A professor of geology, a retired general, and a young engineer sit on a hot veranda west of the Rockies arguing about the sea that used to be there - and out in the desert is a mine called the Golden Fleece, a relic said to be Montezuma's, and a woman who knows more about both than she says. Julian Hawthorne grew up among Emerson, Thoreau and Melville, wrote some fifty books, and later went to prison for mail fraud over a mining stock - which lends this treasure romance of 1892 an edge he did not plan.