The Gold Seekers (4 page)

His tired horse stumbled, and Luke forced himself to give his attention to his riding. He was stiff and saddlesore, but another half hour should see him in the camp, and from there it was only five miles up the valley to their own claim. He would take a bottle of whiskey with him, he decided—buy it in camp with a few ounces of the dust his pa had scorned— and let Dan have a drink or two before listening to his account of his trip home. Dan would be upset, he knew, but would surely agree that they should not be expected to hand over their share of the strike to the Mormon church.

It wanted an hour to sunset when he reached Thayer’s Bend. The store was in a wood-built shanty in the center, kept by a man named Logan, assisted by his two young sons. Luke hitched his mare’s rein to the post outside and, taking the small buckskin bag of dust from his saddlebag, walked stiffly into the store. Logan’s elder son, Ted, was behind the counter, and to Luke’s astonishment the boy eyed him as if he had seen a ghost. Not waiting to ask him what he wanted, Ted backed away and went scuttling to the rear of the store, shouting for his father.

“Pa, come an’ see! It’s one o’ them Windy Gully fellers! Leastways it’s him or his spittin’ image!”

Logan himself appeared, a napkin tucked into his shirt, irritably cursing at what was evidently the interruption of his meal. But at the sight of Luke his eyes widened behind their rimless spectacles and the angry words died on his lips.

“Gawd Almighty!” he exclaimed, visibly startled. “You are one o’ Captain Morgan’s boys, ain’t you, from the Windy Gully claim?”

“That’s right, Mr. Logan,” Luke assured him. “I’m Luke Murphy. I’m on my way back from visiting my folks in—” He broke off, conscious of the storekeeper’s tension. “Is there something wrong?” He thought of the mine shaft and the confined space in which he and the others had been compelled to work, and drew in his breath sharply. “There’s not been an—an accident, has there?”

Logan hesitated. He was known as a hard man, but there

was pity in his eyes as they met Luke’s. Finally, he inclined his head.

“That’s right, boy, there has—a real bad one. Truth to tell, we thought—that is, we didn’t know you was visitin’ your folks. You must’ve gone afore it happened. But maybe it’d be best if Eph Crocker told you—I’m just a storekeeper; I don’t know nothin’ about minin’. Ted—” He gestured to the door. “Cut across an’ ask Mr. Crocker to step in here. Tell him— tell him as one o’ the Windy Gully boys has shown up here, an’ they ain’t all—” He bit back the word he had been about to say, but Luke, a sick sensation in the pit of his stomach, guessed what it was.

“Dead?” he whispered brokenly. “You don’t mean they— they’re all dead? Dear God, Mr. Logan, you can’t mean that?”

Logan said nothing. Turning away, he splashed a measure of whiskey into a pewter pot and thrust it into Luke’s hands.

“Swallow that down, son,” he urged. “Eph’ll be here soon, an’ he’ll tell you.”

The raw spirit choked him, and Luke put the pot down, his hand shaking. He had planned to buy a bottle of whiskey, he remembered, to celebrate his return and to console Dan for what he had to say concerning their father. But Dan would not—could not hear that now because he was dead—he and Frankie and Tom. Jasper Morgan, too, he supposed. All of them except himself.

Heralded by a breathless Ted, old Ephraim Crocker came hurrying into the store. He, too, had evidently been disturbed by the boy’s summons while eating his evening meal and was still buttoning his jacket when he halted by Luke’s side, his lined face grimly set. In a few gruff words he confirmed the storekeeper’s story.

“I’m right sorry, lad, an’ that’s the truth. But they was usin’ blastin’ powder, see, an’ the whole shaft caved in on top of them.” He explained the circumstances. “I reckon it must’ve blown when they was inside. ‘Twas a mighty loud explosion—a lot o’ the stuff must’ve gone up at one an’ the same time, see. I heard it from here an’ guessed there was somethin’ amiss. Haifa dozen of us threw down our tools an’ made for the gully as fast as we knowed how, but we was too late. They was buried, an’ there was no way we could get to them.”

“You tried?” Luke managed, his throat tight. “Mr. Crocker, you did try to get to them?”

The old man inclined his balding white head. He said regretfully, “Oh, we tried all right, son, but it was hopeless. Tons o’ rock was brought down, you see, an’ even if we’d been able to shift it, there was no chance of any of them being’ alive. No chance at all.” He patted Luke’s slumped shoulders in an awkward gesture of sympathy. “You best stop here in camp tonight, an’ I’ll go out with you in the mornin’, so’s you can see for yourself. You won’t have eaten, I don’t suppose?”

“No,” Luke admitted dully. “But I don’t want nothin’.” He was appalled by what Crocker had told him, and bewildered also, for had not Jasper Morgan always claimed to be an expert at handling blasting powder? An expert would not have permitted men to be inside the mine when a charge was about to be set off, and in the past Morgan had been careful —meticulously so. And the gunpowder had always been kept at a safe distance, with only the amount required for each charge taken to the rock face.

He started to say this, but Crocker exchanged glances with the storekeeper and then said reluctantly, “Cap’n Morgan wasn’t there, son. He come through here in his wagon the day before it happened. Stopped at the store for supplies an’ told Mr. Logan he was on his way to ‘Frisco—that’s right, ain’t it, Mike?” Logan nodded, and the miners’ elected leader went on, avoiding Luke’s gaze, “So we all figure that ‘twas an accident. Maybe your brother and those two Australian boys he worked with weren’t—well, maybe they didn’t know how to handle the blasting powder. An’ with the cap’n not there …”

He left his sentence unfinished, hanging in the air between them, with all its implications as plain to Luke as if he had voiced them. He bit back an indignant denial; Crocker was not trying to hurt him, he knew, but Dan was—had been —no fool. They all had learned to handle the powder charges under Morgan’s tuition, and Dan wasn’t one to take risks with other men’s lives, any more than with his own. It

simply did not make sense. Luke’s brows met in an unhappy pucker as he tried to puzzle it out.

Jasper Morgan had gone to San Francisco, as he had said he would, taking their gold—the partnership’s gold—with him, to sell to the United States Mint.

“Did the captain have the girl with him, Mr. Logan?” he forced himself to ask. “His daughter, I mean?”

Once again the two older men exchanged glances, and then Logan shook his head. “Nope, he was alone, Luke.”

That, at least, was a relief, and Luke’s expression lightened. If Morgan had left his daughter behind, he would have to come back—Dan had been certain on that score. And then, when he had paid them their share of the money, they— Luke stiffened, and for all his effort to prevent it, a sob escaped him, as he remembered.

Dan and the other two could not claim their shares. They were dead, all three of them, which meant that as the only other surviving partner he would have to claim their shares as well as his own—fifty percent, the same as Morgan’s. He would find a way to send Tom’s and Frankie’s shares to their folks in Australia; that was the least he could do, of course. And maybe he could talk Pa into accepting Dan’s—to give to the church, if that was what he wanted to do. He …

Young Ted brought him a mug of scalding black coffee, and Luke sipped it gratefully, preferring it to the whiskey. Ephraim Crocker sat down and waited until he had drunk it, then asked thoughtfully, “Why did Cap’n Morgan go to ‘Frisco, son, d’you know? What reason had he?”

“He went to sell our gold to the Mint, Mr. Crocker,” Luke answered, and broke off, belatedly recalling jasper Morgan’s insistence that he was not to talk of their strike to the men of Thayer’s Bend.

Crocker eyed him with narrowed lids. “You made a strike, then?”

There was no point now in attempting to hide the truth. Luke nodded. “Yes, a good one, sir.” He described his find and the manner in which he had made it and, when the old man pressed him, gave him Dan’s estimate of its worth.

Crocker’s lips pursed in a silent whistle, and Logan said, with more than a hint of resentment, “Captain Morgan

never said nothin’ about that to me, boy. Never even hinted at it.”

“No. He—that is, he told us to keep still tongues in our heads. He said if it was known, there’d be a rush to the gully, and he didn’t want that.”

Crocker grunted. “That’s understandable,” he conceded. “But you did no good with that mine o’ yours, did you?”

“No, we didn’t. But Captain Morgan said,” Luke began, “that—”

“I know what he said,” Crocker reminded him. “An” I know what I said. You was there; you heard me. I told him he was plumb crazy ‘cause he hadn’t the right tools nor enough men. He should’ve stuck to puddlin’ like the rest o’ us.” He rose heavily to his feet, as if suddenly unwilling to continue the conversation. “Try an’ get some sleep, boy. Mr. Logan here will fix you up, eh, Mike? An’ I’ll be along first thing in the mornin’ so’s we can go out to Windy Gully together.” He laid a gnarled hand on Luke’s shoulder in wordless sympathy and left the store.

Luke slept fitfully, sharing bed and blanket with young Ted Logan, and he still felt weary and dispirited when, soon after sunrise, he set off for Windy Gully with Ephraim Crocker and another elderly member of the miners’ standing committee, named Roberts. The mine shaft, when they reached it, was a shapeless mass of rocks and earth. The entrance had collapsed on itself and was blocked completely; looking at it through tear-misted eyes, Luke understood, without Crocker’s repeated explanation, why the would-be rescuers had abandoned their attempt to hack a way through to the entombed men. It would have taken hours, and the chances of finding anyone alive beneath the mass of debris would have been virtually nonexistent, even had they managed to get through to them.

Nevertheless, the thought of his brother’s body’s being left to lie there was more than he could bear to contemplate, Dan deserved better than that, he told himself. He deserved a proper burial, with words from the Bible read over him and a headstone to mark his last resting place. Dan and the two Australians—all three of them deserved that, and however long it took, he would see that they got what they deserved.

Ephraim Crocker shook his head when Luke told him what he intended to do, but there was a gleam of approval in his faded blue eyes for all that.

“I can’t promise you no help, son,” he said apologetically. “We’ve all of us gotten our claims to work. But if you’ve made up your mind, then I’m not about to try an’ stop you. And happen there’ll be some who’ll lend a hand. You made a good strike here; when word about that spreads around, why, there’ll likely be one or two that’ll take it into their heads to come up here. Offer ‘em half o’ what they find, and that should lessen your work. An” when you’re able to bring the bodies out, why, we’ll give them Christian burial up at the camp. Mr. Roberts here is a lay preacher; he’ll read over them, won’t you, John?”

“Most willingly,” Roberts agreed. “And I’ll be glad to help you, boy.”

Luke thanked them both. The small camp was as the three dead men had left it; the tents still in place, their bedding neatly rolled, the campfire cold, but the spits and the old iron kettle untouched. There were some tools, too—two picks and a shovel with a broken shaft, a rusting ax, and Jasper Morgan’s small geologist’s hammer. But the keg of blasting powder was empty.

One of Frankie’s snares held the rotting remains of a rabbit; Luke threw the carcass away and, his throat aching, reset the snare. Crocker and Roberts took their leave, and when they had ridden off, he hobbled his tired mare and began his arduous task.

He worked for two days like a man possessed, throughout the daylight hours and then far into the night. The pinto he had left with Dan came in, but there was no sign of the Gardeners’ two animals. Morgan, he decided, must have taken them, for they had never wandered far before, and one of the saddles was gone.

On the morning of the third day the lay preacher, John Roberts, came up with two others, bringing a gift of flour and a small bag of coffee. All three toiled with him for several hours, and Luke felt that at long last he had made progress. Evidently they must have shared his opinion, for at noon on the following day they returned, this time accompanied by Ephraim Crocker, with a lantern and a supply of tools.

“Mr. Roberts reckons we should get to the bodies before nightfall if we work at it, son,” he told Luke with gruff gentleness. “An’ we didn’t think as it was—well, fittin’ for you to be on your own.” He hesitated and then said, looking down at his dirt-encrusted boots, “Remember, they’ll have been buried in that shaft for nigh on three weeks. They won’t be—” He broke off, at a loss for words.

Luke nodded, tightlipped. “I know, Mr. Crocker. I know what to expect.”

“All the same, son, you’d best let us go in first. We’ll take blankets with us, an’— Mr. Logan’s bringin’ up a wagon. It’ll all be done respectful-like an’ proper, don’t you worry.”

“I’ll go with you, sir,” Luke asserted. There was a sick sensation in the pit of his stomach, and he longed to take advantage of the kindly old man’s offer, but … Dan was his brother, and he had a duty he could not shirk.

They broke through two hours later, finding themselves, to Luke’s bewilderment, in a small underground chamber, untouched by the explosion, its roof still quite firmly held by the props of timber that had collapsed elsewhere. And the bodies were there; he saw them in the light of Crocker’s lantern, all three of them, lying huddled together as if they were sleeping. He had expected them to be crushed under the weight of earth and rock, had nerved himself for the sight of blood and hideously shattered limbs, the dead faces indistinguishable one from the other, but … they were not. He recognized Dan’s face instantly and had to bite back a sob, his stomach churning.

“Leave this to us, Luke,” John Roberts besought him. “We’ll bring them out.” He tested one of the roof props with both hands and nodded to Ephraim Crocker. “It’s safe enough. You got the blankets, Eph?”