I nodded and Walter yelled, “Henry we’ll come down once you say you won’t shoot.”
“I won’t,” Henry called, “once you come down.”
Walter pushed up to his knees and I followed suit, thinking I sure hope we’re all clear on the timing of coming down and not shooting but once we were standing and I had a line of sight down into the valley my fears eased, slightly.
Henry stood watching, his gun barrel pointed groundward. He gripped the weapon with both hands and I guessed that was to counteract the tremors or maybe it was a sharp-shooting style but it looked for all the world like he’d had to wrestle the gun out of firing position.
Henry had shed his parka. He wore a brown long-sleeve shirt tucked into his jeans. He wore a belt holster.
Robert stood a few yards behind Henry. He was making no move to tackle his brother.
Walter and I came down off the knob to join the Shelburne brothers.
It wasn’t an Old West six-shooter in Henry’s hand. It was a modern-day Glock, carried by cops everywhere or at least at the crime scenes I’d worked. Henry’s Glock was matte black except for the slide, the metal there silvered where the finish had worn off, which left me thinking Henry Shelburne handles this gun a lot. Or maybe Henry ‘Quicksilver’ Shelburne had sanded the finish down to silver on purpose.
He still gripped the gun with both hands. He pointed it somewhere in the neighborhood of our six legs.
Robert, Walter, and I stood side-by-side in a lineup in front of the tunnel.
Henry spoke to Walter. “I am hiring you.”
Walter said, gently, “We prefer not to work at gunpoint.”
“It’s just in case.”
“In case of what, son?”
“Just in case. Just in case.”
Walter said, more gently, “All right.”
Henry raised his hands, and the Glock. His hands shook. The gun oscillated. “A geologist needs to go in.”
“Cassie will go,” Walter said promptly.
I got it. Henry didn’t know that Walter was the expert on the auriferous channels, Henry just knew we’d been hired to get his brother here. And given that we’d followed the float and found our way, I guessed Henry got that right. By now, either one of us would do. And Walter delegated me. I got it. He’ll stay outside with crazy Henry while I get to go on the treasure hunt. He thought he was protecting me. He always has. When I was a kid assisting in his lab and he took me to my first crime scene, he bought me a whistle in case we got separated. All these years later and now we’re doing the tricky dance of who is protecting whom. Vigilance is in his DNA. It’s tattooed on his soul.
There’s a man with a gun. And Walter is stepping up.
I stole a glance at Robert. He stood rigid, watching his brother. Not overtly afraid but then I’d not seen Robert Shelburne show fear. I did not know how he would exhibit fear.
I refocused on Henry. He looked a little lost, as if he’d come out of hiding too soon. His face was more weathered than the teenager in the photo but the Sherpa wool cap now cupping his head made him look young again. Still, he did not have teenage Henry’s cool squint. His eyes were reddened, blinking. Lack of sleep, trying to get a wet fire going, crying, who knew? His nose was pinkish, sunburned, peeling. I guessed the weather had been clear and sunny before we joined the hunt, although I wondered why an experienced outdoorsman like Henry Shelburne had not used sunscreen. His peeling nose — like the preposterous earflaps — made him look like a kid. I ignored that.
Robert Shelburne’s kid brother. Not mine.
Henry let go of the gun with his right hand and lifted it, gesturing at the tunnel.
I stared at his hand. The palm was pink, peeling, and I got a sick understanding that we weren’t talking sunburn here. Jesus Henry, what have you been into?
Robert suddenly lunged.
Quick as a snake strike, Henry had both hands on the Glock, had the gun aimed at his brother’s head.
Robert raised his own hands. “Chill Bro.”
I said quickly,“I’m going in.”
Henry pulled his arms into his chest, bracing his elbows, steadying his aim. “Thank you.”
Cautiously, I answered, “You’re welcome.”
And so now it became my show. I assumed I didn’t need a gas detector, or Robert would not have emerged from the tunnel alive. I started for the tunnel. Henry stopped me. Told me to leave behind my pack. Told me to take only my tools. Told me to bring him a sample. I rummaged in my pack and got the field kit and headlamp, fitted the headband, and started once more for the tunnel.
As I passed into the mouth I heard Henry call to me, “Go all the way.”
15
All the way where?
The tunnel was black as a catacomb.
I snapped on my headlamp and the bedrock lit up. Bedrock walls, bedrock ceiling, bedrock floor, a sturdy incursion into the mountainside, a strong tunnel that needed no timbering, a tunnel with drill holes in the ceiling to ventilate, the only sort of tunnel I felt remotely comfortable traversing. When my eyes had adjusted and my nerves settled, I identified the bedrock as metamorphic slate.
As far ahead as I could see, the tunnel ran straight.
Perhaps somewhere farther ahead there were side branches, offshoots, whatever it was they were called in a mine, a term Walter would know. But Walter was outside facing a Glock and counting on me to return with something shiny and pretty to satisfy Henry. A nice nugget. Sure thing.
All I need do was go all the way, wherever that way led me.
I was breathing more rapidly, leg muscles working a little harder, and I realized that the tunnel was angling upward. I assumed the tunnel-builders had done that on purpose so that any water that seeped in through the rock would drain out.
Good idea.
My body settled into a rhythm, releasing my mind to dwell on the question at hand.
How did Henry know where all the way led? He didn’t like enclosed spaces. And how would he know how far I went?
And, further, what did he expect me to find?
Quite clearly this tunnel was working its way into the hillside toward the buried river channel whose upper gravel reaches I had glimpsed on the ridge top. Clever, those miners. If you can’t hose out a mountain to get to the gold, tunnel your way. One way or another they’d found the way. One way or another those ancient Eocene river channels had condemned this countryside to an extreme makeover.
And that bugged me, because it should have bugged Henry.
Presumably he wasn’t looking for hosed-out mine pits or well-tunneled hills. Presumably he was looking for a site lost since his grandfather’s time, a site that nobody but nobody had since seen. Was he not disappointed to find that Notch Valley had already been mined? Walter sure was. And Henry, I thought, should have been beyond disappointed. Should have been devastated.
Another failure for Quicksilver.
So why was he so anxious to have me go into this well-tunneled hill? If there was something legend-worthy in here, it would already have been found.
Poor Henry.
Henry with his peeling pink palms gripping the black and silver Glock.
My sympathy evaporated.
Several hundred feet into the tunnel, the walls abruptly changed.
The bedrock was now overlain by gravel. I played my light upon the stuff. It was mostly quartz and slate, cemented in clay and sand. I ran my fingers along the rough face.
I had entered the lost river channel.
There were pebbles and cobbles and even a few boulders — the well-rounded rocks of milky quartz that were legend in and of themselves, the defining characteristic of the blue lead, carried by long-ago rivers, carried to this place. Here right now.