Note 1 — HOW DOLLARS TURNED INTO BUMBLE BEES AND OTHER LEGENDS
Reading edition
“Down there sommers below Realitos there’s an old dug well with six jack loads of Mexican silver in it, and nobody ain’t never going to get it neither. How it come there was this way. Six Mexicans was making for the Rio Grande with it when they was overtaken and killed. But the bandits that killed them was being followed likewise and didn’t have time to get away with the silver. The fight had been right by this old well, and what the bandits did was to shoot the jacks that was not shot already and to pitch dead Mexicans, jacks, silver and all right into the well. In the fight that followed, the bandits was cleared out. The men after them was rangers, I guess. Anyway, one of them found out somehow about the six jack loads of silver.
“Well, when everything had quieted down like, he went and bought the land on which the well was placed and set a bunch of Mexicans to clean it out. Of course, the well had got filled up with dirt and so on from caving in. After they’d dug a while the Mexicans struck bones. They hollered up to the white man that they had struck bones and that all they lacked now was to pull up the goods. The white man, he hollered down to them that they needn’t do any more digging and for them to come on up so as to let him down. Nach’rally, being as they had struck them bones, the Mexicans wasn’t very slow about getting out.
“When the white man got down there, the first thing he done was to grab hold of a corner of an old maleta what he seen sticking out among the bones. He jerked it out and it had the dollars in it all right. Then he looked up and yelled to the Mexicans to pull. He hadn’t more’n got the words outen his mouth when he seen a tall skileton standing alongside the wall of that well. Its feet was close to him and it must have been twenty, maybe forty, feet tall. It reached clear up to the top, and its face away up there was a-looking down at the white man. He couldn’t take his eyes offen it, and all the way up while those Mexicans was a-pulling him slow and jerky he had to look that skileton in the face. He forgot all about that maleta of money and dropped it back, and when he clumb out he was so weak that they had to help him on his horse. They managed to get him home and put him in bed, and that night he died. And there ain’t nobody what I know of as has undertook to get out them six jack loads of silver since.”