Because what I found down that well was a leather bag full of silver dollars.
I did not open it until I was standing in the sun. Then I sat down in the grass and untied the rawhide. Morgan silver dollars. Peace dollars. Heavy and cold, dated from the 1880s to 1928. I counted them twice on the tailgate. Two hundred and twelve.
Tucked in with them was a folded paper, dry as the day it went in. It was a note written in pencil, dated October 1932.
It said the bank in Cadiz had failed, and the farmer who wrote it had lost everything he had in it. It said these coins were all he had left, and he was not trusting them to any bank again. He was putting them in the well where no thief and no banker would ever find them. It said they were for his children, and his children after that. Signed, Elias Crawford.
The man who hired me was named Ron. He had bought the property as a place to retire. He looked at the coins, then the note, then at me. He said, well, legally they are mine now, I suppose.
Then he said, but they are not really mine, are they?
A farmer who lost everything in the Depression had hidden the last of it fifteen feet underground, and it waited ninety four years for someone honest to climb down.
Ron went to the courthouse in Cadiz the next week. The clerk helped him trace the deed. Elias Crawford died in 1949. He had four children. The farm was sold in 1961. Only one of his grandchildren was still living, a woman named Dorothy Crawford Hayes. She was ninety one and lived in a small house in Steubenville.
Ron called her. He told her what we found.
She did not believe him at first. Then she said her grandfather used to tell her he had buried treasure, when she was a little girl. She always thought it was a story. Everybody did. After he died, her father dug around every fence post on the farm looking for it. He never thought to look down the well.
Ron drove the bag to her himself. I went with him. Dorothy sat at her kitchen table and poured the coins out onto a dish towel. She picked one up, an 1896 Morgan dollar, and held it to the light.
She said, he really did it. He really saved it for us.
She had eleven great grandchildren. She asked Ron to help her divide the coins so every one of them would get some. She wanted each child to have a piece of the farm they never saw.
Ron and I spent a whole afternoon at her table counting them into little envelopes, one for each name.
She kept one coin for herself. The 1896. She said it was the year her grandfather was born.
The well works now. Ron says the water tastes like iron and history.
Thirty years down these shafts. That is the only one I ever climbed out of richer, and did not keep a dime.