The old shack stood in stark contrast to the gleaming new structure that towered over it. The larger structure, a two-story house, had been built at great expense following the gold strike in the Superstition Mountains two years earlier. It had been occupied for exactly seventy-two hours before the old man and his houseguest decided it just wasn’t their style to live in such opulence. Much to the consternation of the military police and the security team that patrolled the property at the base of the mountains, Gus Tilly had moved back into his original shack along with the small being who had become his closest friend. The one-room shack had been repaired and a few creature comforts, such as new lamps and two new beds, had been added, but other than that the walls still leaked cold air in the winter.

Gus Tilly’s net worth was something in the neighborhood of $160 million according to close government sources, but he still worked by himself at the Lost Dutchman Mine with occasional help from his houseguest and the young man who lived in Chato’s Crawl. The boy in town was named Billy Dawes and he could only assist Gus on the weekends and holidays now because of his college schedule-a schedule that was paid for by the proceeds from the mine.

The Lost Dutchman, discovered by accident in 2006 during the incident in the desert, had been bestowed on Gus by the U.S. government after his assistance in that event had been deemed invaluable, but that wasn’t the reason for the massive military presence that guarded not only the mine but the shack and the empty house as well. The real value of the property was the creature that Gus watched over. Tilly had sat with his friend for hours at a time during the ten thousand hours of debriefing by other friends based many hundreds of miles away in the desert sands beneath Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Four years’ worth of valuable intelligence, covering a period that had begun in the time of Harry Truman and ended in a battle that had claimed hundreds of lives in 2006.