Zachary's Gold (22 page)

“You're either English or Yankee, I know, and I know that your friend is an Indian. I can tell that. It's a good thing too, because some people might think he was a Chinaman, and everyone is supposed to be on the lookout for a Yankee and a Chinaman. Some sort of crooks. That's what my old brother heard back at Wingdam.”

I didn't know what to say. I stood with my mouth wide open until eventually old Antoine looked at me and said, “You're pretty tired, aren't you? You go to bed if you want. I'm going to stay up and listen to the music.”

For the moment, I responded with only a silent nod and crawled into the hay to consider what had been said, leaving the Indians to savour Rosh's bleating songs to their hearts' content. An unruly variety of questions presented themselves for my analysis. Was this Indian something other than he seemed? Were the sheriff's agents already close behind me? Evidently the man we had stumbled past at Beaver Pass had heard about Zachary Beddoes and discussed his suspicions with others when he had a chance, but who had he told, and how much did they care about a mysterious pair of travellers? Would a troop of Royal Engineers descend on us immediately, or would the authorities choose to ignore us? These weren't questions I could easily dismiss.

By now Rosh had stopped singing, and it was Antoine and his brother who were droning painful monotones into the night. As if he knew of my mental distress and wanted to reassure me, the big Indian stopped for a moment and said loudly, “I know the difference between a Chinaman and an Indian real good, but it's too bad I don't remember names like other people.”

I appreciated the implications of his statement, but I still found it hard to sleep.

I had decided to ask some direct questions of the Indian in the morning, but when I roused myself just as the sky was hinting at daybreak, the little group of natives was gone.

We walked quickly, without taking time to eat. Rosh knew I was worried about something, but of course he had no idea what that might be. The weather had cleared a little, although the road was still muddy. After travelling seven or eight miles, we saw the first twisted strands of smoke rising from the settlement at the river junction, and I decided I should explain. With our usual miming language, I described Red Antoine as “tall man, floppy hat, back there,” and said that he had seen me and knew me. Legal authorities were looking for me. I was worried. Rosh understood. Did Red Antoine know about the gold? No, only about me. He knew the authorities were looking for me.

We both understood the implications of a stray Indian knowing me, particularly since I had made the unforgivable mistake of giving him my name.

At mid-morning we were standing on a well-situated bluff, overlooking the townsite of Quesnelle Mouth, trying to decide on a route. We wanted a road or track that would lead us around the inhabited area without actually ploughing through the bush surrounding the river forks. We would have to come close to the town to cross the Quesnelle River, since I knew of no other ferry or fording place, but I had no desire to pass through the populated area itself. So far that day, we had passed several houses set back from the road, and waved to a settler who seemed to be working on a wagon, but had yet to come into real contact with any of the locals.

I had the feeling that the sheriff, or whoever was in charge of apprehending me for questioning, would probably focus the main part of his attention on the stretch of road ending at this point. Logically, the two ferries—both the larger Soda Creek Ferry and the smaller, locally operated one where the road crosses the river—would be good places to keep watch. I didn't know whether those searching for me were sufficiently informed and organized, or sufficient in numbers to be doing this by now, but I had to take the chance. Once beyond Quesnelle Mouth, the land would be so vast, and traffic so scarce, that finding a single man there would be like hoping to snatch a particular flea off a dog's back.

From our viewpoint, we couldn't see any route that skirted the town, so we returned to the main road and started our descent following it, but kept our eyes open for a promising side track.

With still a mile to go, we passed numerous houses and buildings, some with people coming and going, and I grew extremely nervous.

A wagon track split off to the left a half mile or so from the townsite proper, and we followed this. It snaked left and right for a hundred yards and seemed to be going roughly the proper direction, when we suddenly found ourselves in the yard of a log house on the edge of a meadow. A dog barked angrily from the porch. Before we could consider whether to turn around or cut across the meadow, a woman, large and of middle age, dressed in trousers like a man, stepped out of the front door of the house.

“Good morning, ma'am. I wonder if you could help us,” I began, but she interrupted me with a most unladylike curse and shouted instead:

“I can help you off my land, you miserable vagrant. I'll help you with a shotgun, if you like. You stinking gold grubbers just keep moving wherever you like, but get off my property before you find yourself here for permanent. You start digging around my land and you'll be digging your own graves, by gosh! Get moving!”

We struck out across the meadow, while behind us the lady of the house continued to rant and scold.

“If you were any kind of a decent dog,” she decried to the animal, “you'd have gone after those two and took a chunk out of somewhere.”

Past a screen of trees at the edge of the meadow we found the river bank and followed this downstream to the crossing. One man was panning the river gravel, but he didn't even look up as we passed above him.

Near the ferry we paused and waited, watching both banks of the river from a place of concealment in the short poplars. We saw a child with a dog cross over into town, then a farmer with a small wagon. Finally we emerged from the bush and tramped across the pebbled flats to the river crossing. We could see no one watching, but both of us felt the glare of a hundred eyes upon us and expected shouts and gunfire momentarily.

The crossing was accomplished without incident.

Travelling south all that day, we covered the first twenty miles of the route along the Fraser under cloudy skies that gave no rain. The next day was also successful for us. My strength seemed to have totally returned, although I saw no need to change the status quo and left the carrying of the gold to the Chinaman and the mule. If I had judged that such a weight of supplies and precious metal could be carried by one man and one animal, I would probably not have thought it necessary to include a partner in my plans. In that case, however, I would presumably have died from the fever before I ever made it out of the mountains, so everything seemed to be working out for the best.

Towards the end of that second day, as the sun slipped out between the cloud layer and the hilltops, we approached the Soda Creek area, and the geography changed somewhat. The trees were mostly pine now, scattered in clumps across rolling open country, or forming light, easily travelled forests along the hillsides. The ground was, in fact, so nicely passable that the road was often not clearly delineated. One simply followed the general direction of the mighty brown Fraser River, which carved its great canyon through sand and sandstone alike.

We had not seen a single soul since leaving the Quesnelle Mouth region, so our guard may have been a bit low, and we were taken by surprise when we topped a rise and found a company of range hands making camp in the little valley below us.

We paused and looked at each other, then again at the scene before us. A half-dozen men were spread out there, some setting up camp, some tending to horses, while one pair headed in the direction of the river. They may have been workers on some ranch nearby, for a few people had already set up homesteads or ranches in the vicinity, or they may have been driving the herd of animals on the hill behind them towards Barkerville, for auction at the goldfields. One way or the other, they presented a problem.

Two men working with a pile of packs and saddles were looking towards us, screening their eyes from the setting sun with their hands. It would have been suspicious for us to make a long circle around the valley to avoid passing through their midst, but I did not wish to spend an entire evening being polite to a group of curious cowboys.

I have never feared unlikely schemes, and I had one at the back of my mind that seemed to fit the situation. I just had to communicate to Rosh what his part in it was. Once I had convinced him to start singing, we started down the hillside directly towards the trail hands.

I wore a long grey wool scarf that Rosh had given me. It appeared to have been made out of a blanket at some time, and it kept my neck and shoulders warm, but now I pulled it up over my head and around my cheeks, leaving only the space around my eyes visible. Walking bent over like this, in the deepening evening shadows, I should, I thought, be able to pass for a Chinaman, especially once I began to sing along with Rosh.

He stopped his own song when I began to wail away with what I thought was a fair rendition of a Chinese ballad, and I had to coax him to start again. I gather he eventually figured out the gist of my plan, for we sang out a most unpleasant harmony all the way through the cowboy camp and up the other side of the draw. Rosh paused long enough to chatter some Chinese greeting, and I kept my head bowed and hung close to the mule's flank.

It was dark when we made our own camp a mile or two farther along, but even in the blackness of night I could sense that I had offended my partner with my use of his music in our little scheme. He avoided me that evening, and I never heard the man sing again.

We had been late in choosing the site for our camp that night, and because of darkness we had set up in a little grove of pines that offered minimal protection. Before full morning light we were thus up and on our feet, hastily loading packs and mule when a steady rain began to soak both our clothes and bedding. It is a depressing thing indeed to find your socks are wringing wet even before you put them in your boots.

We trudged along without fluctuation as the downpour continued. Like a mountain stream in flood, it neither slowed nor increased from daylight to noon.

Two normal travellers would probably have agreed to hide under a tree until the worst was past, regardless of the danger behind them, but our communication was not good enough for us to justify it to each other. Because of this we made ten or twelve miles before we were mercifully delivered.

Somewhere around midday we walked along the base of a section of stark rock cliffs—basalt, or some type of slate—when we saw, more or less simultaneously, a cave. Perhaps it might better be described as an angular cleft in the rocks, but it was a protected spot big enough for two men and their gear, and it was so naturally inviting that we both headed for it without hesitation.

We spread our packs and baggage around the back of the little enclosure, although they could hardly have gotten any wetter if we had left them outside. The mule was tethered on his long rope fifty feet away, under the pines.

It was hard to say which was worse—plodding through the fog and the cold rain, or the deadly boredom of waiting in a cramped little stone prison. Such tedium compounds when one is impatient to accomplish something, and while we looked in vain for a break in the clouds, we were conscious that the cashing in of our riches was not getting any closer, but a group of pursuing law officers might very well be.

Rosh passed the time by whittling little pieces of wood into rectangular pieces the size of poker chips. If anything, I became even more irritated to see that he had found a way to distract himself. Then I remembered the single diary and the few letters from Ned's booty that I still possessed and had brought along.

The little red volume was wet around the edges, but the pages were only slightly wrinkled and none of the ink had run. The entries began a year and a half previously when the writer, who never gave his own name, arrived at the goldfields and staked a claim somewhere on Lightning Creek. After a description of what he did to set up, his notes were mostly brief accountings of his gold findings to date. I skipped over much of this to the longer, more interesting journals written during the winter months, when he turned his pen to more philosophical jottings. He hated the north country, it seemed, with the ten and twelve feet of snow and the freezing winds, but he resolved throughout his writings to last another full season for the sake of a woman named Andrea.

Reading this, I felt a sense of disquiet, for I knew that the fellow did not in fact last the season, and I now carried Andrea's inheritance somewhere on my mule.

If I had turned the gold over to the government to distribute as they saw proper, would Andrea have received any share? I doubted that very much. For that matter, did she have a valid claim to the murdered man's gold? Even I had worked for it more than she.

I closed the book and pushed it back into its place in the baggage. I had never intended Andrea or her gentleman any harm, and there was now no way to offer either of them redress. It made no sense to unsettle myself further.

Rosh called for my attention and drew something in the soft sand of the cave floor—a sort of grid of lines with a box around it. He had manufactured a game. He gave me a pile of sticks six inches or so in length, then took the same number of shorter twigs in a pile before him. The little chips that I had seen him making were inscribed with a single slash on one side and these were thrown, five at a time, like dice. The object of the game seemed to be to get one's pegs spotted on the board before one's opponent could do so. After my turn at throwing the chips, Rosh would indicate how many pegs I could place, and which ones I was allowed to move around. It had something to do with the number of slashed sides and the number of blank sides that showed up.

After ten minutes or so, it appeared that I was winning. I had more pegs on the grid, nicely aligned along one edge, and my opponent wore an expression of amused concern. Then he took his turn at throwing the chips, laughed gleefully, plucked three of my markers off the board and threw them back on my pile. When I next took my turn to throw, he simply shook his head to state that I was not entitled to place any pegs at all. He threw again, laughed loudly, and placed four markers on the grid, rattling off some incomprehensible Chinese maxim as he did so. He now had more pegs in place than I.