Zachary's Gold (6 page)

As usual, time proved me wrong.

Two days later I decided to weigh my gold stores as accurately as I could. I was fairly close, I think, considering that my scales were made of a teapot lid, a straight stick, catgut fishing line, and a lump of lead I knew to weigh a half ounce. I discovered that my coffee can contained just over thirty-five ounces of mixed flake, flour and nuggets. I gave myself one more day of working after that and headed into town to celebrate my reaching the sum of three pounds of gold discovered.

Summer was already fading away. I wanted to be south of Quesnelle Mouth before serious snow fell, which meant that I must plan on being gone somewhere in the middle of October—a thought that should have caused me to use every day with careful stewardship as long as I was earning money so quickly. Mind you, I was already wealthy by the standards of my limited experience of life, and this made me ever ready to dole myself out another luxury. One day off to lie in the sun would be nothing to a rich man like myself, I thought. And what was the use of gold in the poke, if I couldn't buy myself a pound of bacon for a dollar and a half or a jar of maple syrup for two dollars?

On a Saturday night somewhere around the thirtieth of August, I paid twenty-five cents and allowed myself to be boiled and steamed in a Chinese bathhouse, then met my friend Carl for supper in the George Washington Hotel. The meal was delicious, and after several pieces of pie, we sat for another half hour smoking cigars before exiting into the shadowy evening.

Barkerville was sometimes referred to as Middletown because the main street more or less continued south to Richfield and north to Cameronton without a sharp break, and Carl and I strolled leisurely the entire length that evening, enjoying the cool late summer breeze, and ended up, as darkness became complete, in a saloon in Cameronton. My friend recognized some people there, and we were soon seated at a table of six, drinking and talking.

The man next to me was a fellow named Hector Simmonds—sometimes miner and sometimes deputy to Sheriff John Stevenson. I happened to mention that I had once worked for the Pinkerton law enforcement agency, and he proceeded to hold forth for the next hour as if we were longstanding colleagues, telling me what a tedious dandy Stevenson was and how Judge Begbie would no doubt soon give him the job of making the region safe for civilized persons.

In every profession there are men like Hec Simmonds—men who must promote their own greatness without cessation, more often than not to convince themselves that they are not the failures that they appear. To be fair, it would have been difficult to do a law officer's job in that region, for petty crime was rampant, major crime abundant, and resources to enforce the law limited indeed. There was a wildness in the air, bred by greed, and one could see where a young buck like Hector would find the situation exciting and challenging. He thought it a shame that he was given only occasional employment as a deputy, and then with no real responsibility, but few people in that money-loving populace were willing to part with taxes to pay for any substantial security force. Instead, they did their best to protect themselves and settle their own disputes.

The real law of the goldfields was Judge Matthew Bailey Begbie—a man who no one failed to respect and who was generally feared more than he was respected. He was called a hanging judge, but he was never known to hang a man not given a proper trial by his peers, nor was he ever accused of being harsher than necessary—necessity, of course, demanding a very harsh attitude.

“He's the smartest, best looking, best speaking, strongest and toughest man in the Cariboo,” was Hector Simmonds' deduction. I don't know whether he ever met the good magistrate, but he admired the fellow so much he tried to mention the name regularly, linking it with his own in some tenuous fashion.

“Judge Begbie sent me and Stevenson down to Van Winkle on Tuesday to investigate the robbery of the Barnard's Express wagon. Curious affair, that—real curious. We talked a spell to the driver and the swamper at the roadhouse there, then went with them to a place almost at Beaver Pass, where the holdup took place. One man. Scarf over his mouth. Driver says tall; swamper says medium/short. Driver says Winchester .30-.30; swamper says army carbine.

“He picked his spot good. Just over the top of a ravine there, the beavers have dammed up the crick, and to get around the pond, they got to take the wagon kind of up on the side of the slope, you see. And the land being swampy, they're all three of them—there was a passenger along—they're all three watching the wagon so as it don't tip over into the beaver pond, and this guy with his rifle just ambles up behind and hollers at them. It's a lonely spot to meet your maker, so none of them makes a fuss.”

Hec's greatest joy in his part-time occupation appeared to be palming a beer and telling a story, and this one seemed particularly pleasurable to him, even if I was his only listener.

“This guy was clever, you see, a good planner. First he gets the driver to unhitch the horses, and he spooks them off south—takes a shot at their heels and they're halfways to Cottonwood. Then he gets the three men—this passenger, you know, he's an Englishman from England, and I think he thought the whole affair was a bit of a lark. Anyway, the outlaw sends the three of them—after they'd emptied their pockets—he sends 'em walking back towards Van Winkle. From the top of that rise he can see 'em for most of a mile, so he knows they aren't gonna head back and sneak up on him. He's got all day, pretty much, to root through that wagon and take whatever he likes.”

At this point, Simmonds leaned forward conspiratorially and spoke in a low voice, not that the other men at our table were at all interested in the story. It was probably a matter of general knowledge by now for everyone but me.

“He got lucky,” was the word. “That wagon carried two gold bars—each thirty pounds—and a strongbox with twenty more pounds of dust and nuggets. The Ne'er Do Well Company was shipping it down to the Bank of British Columbia at Quesnelle Mouth.”

I found this interesting indeed.

“Eighty pounds of gold! That's fourteen, fifteen thousand dollars,” I estimated, and he corrected me with a nod and a grin.

“Better than fifteen thousand.”

“And they were shipping all that on a wagon with one driver and one swamper to guard it? How could they do such a thing?”

Simmonds shrugged.

“What else are they going to do? The Cariboo Gold Escort was gave up a couple years ago 'cause no one used it. No one trusted a half-dozen hired guns they didn't know and that the government wouldn't even guarantee, so now everyone pretty much trusts to good luck. Good luck, Judge Begbie, and the hangman, of course. Anyway, where's a robber going to go with his loot anyway? Like this fellow—he's got a good-sized lump of gold, but he's also got a troop of deputies checking every man on the trail between here and Lillooet. Every roadhouse will be checking out travellers too—tall and short alike.”

“Did you try to track the man? How was he transporting the gold?” I inquired.

“He had a mule—two mules actually—and Stevenson and I did track them as far as Jawbone Creek but once he got on the creek bed—well, you can't do much.”

I had to agree with him. The courses of those creeks are like cobblestone—hard and rough, with shallow water spread out to erase what little sign might be left. But Hector Simmonds did have one more piece of information that I found most interesting.

“We trailed him right up to the creek and we found one of his mules there—he'd shot it dead. We guessed it had gone lame and he ditched it with the clothes and whisky and such that he'd taken from the wagon along with the gold. He shot it and ditched it and carried on. We searched down the creek for several miles, but he either stayed on it or covered his trail too good for us, so Stevenson ordered some Indian trackers from Quesnelle Mouth. They should be here tomorrow.”

I remembered something I had seen not long previous.

“The mule you found—what all was left with it?” I inquired. “Just clothes and miscellany? No furs?”

“Furs?” he said, and squinted at me through the smoky gaslight. “Curious enough, there was some furs, yes. How'd you guess that, stranger?”

Mercifully my mind was quicker, even after several glasses of beer, than the self-important deputy's. I told him that I had heard some parts of the story from someone else earlier, and he reluctantly accepted that explanation.

I asked no more questions of Hector Simmonds.

WITH MORNING LIGHT I LEFT
the gold-rush town on a new sort of search, although I felt the same expectant high hopes I'd had as a prospector.

In retrospect, I cannot say with certainty what my exact plans were, nor claim to be sure of my motives. My goals were not illegal ones, but I must admit that neither was any altruism involved. I set out to find a bad man who seemed to elude all other legal pursuit. In this I smelled a definite opportunity for personal gain, a gain I hoped would be substantial and readily converted into American dollars.

I started out on a Sunday morning. There was a light frost on the ground.

I had originally thought of travelling past my camp and down into the valley, but it was mid-afternoon when I reached Binder Creek, and the sun was already settling behind Mount Greenberry, so I satisfied myself with collecting and cleaning both my rifle and my Colt revolver and making up a light pack, suitable for one or two days' journey. After examining it and thinking things over, I discarded some of the food and replaced it with extra ammunition for both weapons.

I made an early start in the morning and was able to see the sun rise into a clear blue sky as I rounded the ridge and began the descent into the low flat valley that angles down from where Summit Creek joins Antler and eventually runs parallel to and west of the Spectacle Lakes.

When I describe it as marsh or swampland, I hope no picture arises of gloomy, foul-smelling bogs, for it is more accurately a sort of pleasant and lovely lowland—water meadow entwined with higher ground of shale, and all blanketed with a thick layer of moss and lichen. The leaves of the few birch trees were turning yellow, and an unearthly sort of mist coiled and skirted on the ground as I broke the silence of that morning with my heavy tread. My spirits were light. Once again I was on the edge of the unknown—a pleasant place to spend an autumn day.

It amused me to think of the more official search party. The sheriff and his Indians would all be trying to pick up the bandit's spoor going downstream and to the south. Their logic was good enough. Who would want to take ill-gotten gains anywhere but south, towards cities, civilization, comfort, and freedom?

I happened to know that the trail led north and east, through the wildest of wilderness, over Mount Nelson, then probably via the Willow River valley and Summit Creek until it reached the place where I would begin. By that time, I supposed that my quarry would have dropped a certain amount of his caution, and I would be in no need of Indian experts to track him.

My entire train of thought was speculation, but it seemed reasonable to me to believe that if my fur trapper friend was actually returning from a holdup, then he was headed for a hideout in this region. This mountainous route led to nothing but more mountains, so I didn't think he was merely passing through. In point of fact, I thought that his lair was probably relatively close. Following this direction, the country became almost totally impassable within only a few miles.

If my suspicions were correct, he was hiding his criminal activities behind the facade of a simple mountain man, and his cabin might be just around the next bend. He was certainly not being secretive about his path. Almost at the spot where I had spied him a few days previously, I found a whopping stack of mule dung—a blatant, malodorous road marker.

As I walked, I toyed with the idea of walking up to him quite openly and in a friendly manner when I found his abode, then quietly checking out the place for anything suspicious, but the memory of Greencoat's threat when I innocently crossed his claim made me review the plan with caution. What, after all, did I know about this man? I could not be sure that he was indeed a highwayman, but neither had I any reason to think that he would have reservations about blasting anyone who crossed his path unexpectedly.

I decided to follow the rules I had been given when working for the Pinkerton Agency in Illinois, the first of which was always to assume that the suspect was armed and dangerous. (This is a redundancy that never ceased to amuse me, for anyone who is armed is also dangerous. The bishop's grandmother is dangerous if she has a revolver.)

Examine at leisure, I was always told, and approach with caution. Be quick to get your firearms at the ready, but slow to shoot.

In three years at that job, I had hunted down a dozen men, alone or with partners, but I had never been fired upon. This new errand was more exciting for me because I was embarking on it for my own benefit and of my own volition, but there was no reason to believe that I was in any greater danger. If I couldn't find this fellow, or if he turned out to be nothing more than he appeared, then I could return to my work at Binder Creek with nothing to regret but a day or two of pleasant travel.