Free The Theta Prophecy by Chris Dietzel Page B

and charcoal, but this time, instead of wood planks, they found logs.
    The foreman climbed back down into the hole. “This must be it!”
    But when his men removed the logs, there was only more dirt, the same as there always was. The foreman asked the workers if they were playing a trick on him. With his men covered in dirt, barely getting to see the sun, hungry and tired, the foreman was lucky to get back out of the hole and not become a permanent part of the pit.
    At sixty feet, they found the same things. At seventy feet, they again found logs but no seaweed, or whatever it was, nor charcoal markings. Each night, the foreman had to write to his boss that the men were making significant progress but still hadn’t found any treasure.
    The response that came back was: Then it’s not progress!
    At eighty feet, they found more traces of wood planks. At ninety feet, after removing more pieces of wood and finding nothing but dirt beneath it, Owen sent his foreman a letter telling them to pack up their equipment and come home.
    To his dying day, the foreman would tell anyone who would listen to him that if he and his men had only been allowed to continue digging a little longer they surely would have found the treasure.
    Daniel could sympathize with how the man felt. He only ever returned to Oak Island one more time. Nearly thirty years old, with two sons of his own, he told his family what chores they should do that day, then rowed a canoe by himself to the spot where he had once thought all of his dreams were going to come true. His knees became weak when he looked down at the pit that he and his friends had started. So close, yet so far away.
    Now, the latest expedition had also left. The hole that had been thirty feet deep when he last saw it was now ninety feet deep. He couldn’t verify this claim, though, because the mirrors had been disassembled and taken back to the mainland, and the sun didn’t reach the hole’s bottom. Part of him wanted to climb down there and touch the spot where the latest group of men had stopped, but with a family of his own he was no longer willing to do something as foolhardy as climb down a deep hole and risk it caving in on him. He had officially given up his childhood dreams and fantasies. In their place were a family and all the responsibilities that came with being a husband and father.
    Part of him still knew there had to be something down there. After all, someone had dug a hole—it was the only explanation for the wood planks being found every ten feet. But how far down could the hole possibly go? And did pirates or the Queen or whoever had put the treasure down there ever expect to get it back? What was the point of hoarding vast amounts of gold and precious stones if they were just going to be buried so far underground that the owner, or anyone else for that matter, would never be able to recover them?
    Although he didn’t wish misfortune on anyone, he was glad the latest crowd of treasure seekers hadn’t found anything. Even if there was only a little bit of gold to be found, not the hundreds of pounds as he liked to guess there was, if someone else started digging where Daniel and his friends had left off and then found something only a few feet further down, Daniel wouldn’t have been able to live with himself. He was certain the treasure would eventually be found, but with the pit now ninety feet into the earth—an impossible depth for any four boys—he could take comfort in the knowledge that recovering it would have truly been a task beyond his abilities.
    Looking around, the hole still appeared pretty much the way it had when he, Anthony, John, and Samuel last left it. Although the latest group of men hadn’t used it, the original block and tackle was still attached to the tree limb above the hole. The flagstone that Daniel and the other boys had found was still pushed to the side in the exact spot they had left it. The only real difference was that the giant mounds of