“On the contrary,” I said, “I don’t care a great deal about it. I wanted to know about what financial arrangements you’d had with your brother.”
“That’s gratitude for you,” she said with a little laugh. “I bare my soul, and you say you didn’t want to hear it.”
I grinned at her. “Had anything to eat?”
“No, and I’m ravenous. I kept waiting around, thinking perhaps you’d come in.”
“I think they roll the sidewalks up in this town about eight-thirty, but we might find an all-night place on the highway somewhere.”
“Know something, Donald?”
“What?”
“That garlic breath of yours—”
“Offensive?” I asked.
She laughed and said, “You’re a nice boy, Donald, but you do drive the damnedest heaps. Here, take the keys to my car and let’s go out in search of adventure.”
“When’ll your dad be here?”
“Not until midnight. You certainly have made a hit with him.”
She opened the car door and jumped inside.
I fitted the ignition key to the lock and switched on the motor. There was a smooth rush of purring power that ran as silently as a sewing machine and had as much power as a skyrocket. I put it in low and stepped on the throttle and nearly jerked our heads off. Alta laughed, and said, “This isn’t that old heap of yours, is it, Donald? You start this thing in second gear—unless you’re on a steep grade or stuck in the mud or something.”
“So I’ve found out,” I said.
We found a little Spanish place, and she ate her way down the menu. “Let’s drive around for a while in the moonlight,” she suggested when we got out.
I figured there’d be a road that would come out on the flat lands above the river. I finally found it, and we left the pavement when we were about a thousand feet above the valley, to drive out on the dirt road that led to a spur where we could look down over the country below. From that height, the tailing piles didn’t seem hard and glittering. The moonlight was soft, and the whole panorama of the valley was a part of the night, of the stars, and of those mysterious rustling noises that emanated from wild life.
I switched off the motor and the lights. She snuggled over to me. A cottontail hopped across a patch of moonlight directly in front of the car. An owl swooped down on a mouse. The shadows were dark blotches in the canyons. The ridges were splashed with vivid moonlight, and the valley below bathed in tranquil brilliance. I could feel her body close against mine, could hear the even sound of her regular breathing. I looked down at her once, thinking she was asleep, but her eyes were wide open, drinking in the scenery.
Her hand came over and took possession of mine. Her pointed fingernails traced little designs along the edges of my fingers. Once she sighed, a tremulous sigh of deep content, then suddenly she looked up and asked, “Donald, do you like this?”
By way of answer, I leaned over and brushed my lips gently against the side of her forehead.
For a moment I thought she was going to put up her lips to be kissed, but instead she snuggled closer and sat perfectly still.
After a while I said, “We’d better go, and be there in the camp when your father arrives.”
“I suppose so.”
We had driven down the curving ribbon of concrete to the outskirts of Valleydale before she said anything. Then she said simply, “Donald, I could love you forever for that.”
“What?”
“Just everything about it.”
I laughed. “I didn’t make the view,” I said.
“No,” she said, “and there’s a lot of other things you didn’t try to make— Gosh, Donald, you’re a nice kid.”
“What,” I asked, “is all this leading up to?”
“Nothing. I just wanted you to know. It wouldn’t have been the same with anyone else. Other men I know would have talked too much, or pawed too much, or made me fight. I just relaxed with you and felt that you were a part of the scenery, and it was all a part of me.”
“In other words, I’m something of a noncombatant. Is that it?”
“Donald, stop it! You know better than that.”
“I understand a man is supposed to consider it a dubious compliment when a girl says she feels perfectly safe with him.”
Her laugh was nervous. “If you knew how utterly unsafe I felt with you, it would surprise you. What I meant was that it just all fitted in— Oh, why did I try to explain it? I’m no good at that stuff anyway. Can’t you drive with one hand, Donald?”
“Yes.”
She took my right hand off the steering wheel, slipped it around her shoulders, and cuddled over. I drove slowly through the deserted streets of the little city, a city of ghosts, of memories, with houses that needed paint, with shade trees catching the moonlight on polished green leaves and shimmering it back into the night, while the dark blotches of shadow below seemed to be pools of India ink which had been splotched on the ground with some big brush.
Henry Ashbury was waiting for us at the auto court. He’d chartered a plane and then hired a car to take him the rest of the way.
“Beat your schedule, Dad, didn’t you?” Alta asked.
He nodded and looked us over with thoughtful eyes. He shook hands with me, kissed Alta, and then turned to look at me again. He didn’t say anything.
“Well, don’t be so serious about it,” Alta said. “I hope you’ve got some whisky in that bag of yours because this town is closed up tight. There are some pans in here, and I could make a nice little toddy as a nightcap.”
We all went into the double cabin where Alta had registered for herself and her father. We sat down, and Alta made some hot whisky drinks, poured them in cups, and came in and joined us.
“What have you found out?” Ashbury asked me.
“Not very much,” I said, “but enough.”
“What’s happening?”
“They’re prospecting. It seems they prospect dredging land with a drill. Because a dredge can operate at a profit in ground where there are low values per cubic yard, it doesn’t require a great deal of gold to make a good job of salting a claim— And they can use the same gold over and over.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know, just a few dollars, I should judge.” “How heavy are they salting it?”
“Apparently pretty heavy.”
“Then what’s going to happen?”
“The promoters will milk the company dry and skip out. They’d never dare to put a dredge on it. If they did, there would be such a discrepancy in values that it would show conclusively the ground had been salted.”
He bit the end off a cigar and smoked for a while in silence. Twice, I caught him looking over the tops of his glasses at Alta.
“Well?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The next move,” I said, “is up to you.”
“How do you figure that?”
“It all depends on what you want to do.”
“I’m going to leave things entirely in your hands. I’m satisfied you can take care of
us
.”
I said, “You forget that tomorrow at this time I’ll probably be in a cell somewhere charged with murder.”
Alta Ashbury gave a quick little involuntary gasp.
Her father swiveled his eyes around to look at her for a moment, then back to me.
“What do you suggest?” he asked.
“How important is it that you keep Bob out of trouble?”
“Damned important. I’m engaged in some promotional work myself with three associates. To have something come up now that would rock the boat would put me in a most embarrassing position—not financially, but— Dammit, it would make people look down their noses at me. There’d be a wagging of heads every time I walked into the club. Whispered conferences would stop abruptly when I came walking into a room. The whole damn petty mechanics of character assassination carried on right under my nose where I’d have to pretend I didn’t know anything about it.”
I said, “There’s only one way you could handle the thing.”
“How’s that?”
I said thoughtfully, “We might kill two birds with one stone.”
“What’s the other bird?”
I said, “Oh, just an incidental development.”
Alta pushed her cup and saucer to one side, and leaned across the table. “Dad, look at me.”
He looked at her.
“You’re worried because you think I’ve fallen in love with Donald, aren’t you?”
He met her eyes squarely. “Yes.”
“I don’t think I have. I’m trying not to. He’s helping me, and he’s a gentleman.”
“I gathered,” Ashbury said acidly, “that you’d taken
him
into your confidence. You didn’t take me.”
“I know I didn’t, Dad. I should have. I’m going to tell you now.”
“Not now,” he said. “Later. Donald, what’s your idea?”
I said hotly, “I’m not trying to horn in on the Ashbury millions or thousands or hundreds or whatever the hell they are. I’ve tried to give you a square deal, a—”
His hand came over to rest on my arm. The fingers lightened until I could feel the full strength of the man’s grip. “I’m not kicking about you, Donald,” he said. “It’s Alta. Usually, men flock around her, and she makes them jump through hoops. It makes me sore the way she treats them, not sore at her, but sore at my sex for standing all that damn bossing around—” Abruptly, he turned to fare Alta, and said, “And you may feel relieved to know that before I left, I told Mrs. Ashbury she could see her lawyer, arrange a settlement, go to Reno, and get a quiet divorce, and take her son with her. Now then, Donald, what’s the idea?”
I said, “The brains back of this whole business is a lawyer by the name of Crumweather. I thought I could head things off and put the screws on him. I can on one end of it. I can’t on the other. There’s been too much stock sold.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know. Quite a smear. There’s going to be an awful squawk go up.”
“How about the Commissioner of Corporations?”
“Crumweather’s found a hole in the Blue Sky Act, or thinks he has.”
“Can’t we put him on the spot?”
“Not because of that. He’s too slick. He’s sitting back in the clear with a ten-per-cent rake-off. The officials of the company will get the jolt.”
“Well, what
can
we do?”
“The only thing to do,” I said, “is to find the stockholders and get them to sell their stock.”
He said, “Donald, that’s the first time I’ve known you to make an utterly asinine suggestion.”
Alta rushed to my defense. “Dad, it sounds perfectly feasible to me. Can’t you see it’s the only way?”
“Bunk,” he said, slouching down in his chair and chewing at his cigar. “The people who bought stock in that company bought it as a gamble, not as an investment, They’re looking forward to a hundred-to-one, or five-hundred-to-one, or five-thousand-to-one profit. Try to buy that stock at what they paid for it, and they’d laugh at you, Offer them ten times what they paid for it, and they’d think there’d been a strike, and you had inside information.”
I said, “I don’t think you understand what I’m driving at.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“There’s only one person who could buy it back, and that’s Crumweather.”
“How could he buy it back?”
“He could suddenly discover that all of the sales had been illegal transactions, have the salesmen go around and tell the prospects that the idea wasn’t feasible, and that the Commissioner of Corporations had ordered them to return the money received from stock sales.”
“How much would it cost you to do that?” he asked dryly. “I’d say about half a million dollars.”
“I think we could do it for five hundred dollars.”
“What was that figure?” he asked.
“Five hundred dollars.”
He said, “Either you’re crazy, or I am.”
“Is it worth five hundred to you?”
“It’d be worth a cool fifty thousand.”
I said, “Alta’s car’s outside. Let’s go for a ride.”
“Can I come?” Alta asked.
“I don’t think so. We’re going to call on a bachelor who’s already retired.”
“I like bachelors.”
“Come on,” I said.
We sat three in the front seat, and I drove over the rough road through the tailings until the headlights, dancing along ahead, showed the outlines of Pete Digger’s old shack.
“You sit here,” I said. “I’ll get out and see if he’s ready to receive visitors.”
I slid out of the car and started toward the house. A cracked voice from the shadows said, “Hoist ’em brother, and hoist ’em high!”
I swung around and shot my hands up in the air. The illumination of the headlights showed my features, and Pete Digger said savagely, “Might have known you was a god-darn stool pigeon— All right, go ahead and try to find it, you cheap, tin-star, two-faced hypocrite. A writer, huh? That car looks like you was a writer. If you ain’t got a warrant, get the hell out of here. If you have, serve it."
I said, “You’ve got me wrong, Pete. I want some more information, only this time I’m going to pay more money for it.”
The answer was under his breath and reflected on my parentage.
Suddenly the door of the car swung open. Alta got out and walked straight toward the shadows. She said, “Honestly, it’s all right. Donald brought my dad and me down to talk a little business with you.”
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Alta.”
“Get over there in the light where I can get a look at you.”
She moved over beside me in the light.
Henry Ashbury said cheerfully, “I guess I’m next.” He got out and came shambling over to stand beside us.
“Who the hell are you?” Pete Digger asked.
I said, “You damn fool, he’s Santa Claus,” and put my hands down.
CHAPTER TEN
P
ETE
D
IGGER HAD PULLED ON
a pair of pants and pushed his feet into boots when he had heard the car coming. He was a bit embarrassed about coining out and meeting people, but after I persuaded him it was all right, he seemed sheepish about the gun act. It was Alta who saved the day. She acted interested and perfectly natural.
Pete wanted to make up the bed before he had us come in, but Alta said, “Nothing doing,” and we all filed in. The windows were open, and the stove was cold, but I found a pile of twigs and dried bark and started the fire while Pete was apologetically getting into a shirt and coat. That seemed to make a hit with him.
There was one thing about the little shack. It heated up quickly, and the stove roared into a businesslike job. Pete came over and sat down, looked longingly at the fragrant Perfecto handed him by Ashbury, and said, “Nope. That’s rich man’s fodder. I’m a poor guy. My pipe is my friend, and I don’t go back on my friends. See?”
Alta and I had cigarettes. After we were all blowing smoke into a blue cloud which hung heavy over the table and the roaring fire made the place seem even warmer and more cozy than the thermometer would indicate, Pete said, “Okay. What you got on your mind?”
“Pete,” I said, “I’m going to give you a chance to make five hundred dollars.”
“Make what?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
“What’s the catch?” he asked.
I said, “You’ve got to salt a claim.”
“What for?”
“Can I trust you?”
“Damned if I know,” Pete said with a grin. “I don’t double-cross my friends, but I raise hell with my enemies. Pay your money and take your choice.”
I leaned over across the table. “I was stringing you when I told you that I was a writer looking for local color,” said.
Pete Digger threw his head back and roared. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in forty years,” he said.
“What is?” Ashbury asked.
“This young chap thinkin’ I didn’t know he was lyin’ when he told me he was a writer. He’s up here snoopin’ around. I figure he’s a young lawyer tryin’ to get somethin’ on that dredgin’ company. That’s what he was after. Writer,
he?
Haw haw haw!”
I grinned and said, “Well, we’ve got that over with. Now then, Pete, I’m stuck on that stock proposition.”
“
You
are?”
“Uh huh. I got soft and bought some stock in there,” I said.
Pete’s face darkened. “The damn bunch of crooks,” he said. “We’d oughta go down there an’ dynamite their drill rig, give ’em a coat of tar and feathers, and dump ’em in the river to cool ’em off.”
“No,” I said. “There’s a better way.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you think they know how much gold they’re putting in those holes?”
“Sure, they do. The way a proposition like that figure the ground has to test uniform. If you get one hole that runs way up, an’ another hole that runs down, capital gets suspicious. A river don’t deposit gold that way. That gold’s been droppin’ down in that channel for millions years. Get the idea?”
“All right, that’s the way I hoped it would be. Now, then, they’re keeping track of the gold they take
out,
aren’t they?”
“Sure.”
“Pete,” I said, “you mentioned that you could salt claim artistically. What do you mean by it?”
Pete looked at us and said, “You said I could make five hundred bucks. What did you mean by
it?”
Ashbury, who was a good judge of character, and had been studying Pete over the tops of his glasses, wordlessly look a wallet from his pocket, and counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills. “That’s what he meant,” he said, and shoved them across to Pete.
Pete picked the bills up, looked at them, twisted them in his fingers, then dropped them and let them lie in the center of the table.
“Don’t want them?” Ashbury asked.
“Not until you say the word,” Pete said.
“I’m saying it.”
“Wait until you hear what I got to say.”
“Go ahead,” I told him.
“Well,” Pete said, “I know a couple of pretty smooth ways of salting a gold-dredger claim so that the devil himself can’t figure it out.”
“What are they?”
“Well, now,” Pete said, “in order to really get the sketch, I pot to tell you a couple of stories. This goes back to the Klondike when a big company was figurin’ on cornin’ in there. A guy had a bunch of ground he wanted to sell, and the company didn’t think it was any good, but the bird told such a story they decided to drill it.
“Well, the minute they started drillin’ it, they knew they’d struck a bonanza. Values were there just the way they should be. They started low at the top, and were heavy down on bedrock. They punched hole after hole, and every hole gave ’em the same results. The ground was absolutely uniform. They bought the place, but just before they started dredgin’ somebody got a bright idea and punched down a couple more test holes— The values were so thin you couldn’t see ’em with a magnifying glass.”
“What had happened?” I asked. “Was the claim salted?”
“Sure it was salted.”
“But weren’t they looking out for that?”
“Of course they were watching out for it, and the guy salted it right under their noses. Here, I’ll show you how. Ever see gold panned?”
I shook my head.
Pete picked up a gold pan with its typical sloping sides, and curled rim. He squatted down on his heels and held the gold pan balanced in between his knees. “This is the way a guy pans gold, see?” He twisted the pan back and forth, shaking it with his wrists. “You keep the stuff under water. The idea is to get all the gold mixed up with the water so it settles to the bottom of the pan.”
I nodded.
“Well,” Pete said, “a man pans like this. He’s smokin’. See? He’s always got a right to smoke. He takes a sack of tobacco outa his pocket an’ rolls his own, or, if he’s a little different type, he has a package of tailor-made cigarettes in his pocket. Me, I use my own, because the minute I started smokin’ tailor-made cigarettes, anybody that knew me would get suspicious.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Well,” Pete said, “that’s all there is to it.”
“I don’t get you,” Ashbury said.
“Don’t you see? The tobacco is just about a quarter gold dust. I put just as much tobacco as I want into the cigarette, and I determine the values in each pan by the length of time it takes me to pan it out. While I’m smoking, the ashes from the cigarette are droppin’ down into the gold pan. Nobody thinks anything of that.”
Ashbury gave a low whistle.
“And then there’s another way,” Pete went on. “You climb up on a drill rig, an’ you take a marlinspike an’ spread the strands of the rope apart, then you put in a bunch of gold dust. You do that all the way down the whole length of the rope, then in the mornin’ when they start drillin’, the jar of the bit on the ground dislodges little particles of gold dust which drop down the casing into the hole.”
I said, “All right, Pete, what we want is to have those holes show so much more gold coming
out
than they’re putting
in,
that they’ll come to the conclusion they
really
have a bonanza. But it’ll have to be done so all the values show up after they get below the old level of work.”
“Shucks,” Pete said. “They don’t know where the old level of work was. That bunch don’t know anything, They’re just goin’ through motions. I watched ’em. They’re so damn clumsy, I swear to God I almost started over and said to the driller, ‘Look here, buddy, I don’t want to tell a man his business, but if you can’t make a better job of salting a claim than that, for God’s sake, stand to one side and let a guy that really knows how give you a few pointers.’ ”
Ashbury chuckled. Alta laughed out loud. I pushed the five one-hundred-dollar bills across the table toward Pete Digger. “It’s all yours,” I said.
Pete picked up the bills, folded them, and put them in his pocket.
“When can you start?” Ashbury asked.
“You’re in a hurry?”
“Yes.”
“I got a little dust in there,” Pete said, jerking his head toward a cupboard. “Stuff I’ve picked up here and there in the pockets, pay dirt that had dropped out of some of the old cleanups. It’s enough for what we’ll want.”
“How can you get on the property?” I asked him.
“That’s a cinch. They’ve been trying to get me to work ever since they started. They don’t know too much about handling the job.”
“You don’t dare to have values start running up just after you go to work. It would be too much of a coincidence,” I warned.
“Leave that to me, brother. I’m going down there tonight in the moonlight an’ take a marlinspike, an’ salt a bunch of gold in that drill rope. Their values’ll start pickin’ up tomorrow. I think that drill rope’s all I’m goin’ to need.”
I said, “Keep it up until I tell you to stop.”
“How’ll you tell me?”
“When you get a postal card signed ‘D.L.’ saying, ‘Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here,’ you’ll know it’s time to quit.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll get started in about half an hour.”
We shook hands all around, and as we climbed in the car Ashbury said, “That’s a fine piece of work, Donald.”