Gold Comes in Bricks (11 page)

“I’m not certain I like that. Alta telephoned a little while after you’d left. She said that she thought you were coming back, that you’d just gone to the garage with me. She wants to see you. She’s worried— She’s— Dammit, Donald, we’re all getting so we depend on you.”

“That’s what I’m hired for.”

“I know, but this is different. Alta would be lost if you left.”

“Alta has to leave, too.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“You mean go with you?”

“No. Go some place. Visit someone. Spend a few days with some out-of-town friend— And don’t let anyone know where she’s going.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want anyone asking her questions until I know a few more answers.”

“Then why are you going away?”

I said, “Detectives are on my trail right now. They’re checking up— Do you want me to tell you what they’re after?”

“No.”

“All right, then. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, and what you can do.”

He thought for a minute, took a cigar from his pocket, clipped the end off, and struck a match. “When are you going?” he asked.

“Now.”

“Where can I get in touch with you?”

“It’s better that you don’t. If anything comes up, get in touch with Bertha Cool.”

“But you’re going up to Valleydale?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t know how long you’ll be gone?”

“No.”

“You’ll be going out to the house to pack up some things and—”

“I won’t be going anywhere to pack up anything. I’m going over to the garage, get the agency car, and get started. I’ll buy what clothes I need.”

“You’re leaving right away?”

“Just one thing I have to attend to.”

“What’s that?”

“Winding up Mr. Fischler’s business transaction.”

“I can drive you up to the Commons Building.”

“Let’s telephone first,” I said. “Wait here. I’ll be back.” There was a public phone in the gas station at the parking lot. I called up the number Elsie Brand had given me. She answered the phone. “Hear anything?” I asked.

She said, “You must have thought they didn’t want your money.”

“Why?”

“You said they’d tell you you had until about two o’clock this afternoon.”

“What did they say?”

She said, “The salesman’s been here twice. He’s coming back in ten minutes. He said to tell you that he could put it across, but the time expired at one.”

I said, “Stick around. I’m going to draw up the option agreement.”

“He has one with him.”

“I don’t think I’ll like it.”

“Do you want me to tell him?”

“No. Just stick around. I’m coming right up.”

I walked back to the car and said to Ashbury, “Okay, drive me up to the Commons Building if you will—or I can take a taxi.”

“No. I want to keep my finger on the pulse of things.” Ashbury waited outside while I went up to the office. Rich was waiting for me when I came in. He pumped my hand up and down, and said, “Congratulations, Mr. Fischler! The shrewdest buying brain I’ve contacted in fifteen years of salesmanship. You win!”

He took my arm and piloted me into the private office as though he owned the joint. He whipped a stock certificate out of his pocket and said, “There you are. One share. Here you are. An option agreement duly signed by the president and secretary of the company.”

“You work fast,” I said.

“I had to, to put a deal like that across. They hit the ceiling, but I explained to them that your money wasn’t available right at the moment, that you were a hundred-per-cent sold, that you’d make us a good stockholder, that you—”

He kept on talking, but I quit listening. I was reading the option agreement. To my surprise, it was exactly what I had instructed him to have. I signed an okay on the duplicate option agreement, gave him one thousand dollars, and put the share of stock and original option agreement in my pocket. The option was signed by Robert Tindle as president and E. E. Matts, secretary. I shook hands with Rich, told him I had an appointment, and eased him out of the office. I said to Elsie, “Remember, you’re to keep the office open until I get back.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m out of town on a business trip.”

“You explained to Bertha about the work?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“It’s all right.”

“Then I’m to sit here and just read magazines?”

“That’s right. Do a little sewing if you want to. Smoke cigarettes during office hours, and chew gum. That’s the sort of business this is, one of those happy-go-lucky affairs.”

She laughed. “I’ll feel like a kept woman.”

“That’s what I want you to look like,” I said. “Get the idea?”

Her eyes flashed me a smile. She said, “Good luck, Donald.”

“Keep your fingers crossed,” I said, and went out to tell Ashbury I was all ready to go. He insisted on driving me over to the garage where Bertha Cool kept the office jalopy. His eyes were wistful as I pulled away into traffic.

CHAPTER NINE

V
ALLEYDALE HAD AT ONE TIME BEEN
something about which a Chamber of Commerce could wax eloquent. The mountains, covered with digger pine, chaparral, manzanita, and, lower down, with big live oaks, broke into peaceful rolling hills, then into what had once been a fertile agricultural valley.

Now, it was a mass of rocks, piled in serrated ridges where the conveyor belts of the gold dredgers had dumped them. They were rounded rocks that had been worn by ancient glaciers and rivers. They were the bones of what had at one time been huge boulders, and now they glistened in the sunlight like bleached bones in the desert. Here and there an attempt had been made to level off the ground and plant orchards. On the rolling hillsides which the dredgers hadn’t touched, the massive oaks cast dark pools of inviting shadow. The slopes were broken here and there with bits of vineyard and, in places, with the green of orchards. They gave a clue to what the country must have been at one time.

A river, flowing down from the mountains, broke through a cut near the town of Valleydale, spread out into smooth placid waters, and then ran through the ugly piles of rock tailings.

I found an auto court and registered, giving the license of the agency car and the name of Donald Lam. Later on, when it would be necessary to account for every minute of my time to the police, I didn’t want to have it appear that I’d taken an alias, or resorted to flight.

I went right to work.

The people who were left in the town hated gold-dredging with a bitter hatred. The ones who had owned the land originally had made their clean-up, taken the cash, and gone to the bigger cities. The dredgers had pumped prosperity into the town through payrolls, machine shops, and offices, then they had worked out the ground. The machine shops had been moved. The offices stood deserted. There was an air of funereal despair about the town. Those who were left went dejectedly about their business, moving with the listless lassitude of persons who have lost their chance at winning big stakes and are plugging away simply because they can’t figure out how to quit.

No one knew what had happened to the records of the dredging company. The head offices had always been somewhere else. The books were gone, the machinery was gone, and the employees were gone.

I made inquiries to find whether some of the old employees were still in the country. A man who kept a drygoods store told me he thought an old hermit bachelor named Pete Something-or-Other had worked on the original dredgers and on the drills when the ground was prospected. He didn’t know Pete’s last name, and didn’t know exactly where he lived, but he had a shack about a mile down the river. There was a little strip of land the dredgers hadn’t got. Pete lived on it. He came into town once in a while for supplies. He paid cash and wasn’t sociable. No one seemed to know exactly how he lived.

I learned that a new company was planning to use some sort of a new invention to put the rocks underneath and bring the soil back on top. Old-timers said that even if the soil were put back on top, it would be years before it could grow anything. Others were of the opinion that scientific fertilization would have it producing crops in no time. None of them tried to marshal facts and reach an intelligent, impartial opinion from those facts. They advanced an opinion first, then selected illustrations, gossip, and garbled rumor to support that opinion. Anything which didn’t support it was ignored entirely. I figured there wasn’t much chance finding out anything from them.

It was getting dark when I found Pete’s shack. It had at one time been the operating house on a gold dredger, with windows all around it. About half of the windows were covered with tin which Pete had flattened out from old five-gallon coal-oil cans and nailed over the openings.

Pete was somewhere in the late sixties. He was big-boned and didn’t carry much flesh. There was no sag to him anywhere. His last name was Digger.

“What do you want?” he asked, indicating a homemade bench by a dilapidated stove which had been salvaged from a junk pile. There was a fire going in the stove, and a pot of beans simmering.

“I’m trying to get some of the old history of the place,” I said.

“What you want it for?”

“I’m a writer.”

“What you writing?”

“A history of gold-dredging.”

Pete took the pipestem from his mouth and jerked it over his shoulder in the general direction of Valleydale. “They can tell you all about it.”

“They seem rather prejudiced,” I said.

Pete chuckled. It was a dry chuckle that was packed with philosophic amusement. “Helluva bunch,” he admitted.

I looked around the cabin. “This is a mighty cozy little place.”

“Suits me all right.”

“How did it happen the dredgers didn’t chew it up?”

“They had to leave it to keep the river out of the ground

they were working. They intended to swing around and build a levee with tailings so they could come back to it later on. It didn’t work out that way.”

“How big a strip is it?”

“Oh, maybe half a mile long by a couple of hundred yards wide.”

“It’s nice-looking country. Was it all like this before the dredgers came?”

“Nope. This was wasteland. It had been worked by hand. The old tailing piles left by the Chinese are still here. They weren’t big piles, just four or five feet—There was some pretty good land here before the dredgers started farther up the valley.”

“This strip looks nice to me.”

“Uh huh.”

“I saw some rabbits on it as I drove in.”

“Quite a few rabbits. I get a meal from ’em once in a while.” He jerked his head to indicate a rusted twenty-two-caliber rifle which hung on the wall. “She don’t look like much outside, but she’s smooth as a mirror inside.”

“Who owns the land?”

His eyes glittered. “I do.”

“Makes it nice,” I said. “It’s better living this way than in town.”

“It is for a fact. The town’s dead. This place is all right. How’d you happen to find it?”

“Someone in town told me you were down here and could tell me something about the gold-dredging.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Oh, just general facts.”

Pete jerked his pipe stem in the general direction of Valleydale again. “Those folks make me sick. I’ve seen the whole damned business from the start. The land around here was pretty good. In the old horse-and-buggy days it was just a jerkwater country town—then someone started promotin’ gold-dredgin’. Most of the inhabitants thought it wouldn’t work. They hung crape all over the idea, then when they found it would work, they went hog-wild. Real estate started goin’ up, an’ kept on goin’ up. No one would sell because they thought it was goin’ even higher. The Chamber of Commerce got busy. They kowtowed to the dredgin’ outfit, turned the whole town over to them. Everybody in town that wanted to work had a job, then the company started importin’ men, lots of ’em. The town started boomin’. The merchants jacked prices up for all the traffic would bear. Every once in a while somebody would raise the question about what was goin’ to be left when the dredgin’ companies got done, and they’d all but tar an’ feather him an’ ride him out of town on a rail.

“Well, after a while things sort of leveled off. Then the birds that held the real estate thought it would be a good time to unload. The purchasers didn’t think so. Dredgers started cutting down on payrolls. There were homes for sale. Even then the Chamber of Commerce didn’t face the facts. They tried whistlin’ to keep their courage up. They thought a railroad was comin’ through. The town would be a big railroad center. They were goin’ to put in rock crushers. There was a lot of hooey. Then things started goin’ downhill fast. Now, it’s like you see it today. Everybody’s cussin’ the dredgin’ company.”

“You worked for the dredging company?”

“Uh huh.”

“When did you start working?”

“Just about the time they started dredging. I prospected this country.”

The fire blazed up a bit. The beans started bubbling until the steam raised the cover on the pot. Pete got up and shoved the beans a few inches to one side.

I said, “I’m very much interested in this.”

“A writer you say?”

“Yes. If you wanted to make a few dollars, I could spend an evening with you, picking up some local color, and make it worth your while.”

“How much?”

“Five dollars.”

“Give me the dough.”

I gave him a five-dollar bill.

“Stay for supper?”

“I’d like to.”

“Nothin’ but beans, hot cakes, and sirup.”

“It sounds good to me.”

“You ain’t a game warden?”

“No.”

“Okay, I’ve got a couple of cold quail. Let’s get the eatin’ over with an’ we can talk later.”

“Can I help?”

“Nope. You sit still. Keep out of the way over in that corner.”

I watched him get supper and found myself envying him. The place was crude, but it was clean. Everything was shipshape, a place for everything, and nothing hanging around where it shouldn’t be. Cupboards had been made out of wooden cases which had originally held two five-gallon oil cans. These boxes had been placed one on top of the other and nailed in strips. Pete found two agateware plates, knives, and forks. The sirup, he explained, was homemade, half white sugar and half brown, with a little maple flavor. The hot cakes were big flapjacks cooked in a huge skillet and turned by the simple process of flop ping them over. There was no butter. The beans had lots of garlic. The gravy was thick. The quail had been broiled Pete explained, over wood coals. He said that he killed game, when it was out of season, away from the camp picked it, cleaned it, buried the skins, entrails, legs, and heads, built a little fire, broiled the game, and carried it in already cooked. He kept it in a place where “no damn snooping game warden would find it.”

“Bothered much with them?” I asked.

“There’s a guy in town that got himself appointed a deputy,” Pete said. “He comes out once in a while and looks the place over.” He gave his characteristic chuckle again, and said, “He don’t find nothin’.”

It was a nice dinner. I wanted Pete to let me help with the dishes, but he had them washed and dried while I was still arguing about it. Everything went back to its place in the boxes. Pete put the coal-oil lamp on the center of the homemade table.

“Like cigarettes?” I asked.

“Nope. Stay with my pipe. It’s cheaper. I like it. More satisfaction in it.”

I lit a cigarette. Pete lit his pipe. It was a big hod, so thoroughly soaked with nicotine that it filled the place with a heavy odor I could all but taste. It smelled good. “What do you want to know?” he asked.

“You did prospecting?”

“Yep.”

“How did you prospect? I shouldn’t think it would be possible, since the values were all under water.”

“In those days,” he said, “we had a Keystone Drill. It’ simple to prospect. You punch down a casing right through to bedrock. You lift the stuff out with a sand pump. Every thing that comes out of the sand pump goes into a tub, and you pan that out and save the colors of gold.”

“Colors?” I asked.

“Yep. It’s gold that’s been ground down by the action of rivers and glaciers until it’s in little fine flakes about as big around as a pinhead and thin as a piece of paper. Sometimes it’ll take a lot of ’em to make even a cent’s worth of gold.”

“Then you must get pretty much out of each hole you drill.”

“Nope. You don’t. Those big dredgers could work ground at a profit when there was a value of only ten cents a cubic yard. That’s more than a man could have handled in a day by old methods.”

“But how could they get an accurate idea of values from that sort of prospecting?”

“Cinch,” he said. “The engineers knew down to a cubic inch how much dirt had been inside the casing by the time it was punched down to bedrock. They got the gold from each hole. They weighed it out carefully, and punched down holes every so many feet.”

“And they didn’t get a great deal of gold from any one hole?”

“Nope, just colors.”

I waited a while, then said, as though thinking out loud, “It would seem easy to doctor the results on that kind of a prospect.”

He took the pipe from his mouth, looked at me a minute, clamped his lips together in a firm, straight line, and said nothing.

“This the only place you prospected?” I asked.

“Nope. After I got to know the game,” he said, “they took me all over the country. I prospected up in the Klondike where the ground was frozen so solid you had to thaw it out with steam pipes before you could get a hole down. I was down in South America prospectin’. I went all over the country—then I came back and worked on dredgers.”

“Saved your money?” I asked.

“Not a damn cent.”

“But you’re not working now?”

“Nope. I get by.”

I was silent for a while, and then Pete said, “Don’t cost me hardly anything to live. I get most of my stuff from rustling around the country. Get a sack of beans once in a while, and I got a little vegetable patch out here. Buy my smokin’ tobacco, a little sugar, an’ flour in town. Buy a little bacon an’ save the grease for cookin’. You’d be surprised how little it takes for a man to live.”

I did a little more thinking and said, “I didn’t realize I was going to have an evening in such a comfortable place. There’s only one thing lacking.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“A good shot of hooch. Suppose we take a run into town and pick up a bottle?”

He didn’t say anything for a long time, just kept looking at me. “What kinda hooch do you drink?” he asked. “Anything, just so it’s good.”

“How much you generally pay for it?”

“Around four dollars a quart.”

He said, “Stick around here a minute. I’ll be back.” He got up and walked outside. I could hear his steps as he walked out about twenty feet from the door. Then he stood perfectly still. After that, his steps moved again. It was moonlight outside. Through the windows which weren’t covered with tin, I could see the moon casting black shadows beneath the digger pines and oaks. In the background the white piles of tailings caught and reflected the moonlight in a cold glitter that reminded me of the desert.