HATFIELD, Ark. - Deep in the woods near Brushy Creek stands an old beech tree, its smooth bark etched with dozens of carvings, including biblical references, a heart and a legless horse.

Bob Brewer was 10 when his great-uncle, W.D. “Grandpa” Ashcraft, pointed it out on a logging trip 57 years ago.

“He said, ‘Boy, you see that tree? That’s a treasure tree,’”

Brewer recalled on a recent visit to the site. “‘You see that writing? If you can figure out what that is, you’ll find some gold.’”

The old man didn’t elaborate, but his words stuck with Brewer through childhood and two tours of duty in Vietnam as a Navy helicopter crewman. So did memories of Grandpa’s frequent, unexplained horseback rides into the nearby Ouachita Mountains.

In 1977, after retiring from the Navy, Brewer returned to western Arkansas and took up an obsessive search - for buried treasure, and for his family’s links to a secretive, subversive Confederate group, the Knights of the Golden Circle, commonly referred to as the KGC.

After many years of research, he is among those who believe that the group buried millions in ill-gotten gold across a dozen states, to finance a second Civil War that never came to be. And he thinks Ashcraft and his son, Odis, had something to do with it.

“I think Grandpa Ashcraft and Uncle Ode had a secret,” Brewer says.

A similar theme will play out on the big screen Dec. 21, when Nicolas Cage returns as code-breaking treasure hunter Ben Gates in “National Treasure: Book of Secrets,” a sequel to Disney’s 2004 hit. Brewer is a consultant on the film.

Although Cage’s character searches for Confederate gold and his ancestral ties to the Lincoln assassination, Brewer’s journey shows, once again, that real life can be stranger than fiction - or at least as intriguing.

Steeped in the history of the South and the West, his quest is haunted by the legend of Jesse James and imbued with the mysterious stuff of Freemasonry, coded treasure maps and conspiracy theories dating to John Wilkes Booth.

Along the way, Brewer says, he has unearthed some $200,000 worth of gold and silver coins. It’s enough to support his modest lifestyle and to thumb his nose at those who might think he’s just another old coot with a metal detector.

“It’s my damn story,” he says, “and if they don’t believe it I’m not gonna worry about it, damn it. Pardon my French.”

Brewer’s life is detailed in “Shadow of the Sentinel: One Man’s Quest to Find the Hidden Treasure of the Confederacy,” a book he wrote with Warren Getler, a former Wall Street Journal reporter.

Brewer’s hunt began in earnest after he retired from the Navy in 1977 and started spending time at a Hatfield coffee shop, where talk often turned to treasure-hunting.

He sketched the symbols others described, tracked them down when he could and plotted them on topographical maps. During a stint as a state inspector of beekeepers, he explored remote areas of the forest and found more carvings on trees and rock faces.

Brewer concluded that clues could be found not only in carvings on trees but also in the trees’ shape. Some appeared to have been contorted as saplings or had oddly grafted limbs that caused them to grow into unusual shapes and directional pointers.

Following a line from one such “hoot owl tree,” Brewer says, he found the carved beech that Grandpa Ashcraft had shown him decades earlier.

He studied its symbols, “walked the lines” radiating from them and found buried horseshoes and other clues that led to his first cache in 1991 - a canning jar filled with gold and silver coins from the 1800s, their $400 face value a fraction of their actual worth.

Brewer soon was trading stories and information with others who shared his esoteric interest.

In 1993, one of them showed Brewer a book about Jesse James, with passages about the Knights of the Golden Circle, buried Confederate treasure and cryptic symbols.

Founded in the 1850s by George Bickley, a former Virginian living in Cincinnati, the group was reputed to include prominent political figures and Confederate leaders, among them Gen. Albert Pike, a high-ranking member of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.

One of the things that led Brewer to link his family to the KGC were “Pike” carvings he had seen on trees. Another was Grandpa Ashcraft’s mysterious, daylong rides into the woods.

Sometimes his great-uncle told him he had been hunting “cows,” says Brewer, who only much later learned it might have been short for “cowan,” a Masonic term of contempt for intruders.

Eventually, Brewer concluded that Grandpa and Uncle Ode were part of a generations-old network of “sentinels” who watched over caches of KGC money. Much of it came from government-payroll holdups and train robberies, according to Brewer and others who say Jesse James was a leader and benefactor of the group.