The lure of gold brings life back to the old ghost town of Basin City in an exciting story of five people who met in a deserted village under the shadow of the great glacier, Hellsgrin. Basin City might have been any ghost town, weathering away for fifty neglected years in the Colorado snow and sun, except that there was a legend about Basin City, and a prophecy. In 1909, the story went, a prospector, Alonzo Pike, had disappeared with thousands of dollars' worth of gold ingots in the saddlebags of his pack mule. His body had been swallowed by a crevasse in the glacier and it was due to appear again, according to a geologist, at a given point on the glacier, on September 12, 1959. Curious about the riddle and hoping to find treasure, Johnny Bennion bought Basin City and camped out there in the fall of 1959. As the twelfth of September approached, tension mounted in the old town. Others came, drawn by the old story of the prospector's corpse, the mule, and the gold bars.