Grandfather's Journal

This is a story I was told when I was fourteen or fifteen years old and it is based on a true story about a cave at the top of a mountain along the Red River.
Three men went into a cave that overlooked Red River around 1923 or 1927. You could see the river from the cave, but you couldn't see the cave from the river. As they were searching through the cave they found a pit with a log lying across it about two feet across with a hair rope tied around it descending down, down into the pit. They said it looked like horsehair. They lowered one of the men into the pit to approximately thirty or forty feet where he landed on a rock ledge. He walked around the ledge shining his carbide light and noticed the pit descended another 100 feet or so. Circumferencing the ledge area he noticed another opening. He yelled out to the two men at the top of the pit to let them know he found another cave entrance. As he shined his light into the opening of the cave, he became excited; he saw Spanish helmets, breastplates, muskets, bows, and arrows. There were also spears, trunks with clothing, gold, and silver. His heart began to race as he stood at the edge of the entrance. He looked down and noticed a mask mostly covered with dirt on the cave floor in the opening. He bent over, picked it up and brushed the dust off the mask. When he did, the mask began to glow and voices filled the air around him. The voices were deafening and the mask glowed as if it were on fire. He threw the mask down to the cave floor and started screaming pull me up, please get me out of here, pull me up. They said when his feet hit the cave floor he ran out of the cave never stopping until he had gotten back to the car. He had covered five miles to get back to the car, crossing over mountains and dry creek beds. They couldn't catch him. An hour later when they got back to the car, he was lying on the back floorboard covered with a blanket. When they finally coaxed him out of the car, he told them everything that he experienced. He said: "I'll never go into that cave again as long as I live!"