A. Fair - Gold Comes in Bricks

“Nope. You don’t. Those big dredgers could work ground at a profit when there was a value of only ten cents a cubic yard. That’s more than a man could have handled in a day by old methods.”

“But how could they get an accurate idea of values from that sort of prospecting?”

“Cinch,” he said. “The engineers know down to a cubic inch how much dirt had been inside the casing by the time it was punched down to bedrock. They got the gold from each hole. They weighed it out carefully, and punched down holes every so many feet.”

“And they didn’t get a great deal of gold from any one hole?”

“Nope, just colours.”

I waited a while, then said, as though thinking out loud, “It would seem easy to doctor the results on that kind of a prospect.”

He took the pipe from his mouth, looked at me a minute, clamped his lips together in a firm, straight line, and said nothing.

“This the only place you prospected?” I asked.

“Nope. After I got to know the game,” he said, “they took me all over the country. I prospected up in the Klondike where the ground was frozen so solid you had to thaw it out with steam pipes before you could get a hole down. I was down in South America prospectin’. I went all over the country — then I came back and worked on dredgers.”

“Saved your money?” I asked.

“Not a damn cent.”

“But you’re not working now?”

“Nope. I get by.”

I was silent for a while, and then Pete said, “Don’t cost me hardly anything to live. I get most of my stuff from rustling around the country. Get a sack of beans once in a while, and I got a little vegetable patch out here. Buy my smokin’ tobacco, a little sugar, an’ flour in town. Buy a little bacon an’ save the grease for cookin’. You’d be surprised how little it takes for a man to live.”

I did a little more thinking and said, “I didn’t realise I was going to have an evening in such a comfortable place. There’s only one thing lacking.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“A good shot of hooch. Suppose we take a run into town and pick up a bottle?”

He didn’t say anything for a long time, just kept looking at me. “What kinda hooch do you drink?” he asked.

“Anything, just so it’s good.”

“How much you generally pay for it?”

“Around three dollars a quart.”

He said, “Stick around here a minute. I’ll be back.”

He got up and walked outside. I could hear his steps as he walked out about twenty feet from the door. Then he stood perfectly still. After that, his steps moved again. It was moonlight outside. Through the windows which weren’t covered with tin, I could see the moon casting black shadows beneath the digger pines and oaks. In the background the white piles of tailings caught and reflected the moonlight in a cold glitter that reminded me of the desert.

After a while Pete came back in and sat down. I looked at him for a minute, then took out my wallet, and took out three one-dollar bills.

He handed me back one of the dollar bills. “I only brought a pint,” he explained.

He took a bottle from his hip pocket and put it on the table while he got glasses. He poured some into each glass, then put the bottle back in his pocket.

It had a deep amber colour. I tasted it. It wasn’t at all bad.

“Good stuff,” I said.

“Thanks,” Pete said, modestly.

We sat there and drank and smoked. Pete told me stories of old mining camps, of lost mines in the desert, of claim-jumping, of feuds, and interspersed his conversation with comments about the old gold-dredging days.

Over the second glass, with my head feeling a little woozy, I said, “There’s some talk about a new dredging company coming in.”

Pete chuckled.

“Didn’t they miss a lot of bedrock around here?” I asked.

Pete said, “The company I was working for was run by old man Darniell. Anything he missed you could put in your eye.”

“But there were some places where they couldn’t get down to bedrock?”

“Yep.”

“Quite a lot of them?”

“Yep.”

“Then why can’t they redredge this country?”

“They can.”

“And make money?”

Pete pursed his lips. “Maybe.”

“And they can turn it back into agricultural land?”

“That’s what they claim.”

“Why wouldn’t it be a good thing?”

“Maybe it would.”

“I suppose they’ve got the old records of the prospecting that you did, know just how deep the old dredgers could go, and know just where to go after the stuff they want?”

Pete leaned forward. “Damnedest crudest bunch of salting I ever saw in my life.”

“What do you mean?”

“The drilling they’re doing.”

“They’re doing drilling?” I asked.

“Sure. Down here about a mile and a half. My God, but they’re crude.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mean!” he said. “Hell, they just dump the gold in the drill pipe and then pan it back out. Every once in a while they come up with a bunch of suckers. The suckers stand gawking over the gold pan. What they don’t notice is that the drill man has to keep a hand on the rope in order to steady the bit when it’s going up and down. You watch that hand, and every so often you’ll see him dip into his pocket with one hand and take the other hand out of his pocket to steady the drill rope. Watch closer than that, and you can see little colours of gold dribbling down every time he does it — mind you, he’s pretty slick at it. He doesn’t do it so it shows up too big. He’s got it all figured out, and they don’t bring up any gold at all until they get below the place where the old dredger worked. But, brother, you take it from me, when they hit bedrock they put it in plenty rich. You can take the figures they’re getting from their holes and figure the acreage they’ve got lined up, and the mint would have to go out of business. They’d have to dig up the whole darn state of Kentucky to find a place to store the gold.”

“That must take quite a bit of gold.”

“What? To salt the hole?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “It don’t take much. They’re damn fools. They’re goin’ to get caught.”

“How many holes have they put down?”

“Three. They’re on the fourth. They’re just started.”

“Know who’s back of it?”

“Nope. Some crowd from the southern part of the state. They’re sellin’ most of their stock around there.”

“How does the town feel about it?”

“Oh, they’re divided. You’ll find croakers and boosters. The minute it begins to look as if they’re goin’ to start puttin’ up a dredger though, you’ll see the Chamber of Commerce standing on its head and wiggling its toes — only they ain’t goin’ to put in no dredger.”

“Why not?”

“Because it would show up their prospects too much. The minute a dredger works that country, it’d show that the ground had been salted. I don’t think they intend to spend no money to put up a dredger. They’re doin’ a lot of talkin’, pourin’ gold into the ground, and gettin’ it back so they can pour it into the next hole. How about fillin’ your glass again?”

I said, “No, thanks. That stuff has authority.”

“It packs a wallop. That’s what I made it for.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “I’ve got to drive the car back.”

“I don’t hit it very hard, but I like it when I’m sittin’ around talkin’ with a friend. You’re a good guy — a writer, eh?”

“Uh, huh.”

“What do you write?”

“Oh, articles about different things.”

“You don’t know much about mining, huh?”

“Not a damn thing.”

“How’d you happen to pick this to write about?”