Zachary's Gold (18 page)

I bypassed the first drop-off altogether. There was no point in showing him my arsenal.

The time might have been nine o'clock or ten, or it may have been a small hour of the morning when we finally reached the second cache point and I took the lantern back from Rosh. He stood on the pathway while I stepped into the bushes, found the old keg, pushed aside the camouflage, and removed the lid. I held the lantern high and called to him, and he picked his way daintily through the shadows to where I stood.

The lantern gleam needed only to tickle the surface of the gold bars at the bottom of the barrel for Rosh to recognize them. He was a miner. He could probably have smelled his way to the ingots without the aid of a lamp.

Watching his expression, I was satisfied with the mixture of awe and new comprehension that showed in his face.

I could tell he was loath to leave the precious stuff behind, but I quickly popped the lid back in place and returned to the game trail. Looking again at his expression, I could see that there was a great deal going on behind his eyes. I gave him the lantern, and he turned to head back in the direction from which we had come, but I spoke to him and pointed the way farther along. There was no need to use my gun anymore.

He walked faster and needed less prompting at the forks and bends, and we reached the next cache quite quickly. Standing above the opened box, holding the light, I let him spend a long time on his knees, fingering and hefting the bags and boxes and jars of raw gold dust and nuggets. He murmured to himself softly—something that may have been quiet prayer, or may have been a steady, gentle stream of caustic Oriental oaths. I was satisfied that, either way, he was voicing a very genuine appreciation of the stockpile.

I carried the lantern and led the way home. We did not stop to rest, but walked at a moderate pace in silence and were both exhausted when we reached the cabin.

I went straight inside. Rosh stopped to bring in a few more blocks of wood. The room stank of gunpowder, but I did not care. I let the other man tend to the fire, threw my blanket over the bed, and crawled in. I was asleep before Rosh had got his mat and blankets laid out on the floor.

When he woke me it was full light, although it seemed that I had just closed my eyes. The cabin was warm, and Rosh pointed to the table, where oatmeal and tea steamed in their dishes. He had evidently already eaten, a necessary procedure since we possessed only one bowl. I ate hungrily, thinking, though, that he was better at cooking rice than oatmeal. He waited with a noticeable impatience.

As soon as I had finished the last spoonful, he took my bowl away and set it on the floor by the door. The table was now cleared except for our teacups, and as he pulled up a block of firewood for a seat, it became clear that we were about to begin another session of sign language.

First he made desultory gestures at the map, the mule, and the woods in the direction of the gold. I nodded that I understood so far. With that, he drew a handful of coins from his pocket—eight Chinese ones, brass, with square holes in the middle, and two English shillings. He laid the ten pieces in a row before us, pointed once again in the direction of the treasure, and carefully pushed five towards me, then drew five to himself.

He smiled graciously.

I smiled as well, but mine was a smile of amusement at his ingenuous attempt at graft, for such was what I judged it to be.

“Fifty-fifty you think, do you? Well, I must say you've got a lot of gall to even begin haggling with that. It'll take a fine sight more than a bowl of porridge and a cup of tea before I'll be that generous.”

I reached across and retrieved four of his coins, shaking my head.

“I don't care to haggle, Chinaman.”

He wailed as if he had been shot. His face contorted with anger and self-pity, collapsed into contrite sorrow, then sprang to righteous indignation. He pleaded his case in loquacious terms I could never grasp. He mimed to me our history of meeting, and himself being dragged off at gunpoint—terrified to the brink of apoplexy, if you were to believe him—then stabbed and stroked the map until even a dim-witted Occidental ruffian like myself had to be impressed with the magnitude of the epic journey he was being asked to undertake, and the minuscule reward being offered.

Before I could react, his hand snaked out and swept away three more of the coins, giving him four to my six. He was still grimacing at the idea that I should demand so much for so little.

I took them back just as quickly.

“Look, my friend,” I said patiently, hoping that the tone of my voice would somehow impress on him my logic. “With one-tenth of that stack of gold you can set yourself up for life—buy a little business, buy yourself a nice farm and some cattle, get yourself a house in the city. Whatever! You haven't even done anything to earn that stuff. You might have thought you were in danger, but I don't think your skin was ever really on the line. I risked my life and I've nearly lost it more than once just getting my hands on that gold. I don't intend to hand half or forty per cent to you just for helping me carry it away.”

He summoned up another loud symphony of remonstrations, and before long had drawn back coins number two, three, and four. To finalize his statement he folded his arms and hardened his jaw, as if to say that enough was enough.

We sat that way and stared at each other for a long moment while I tried to think of an argument that he could comprehend.

“Stand up, Rosh,” I said at last, scratching my chin contemplatively. He understood my meaning and did so.

The instant he was on his feet, I drove my fist into his stomach. When he bent over double, I smacked him solidly on the top of his head with my elbow, sending him backwards against the door, where he slid to the floor.

He kept his consciousness, but he squirmed quite a lot, trying to get his breath back. He groaned for some time. I helped him to his feet then, and led him back to the chair, dusted off his coat, fetched him a drink of cold water.

Then I took nine coins off the table and put them in my pocket.

“I'm afraid that that's the main reason why I get such a big share of the gold, Rosh. I can whip you any time I want. I'm giving you ten per cent because I think I like you, but if you'd expected to get more than that, your mother should have built you bigger.”

At that point in my life, I considered mine to be an eminently fair and logical assessment of the situation.

I KNEW WE WOULD NEED
a full day to get our supplies organized and the final plans detailed. We had a long trip ahead of us, and we would not save time by rushing into it.

The prime item of business was to fetch the gold—a job that, for the main part, I planned to leave to my partner—but first I had to show him the way, since I couldn't expect him to remember by day where he had walked at night.

As I led him down the game trail I saw that he was marking each fork in the way with a stripped willow branch made into a hoop and hung in an obvious location. He should have been able to remember the route without this, but he was evidently a bit unsure of himself in the bush, and I thought it just as well that he took every precaution. I had no desire to find that my life's riches had wandered off into oblivion on the back of an overconfident fool.

My own packsack had been left with the mule outside the saloon in Barkerville, and if Rosh owned one, it was still at his claim, so between us we possessed only Ned's packboard. I gave this to my companion when we reached the third drop-off. He started loading up, with a broad smile still on his face, while I selected a single tin strongbox half filled with gold—about fifteen or twenty pounds. This seemed like a minimal load for a grown man, but by the time I reached the cabin I found my back was protesting and my convalescent shoulder was quite sore. I had expected it to heal much quicker, but I had only myself to blame for treating it without due consideration.

Rosh was sitting on the porch. He stood up to stretch when I arrived. He had evidently overburdened himself a bit as well, but I signed to him that time was short, and he should hurry back for another load. He nodded agreement, but before he left he stopped to inspect the mule—hooves, ears, mouth, and so on—quite carefully. It would have given me great pleasure to see the beast bite him the way Lord Nelson had me, but the Chinaman was noticeably more familiar with animals than I was.

Once he was gone, I went indoors and loaded the wood stove until it was hot enough to fry bannock. When I had that underway, I sorted out our foodstocks in the centre of the cabin floor. Ned was well supplied for the winter, but apart from salt, sugar, and tea, all we could hope to carry was bannock, oats, beans, a few carrots, and some rice, which I thought my partner would appreciate. I didn't want to let my face be seen within three hundred miles of the goldfields, nor did I like the idea of sending someone who didn't speak our language to buy supplies. That too would attract attention.

Too much was at stake to take any risks. I estimated the total journey would take us three weeks, and for the first half of that, we should consider ourselves fugitives—from justice and injustice alike. If all went well, we could purchase goods at some way station or roadhouse near the midway point—Lillooet or Ashcroft.

To start with, I figured we could manage about two hundred and twenty pounds of goods, most of which would be gold. The mule should continuously be able to lug a hundred and fifty, the Chinaman forty-five, and I twenty-five. At that, I would have to manufacture a special pack to carry all the weight on my good shoulder.

I was starting on this, ripping apart the canvas hammock that had been Ned's bed and sewing shoulder straps and connectors to a crude sort of bag, when Rosh arrived back with his second load of gold. He dropped it wearily on the floor, squatted against one wall, and began devouring warm bannock from the pile I was accumulating.

I asked him if he thought one more trip would be enough, and he shrugged doubtfully.

When he had taken the edge off his hunger and fatigue, he began perusing the maps on the table. One was a large-scale chart of the Cariboo, much of which was still blank, and the other a complete map of British Columbia. Both were furnished courtesy of our deceased host. On each I had scribed in red the route that I proposed to follow.

Still chewing on a handful of nuts he had discovered in a can on a high shelf, Rosh called me over from my sewing and pointed to the map of the Cariboo, specifically at a spot where my red line passed along Downey Pass and Martin's Creek to the Willow River. He evidently felt that this was a bad decision and spoke sagely in a very negative voice, stabbing and circling with his finger, indicating that a better route would be to add several miles to the distance, and to follow Nine Mile Creek to Cornish Creek, then the Willow River and Slough Creek.

I don't know whether proper etiquette actually forbids miming with one's mouth full, but I found his manner rather irritating.

“Enough of that,” I growled and pushed him towards the door. “You go get the rest of the gold, and leave the map work and the planning to me. I don't know how things are done in whatever corner of the heathen world you come from, but in America the conscript does not offer advice to the captain. If God had wanted you to examine my decisions, he would have made you with eyes that were all the way open.”

He grabbed the packboard and exited, still jabbering away, and I returned to my needlework. I had just cut a new length of gut and sat down when I heard a horrible shriek from outside. I leaped to my feet, startled, but stopped even before I made it to the door. I knew what had happened without looking.

Rosh had found Ned.

He had gained control over himself by the time I reached him, but he was still obviously shaken and distraught. I didn't know why he had wandered over in that direction, but now that he had discovered my dangling accomplice, I thought I might as well explain as much as I could.

“Good afternoon, Ned. You're not looking any better today, I'd say, nor smelling much improved. You should be ashamed of yourself, you know, sneaking up on my new partner like that. You'll have him scared to death before I can get him out to where he's seriously risking his neck. You aren't jealous, are you, old man?”

It may not have been such a good idea to chat up the dead man like that in Rosh's presence. I don't know whether he was particularly superstitious or just thought that my friendliness with the corpse was in bad taste, but it didn't improve his humour at all.

I knew it would be no easy task to try to explain the intricacies of my situation or even the history of recent events, so I thought carefully and waited until we were back to the clearing beside the cabin before I began my presentation.

Not only was it difficult to mime out my story, it was a bit embarrassing. I felt like a child playing a parlour game, but it was a charade with rather serious forfeits, for if my companion didn't properly grasp our state of affairs, he might unwittingly betray us to the wrong person at the wrong time.