It Happened at Four Corners

Bernard Walton and Eugene Meltsner are driving across Arizona toward Four Corners when the empty road leaves Bernard restless. To pass the final fifty-eight miles, he proposes an old traveling custom: telling stories. Eugene admits that storytelling is not his strength, so Bernard demonstrates with a tale that he claims has come from reliable sources, although he leaves Eugene to decide whether it is true.

In Bernard’s tale, two distant cousins are driving to California when a reckless motorist races past them, loses control, and plunges over an embankment. The travelers stop immediately. The older man calls for emergency assistance while the younger one climbs down to the wreck. The injured driver’s door is jammed, his coat is caught, and his engine has burst into flames. Working together, the cousins pull him through a window and take shelter behind a rock moments before the car explodes.

The rescued driver calls himself Logan “the Smiler,” an elderly prospector. While waiting for the rescue squad, he tells the men that he has finally discovered a legendary underground river filled with more gold than they can imagine. A pouch in his pocket holds genuine-looking nuggets, and he carries a map to the cave. He has spent years searching and was racing to Four Corners to register his claim when he crashed.

Believing that he will not live to enjoy the discovery, Smiler tears the map in half and gives one piece to each rescuer. Neither can find the treasure unless they cooperate. He makes them promise not to tell anyone and asks them to remember him after they become wealthy. Soon he loses consciousness, though he is still breathing when help arrives.

At the local police station, an officer identifies Smiler as an unsuccessful prospector who has spent his life chasing the legend. He has never married or formed a family because wealth always came first, and the officer believes years of isolation have made him unstable. Smiler is now in a coma and not expected to recover. The two travelers keep their promise by saying nothing about the pouch or the map. They leave assuming that the nuggets are probably false and the directions only another part of Smiler’s fantasy.

At their motel, however, the younger man secretly tests the nuggets with a makeshift chemistry laboratory. They are real and of unusually high quality. He asks to borrow the older man’s half of the map under the excuse of researching local legends, but spilled gold dust and concealed equipment expose his deception. He argues that the journey into the cave would be too difficult for an older person and intends to go alone. Offended, the older man keeps his half and warns that neither of them should sleep if he wants to retain it.

Both stay awake until two in the morning, trading childish claims that the other is growing drowsy. When the younger man finally thinks his companion has fallen asleep, he reaches for the missing half and is caught. They wrestle over the paper until they recognize how foolishly two grown men are behaving. They agree that Smiler was right: the only sensible path to the gold is cooperation.

The older man brings water while the younger one joins the maps and studies the complete route. With the two halves together, the location of the Old Hopi Trail, the compass, and the cave entrance become clear. Their partnership lasts only until the younger man drinks. The older man has put sleeping powder in his water. Once his companion collapses, he takes both halves of the map and leaves before dawn to claim the fortune himself.

Deep inside the cave, the older traveler follows his markers for more than a mile, lowers himself down a twenty-five-foot cliff, and discovers a riverbed gleaming with gold nuggets. His triumph is interrupted by the younger man, whose body has absorbed the drug quickly enough for him to awaken and follow. Relying on his photographic memory, the younger man has first stopped at the county office and filed a claim to the cave entrance in his own name.

The older man laughs at the incomplete victory. The gold-filled cavern lies far from the entrance and beneath different, still-unclaimed land. The younger man scrambles up the rope to file a second claim, but the older one pulls him down. In the struggle, the younger man falls onto a rock and says he cannot move. The older man offers to seek help only if he signs over the entrance claim, which controls the easiest route to the treasure.

The younger man appears to surrender and asks for a pen. When the older man reaches for the signed paper, the younger man locks a pair of handcuffs around both their wrists and throws the key downstream. If he cannot have the gold, neither of them will. Their greed leaves them chained together beside the underground river forever, wealthy in sight but unable to enjoy or escape with any of it.

Eugene praises Bernard’s delivery but immediately identifies gaps in the tale, including the convenient handcuffs and Smiler’s reckless rush to file a supposedly secret claim. As Bernard tries to defend the behavior of people on lonely roads, a speeding driver approaches them from behind just as the driver in the tale did. The car nearly forces Bernard off the road before speeding safely onward. Bernard and Eugene then realize they have arrived outside Four Corners. Neither wants the imagined temptation to become real, so they agree to bypass the town completely and keep traveling.