Cousins, 12 year-old Bradley and 14 year-old Glen, live near each other in north Georgia. They’re best friends, but always competing.
Glen is fearless and always the center of attention. He usually beats his smaller cousin in basketball, bicycle racing, and daredevil games. Bossy and outgoing, he usually acts without thinking. He loves electronic games.
Brad is smaller and good at short sprints and games like soccer. He’s also quiet, and likes to think. He likes to read, and believes in a spirit world beyond what he can see and feel. He’s not much into electronics and computers.
In 1918, Brad’s great-grandfather waded across a creek to get a better view of Army troops training fight a battle in the military park behind his house. His shoe scuffed something shiny out of the gravel bottom of the stream. It’s an 1854 $3 gold coin.
The coin has been passed down as a family heirloom, and now Brad’s dad owns it. After all these years, the coin has become worth more– $500,000. “This coin,” his father often tells him, “represents the future welfare of our family in hard times.”
Without permission, Brad “borrows” the coin to play with. He and Glen, pretend this real treasure is a chest of “pirate gold” they’ll hide in a limestone cave in the thick woods of Chicamauga Battlefield Park, then take turns finding it.
Something in the cave causes them to be transported back in time where they get mixed up in all kinds of adventures. All they really want is to get the coin back before anything happens to it
They never know in what year or place they’ll turn up in, but wherever they land, there is the $3 gold piece, just out of their reach. If the boys return home without the coin and confess to losing it, they’ll be grounded for life, disowned, sent to reform school or, worse, will have to work the rest of their lives to pay for it.
Meet the Author:
Fargo, North Dakota, very cold. Know where it is? Look it up on a map. It’s near Canada. Well, that’s where I came from. My Dad worked for the U.S. Government as a veterinarian, trying to keep cattle, horses, and pigs healthy. Our family got moved around a lot. Growing up, I lived in Nebraska, Missouri, and Arizona. I finally graduated from high school in Phoenix. Then my Dad got transferred to Tennessee, and That’s how I ended up here. After I went to college I got married, had some kids, and worked for many years. My wife and I still live in Nashville. We’ve also got a bunch of grandkids.
I’ve written a bunch of books and stories about the past—you know—traveling back to exciting times and places that are a lot different from our lives now.
One of the cool things in my life is my 17-foot sailboat. I love sailing it on the lake here. I also have a lot of fun playing tennis in the summer. When I was 12 years old, I started a coin collection. I now have a $3 gold piece, but it’s not as valuable as the one in my stories.
Episode #1
Sounding the Reef
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Searching for something to make their game of “Find the Treasure” more exciting, Bradley takes an 1854 gold coin from his father’s lockbox.
In the thick woods of nearby Chicamauga National Battlefield, his cousin, Glen, slides down into a limestone cave to hide the gold piece for Brad to find. In the dark, he bends to place the coin on the faint glow of foxfire from a piece of rotting wood. Before he can stand, he gets dizzy and faints. When Brad goes inside looking for his cousin, the same thing happens to him.
When they wake up, they discover they are on a steamboat in 1854 and the gold coin is missing. Even worse, the captain sends them out in a rowboat with a huge storm coming.
Half the crew is down with fever, so the boys are recruited to join the First Mate in a small boat out ahead of the sternwheeler. They must probe for a spot deep enough for the steamboat to safely cross a shallow sand bar. The captain promises to reward each of them with a gold dollar. But that’s not what they really want.
When the storm rolls in, the cousins fear they might not get out alive, especially when they all realize the steamboat is headed straight for their rowboat. One thing is for sure, they never expected to find this when they went looking for treasure.
Episode #2
Cape Horn Fury
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Brad and Glen have had quite a day. Transported back in time to 1854, they landed on a steamboat moving down the Mississippi River. When they left, they had the 1854 $3.00 gold coin Brad had “borrowed” from his dad’s strongbox. Problem is, they made it back to their own time, but the gold coin didn’t.
Desperate to get it back, they decide to try another time travel trip. However, instead of going back to the same steamboat, they end up on a square-rigged sailing ship in the 1850s. The ship is attempting sail around Cape Horn to the California gold fields. They meet a Cuban teen, who’s a member of the crew, and he shows them where to find the gold coins are kept. They recover the $3 gold piece.
Brad and Glen discover that all is not well on board. The captain and the first mate are at odds, and the ship is hove-to in heavy seas, awaiting a chance to tack around the Horn. It’s past midnight. Under a full moon, the ship is about to smash against the rocks.
Will the captain or the first mate be able to save them from certain death? At this point, Brad and Glen doubt they’ll ever get home alive, with or without the coin.
Episode #3
Snatching the General
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Cousins, Brad and Glen Casemont, have lost a $3 gold coin worth half-million dollars that they borrowed without permission from Brad’s father.
From inside a cave, the boys have gone back in time twice. During each adventure, they see the coin, or get it in their hands, but not for long. They can’t seem to bring it back to the present. Even though they have no control over when or where they go, they try a third time and are carried back to April 12, 1862, where they land aboard a train near Atlanta. The train, pulled by the locomotive, the General, is being hijacked by Union spies. The boys are caught in the middle of this and forced to travel with the raiders as the train flees north toward Chattanooga, with the Confederates on their tails.
Where is the coin the boys came to find? The leader of the raiders, James Andrews, uses it to buy wood to fire the boilers of the steam locomotive, the General. Brad and Glen try desperately to buy the coin from the wood yard man, but fail.
In the wild chase that follows, they forget the coin as they hold on to the top of the train as it races northward. They realize that whichever side they wind up with, they’ll either go to jail or get hanged. They’ve got to escape, but the train is going too fast to jump. And there’s a tunnel is coming up…
Episode #4
Wild Man of the Woods
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First cousins, Brad and Glen Casemont, are back from their third time travel adventure, bruised and battered, having jumped off a speeding train being hijacked by Union spies in 1862. But, once again, they couldn’t bring back the $3 gold piece belonging to Brad’s dad.
Tired and sore, they’re desperate to try again by plunging into the unknown past. This time maybe they’ll get lucky and find the treasured gold coin and bring it back.
In their limestone cave, they touch the glowing foxfire and pass out. They wake up in the nearby woods, but it’s September, 1863, and a Civil War battle is raging close by. When a wild-eyed, bearded hermit, Anthracite Pargee, who hates war finds them, he recruits the boys to help him sabotage both Yankee and Rebel forces to stop them from killing each other. The three of them pull out all the stops.
In the moonlight, they find a dead Union officer. Searching him to find out who he is, the boys find their $3 gold coin in his pocket. But will Pargee let them rob the body? Will Pargee be able to recover his stolen mule without being shot by a picket? Can he protect the boys from getting killed?
Episode #5
The Long Trail Home
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Cousins Brad and Glen have failed four times to recover a rare coin they lost. The valuable $3 gold piece, belonging to Brad’s father, continues to elude them as they adventure back to different times and places.
Frustrated, they head back into the limestone cave and let the mysterious foxfire hurl them into the past, not knowing where they’ll wind up.
This time, they land in the Yukon in December 1899 where a Northwest Mounted Policeman desperately needs their help. While destroying the whiskey cache of Swede Swenson, who is peddling hooch to the Indians, Constable McKelvey steps into a trap and a log deadfall breaks both his legs.
Swede and his men are due back anytime, and the injured mountie must escape back to his cabin 30 miles away. It’s 20 below zero, a blizzard is blowing up, and his sled dog team is exhausted.
This is the hardest challenge the boys have ever faced. They must save themselves and the mountie from Swede Swenson and the storm. But can the fatigued dogs pull the sled with the disabled mountie 30 miles in the blinding snow at night?
And what about the gold coin they came to find? If they’re murdered by Swenson, the coin won’t matter.
Episode #6
Flying from France
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Cousins Brad and Glen Casemont were flung into the past five times when they touched a mysterious patch of foxfire. In each time-travel adventure, the boys barely escaped with their lives as they tried, and failed, to bring back the treasure–a rare $3 gold piece they took from a strongbox belonging to Brad’s father.
All five time-trips have taken only eight hours during one summer day. They were shot at, bruised, nearly drowned, crushed, and scared half to death, but the lost coin has continued to elude them. They have time for only one more attempt before they must go home, empty-handed.
This time they land in World War I France at the aerodrome of the LaFayette Escadrille, where American volunteers are flying biplanes in the fight against Germany. By a twist of good fortune, a pilot named Conrad Johnson, has the gold piece. He’s planning to mail it to Brad’s great grandfather, Alan, who found it in a creek bed a few months before. Thinking Alan is a teenage relative of Brad’s, Johnson asks the boys to return the coin to Alan in person. Brad is elated. This is easy. Or is it?
The boys jam themselves into the rear cockpit of Johnson’s Sopwith biplane so he can fly them to England for a ship home.
But German fighters attack. Is this the end? Have they tempted Fate once too often?
