“Aaarrrrrrgh!” Layla barked suddenly, interrupting her own story.

I jumped and she laughed really hard.

“Ha, ha.” I said embarrassed and annoyed. “Without the sound effects please.”

“But seriously,” she continued with a little apologetic smile.

“The boys found some gold but still Darmo wouldn’t let them stop panning. Darmo got paranoid and began to think the boys were stealing some gold and putting it in their pockets. He snuck up behind one of the boys while the boy was dipping his pan in the stream to see what he was doing. Darmo had to lean over so far to see the boy’s hands that he lost his balance. He slipped and fell face first into the stream and drowned.”

Now I had her. That didn’t make any sense to me. None of the streams we passed was deep enough to drown in. None of them would even come up over my knees. So, I said, “No one drowns in a stream, Layla. They’re too shallow.”

She looked at me impatiently. “You can drown in almost any amount of water, Robby. People drown in bathtubs all the time.

Darmo hit his head on a rock in the stream. By the time he came to, he was dead.”

“Okay, oh-smart-one. If he was dead, how did he come to?”

“He didn’t know he was dead. He thought he was alive, but the boys knew he was dead. They bolted out of there as fast as they could.

Luckily, one of the boys was really good at map reading, like me.” She grinned a cheesy grin at me. “He took Darmo’s map from his pocket while he lay there dead in the stream. And they used the map to find their way back to camp.