A machine! ‘You’re mining here,’ I said. ‘Somebody’s mining here.’ And I pushed past him, ignoring the gun, moving fast so that I was round the end of the rock outcrop before he caught up with me. He grabbed hold of my shoulder, but by then I had stopped of my own accord. Barely two hundred yards away, close against the mountainside, a small wheeled tractor with a shovel attached to the hydraulic lifting gear was digging down into an old streambed and dumping the rock and silt it scooped up into what looked like a line of wooden shuttering. The man driving it was hidden by the cab. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘Is it Mr Epinard?’
‘Jonny? No.’
The shuttering led from the base of a cascading torrent. I could see the water frothing in it as it rushed down the sloped wooden channel to spill out into a great box-like contraption that I recognized from old gold rush pictures I had seen. It was a sluice box, a large, old-fashioned working sluice box. No wonder they hadn’t wanted me to come up here. ‘Who’s doing this?’ I had rounded on the Indian angrily. ‘Come on, you tell me. You’re mining and I want to know who’s behind it.’
He shook his head slowly, his face still wooden, but a slightly bewildered look in his eyes.
‘Well, who?’ And once again I explained that I was a solicitor and acting for the owner.
He shook his head. I don’t think he understood about the legality of it any more than he knew about solicitors, but he had got the message that I was trouble, his eyes shifting to the distant tractor, then back to me as he said, ‘Okay. Stay here.’ His grip on my shoulder tightened and he spun me round, giving me a push that flung me against the rock of the outcrop. ‘You stay. Okay?’ He left me then and went loping across the wet grey detritus to where the tractor was still shovelling dirt. It stopped as he reached it, shovel poised, and a man’s head and shoulders leaned out of the cab. They talked for a moment, the tractor ticking over and the driver with his head twisted round so that he was looking back at me. Finally he nodded and withdrew, the tractor engine roaring again as he dumped its load, then backed it down to the sluice box, swinging it round and manoeuvring it close against the lower end.
McDonald had moved down with the tractor and now the two of them rigged a broad loop of belting from the tractor’s power drive to the big wheel on the side of the sluice. As soon as it was adjusted correctly and the power drive engaged, the sluice began to rock back and forth. Only then did the driver turn and begin walking towards me. There was something about the way he moved, the jerk of his head as he talked, but even then I didn’t guess. It was not, in fact, until he was within a few yards of me, was actually speaking to me, that I realized who he was.
Even then I could hardly believe it, he was so changed. For one thing he had lost a lot of weight. All the flab of good living had gone, his body so thin he looked like a famine relief figure. And his face was changed, too, much thinner and the bones of the skull showing through, so that he looked almost gaunt, his once-black hair turned grey and so long it covered his ears. But it was the moustache that changed him most. He had shaved it off and the absence of it seemed to alter his whole face.
For a moment I was so shocked I couldn’t say anything. He, too, seemed stunned. At the moment of recognition his mouth had opened, and then he just stood gaping at me, both of us standing there, saying nothing. At last he found his voice. ‘Kevin should have warned me,’ he murmured to himself. Then to me — ‘How did you get here? Who brought you up?’
Tarasconi,’ I said.
He nodded as though he had expected that. ‘So you’ve caught up with me. What now?’
I still found it difficult to believe it was true, and when I had recovered sufficiently to question him it was to ask him if he’d seen Miriam. ‘She wrote me she was going up to Ice Cold. Did you meet her, did you talk?’
‘What’s it to do with you?’
‘She said she’d write again. That’s three weeks ago and she hasn’t.’ There was sudden hostility in his eyes. ‘And you — disappearing like that. Why?’ I knew why, of course, but that’s how it came out. I was so shocked by his appearance, his face so gaunt, his eyes sunk in their sockets and his body thin as a rake as though he were suffering from some wasting disease. ‘You can’t hope to recover your fortunes slaving up here on your own.’
‘Why not?’ My words had got under his skin and he was suddenly bristling. ‘There’s gold up here. Why shouldn’t I strike lucky like my father did? He worked up here on his own.’
‘This isn’t the same as the Ice Cold Creek mine,’ I said.
‘Why not? What’s the difference?’
‘Just look at it.’ I made a vague, all-embracing gesture with my arm. ‘The situation, the logistics, everything — it’s all so much more difficult.’
‘Okay, but if there’s gold — ‘ His eyes had taken on that feverish glint that I had seen in Tarasconi’s. ‘And there is gold. Real good solid stuff. Nuggets. Look!’ And he pulled at a piece of orange agricultural twine round his neck, yanking out a small white cotton bag tied to the end of it. ‘Look at these!’ He squatted down on a boulder, his thighs pressed hard together to form a safety net as he emptied the contents out into the calloused palm of his hand. ‘Found these f-five days ago.’ That was when I first became conscious of the slight hesitation in his voice, the near stutter Miriam had referred to. He held out his hand. ‘They were all together, a little pocket in the bedrock.’ They were a darkish gold and there must have been more than a dozen of them, about the size of a pea, some a little bigger, some smaller. ‘And we’re getting dust, of course. We’re getting dust all the time.’ He put the nuggets back in the little cotton bag, slowly running them off his palm as though reluctant to see them pass out of his sight.
The bag back under his bush shirt, he got to his feet. ‘You haven’t told me why you’re here. Whitehorse isn’t exactly the centre of the universe and to get up here isn’t easy. You must have had a reason. And how did you know? — I suppose Miriam …’
‘So you saw Miriam?’
‘Oh, yes. But she swore she wouldn’t tell anyone, and I believed her.’ He said it resignedly. ‘I always believed whatever she told me. It was probably a mistake.’ He stared at me as though he hated my guts. That was when I realized he knew, had known all along, and I was sorry for him.
‘Where is she now?’ I asked.
‘Vancouver. She should be in Vancouver now, or back home.’ And he added with a wintry little glimmer of a smile, ‘So she didn’t write to you again.’
‘No.’
‘And you’ve come rushing out here to discover why? Oh, my dear fellow. This heart of mine bleeds for you.’ He tapped his chest, the smile broader now. ‘Come on.’ He got to his feet. ‘We’ll go up to Ice Cold and have a brew of tea. Not much sun gets into this place and it’s cold. Jack-Mac here doesn’t mind. None of the Indians worry much about the cold. But I do. Used not to, but now …’ He laughed, shrugging his shoulders as he added, ‘Getting old, I suppose.’ And we started back across the sloping floor of the amphitheatre, over the great rock slide and through the Gully with its beetling cliffs, and all the time he was talking, the words pouring out of him as though he couldn’t help himself. He was a gregarious man who had probably been very little on his own. Now, after a month or more up here, most of the time with only an Indian for company, it was hardly surprising he was desperate for somebody to talk to.
I didn’t really take in what he was saying, except that it was about the way he and Jonny and the Indian had set about trying to get at the gold they had convinced themselves lay under that massive overburden of rock in the Gully. It was talk for the sake of talking and I was only partly listening, my mind concentrated on trying to understand what was behind his extraordinary behaviour. To walk out without telling a soul… not even Miriam, or his son, though he was living in the house. ‘If only we’d drilled, test-drilled right here when I had the money.’ We were under the cliffs then, in the Gully itself. ‘If there’s a f-fortune, it’ll be right here, deep under the slide. As it is, all I can do with the puny implement I’ve got is dig away at the upper end. That’s the wrong end. Always work upwards, boy. That’s what my father told me. And it was he who told me he’d acquired the claims over the other side of the watershed so that there’d always be Stone Slide to fall back on.’ And he added slowly, his voice sounding weary, ‘He knew. He had a nose for gold. He was sure there was another fortune here in the Gully. But by then he was only interested in his trees. He’d got all the money he wanted and he didn’t care. And I go and listen to that fucking mine consultant.’ He snorted, a little neigh of a laugh. ‘And now, the best I can hope for is to do a little better than break even and pray to God I’ll uncover a real deep fault in the bedrock that’s jam-packed with nuggets.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Tony coming back for you?’