Outside, he looked across the street at the ABC Cafe and thought lugubriously, My God, I’ve got a date for tonight. He smiled quickly, a pleasant relief for his face. She got off at two, she’d told him, and it was quarter to now. He was tempted to wait and walk her home, like a schoolboy and his girl, but he needed to deal first with the growing mass of worry in his mind. In twenty-seven more days they could ruin the place forever.
Sheldon High School was on the north border of town, not far from the Mountain View Motel. The football field had been cut out of the wilderness that still surrounded the school grounds, a noble stand of ponderosas backdrop to the scoreboard.
In his student days Benton walked to school through the woods from the ranch, a distance of three miles, entering and leaving through a gate under the scoreboard. Occasionally he’d take the school bus for the five-mile trip back home by road, but he’d come to love the early-morning walk through the cool and silent trees.
The old path was still there, less distinct than it once was but still negotiable. It would bring him out on the southeast corner of his nearly square hundred acres. His house was on the southwest corner of the property, a short half mile away. Between the two points a thick belt of pines curved north and west until, a few miles farther on, it embowered Hildy’s Place in fraudulent charm. Between the trees and the house Benton’s father had cleared forty acres of nearly level land for pasturage. Benton and Sheila had run their one cow and three horses there — all sold before he went to jail.
East of the trees the ground fell away gradually to Timberslide Creek, winding and dancing through the National Forest that adjoined Benton’s eastern line. The ground there was stony, the topsoil thin and patchy, host to manzanita, wild azalea, and other small tenacious growth. Once, eons ago, the river, or a river, had run the full length of the eastern border, building and leaving behind a thick stratum of sand, gravel, and rock but, unlike most ancient river beds in the Sierra, little or no gold. Benton’s father had spent a lot of time and money proving that.
Benton had no inkling of what he’d find when he emerged onto the property east of the trees. He had intended going straight on to the house, approaching from the blind side. He had noticed that morning with his rage-dimmed eyes a long stack of cut and split pine, a dozen cords at least, four or five years’ supply for the house fireplace. And he had noticed too the imprint of heavy-duty equipment tires crossing the dusty compound in front of the shed. The impressions had trickled upward into his consciousness through the middle hours of the day and were clear now. Something was going on, something illicit and damaging to his land. He had to learn what it was and stop it.
If any of the machines had been running that afternoon he’d have heard them before he saw them. As it was, he emerged onto a clear gravelly ledge in full view of the operation, retreating reflexively into the brush until he saw that no one was there. Anger surged through him again, enhanced this time by a foot soldier’s fear. He’d stumbled unexpectedly onto an enemy camp, and he understood then and believed in McCord’s gun. They were mining the ancient river bed — five, six hundred yards of it ripped open like a wound. It was awesome and brutal.
Still partly hidden, he surveyed the scene like a scout. A skip-loader/backhoe rig lay resting in the shade of one of the long deep cuts it had made in the land. It was a placer operation. It took more back than brains, but the skip-loader would do the work of ten men. Benton could see a length of plastic pipe snaking through the brush from Timberslide Creek below. They pumped their water up from there to feed the long, gently graded sluice box, big as a launching ramp.
The skip-loader had chopped raggedly into the higher ground along the western edge of the working zone, had scalloped into the stand of trees. Three tall ponderosas were down; others had fallen before, their grotesque uprooted stumps drying in the sun, their trunks no doubt cut, split, and stacked back at the house. The earth along the cut was eroding rapidly, a process that would be hard to stop, a fatal cancer on the land.
Benton had seen enough, too much. He turned away, fighting tears of helpless rage.
They’d ruined his house, and they’d ruined his land.
It was quarter after six and Moss was preparing to leave when Benton drove his truck up Moss’s drive and trapped the Lincoln in its lair. The trunk of the Lincoln was open, one suitcase already stowed away. Moss wasn’t going to hide out for a few hours this time, he was going to run.
Benton was hot from the long hike through the woods, and from the fires that burned within. He got out of his truck, picked up at the motel, and walked through the open side door of the house. Moss had seen him, was waiting in the kitchen, wavering on his feet, drunk. Mrs. Moss was a floral-print dress and a greying thatch of hair retreating through a door. She too had probably had enough of her husband.
Benton had no sophisticated plan of attack this time. He said right off, angrily, “Harry, it’s gonna cost you a hell of a lot more than two grand to put things right out there. Sit down and start talking. I want to know everything that’s going on, all of it, nothing held back!”
Moss had within him that special engine that functions best on booze; and sometimes only. He sat down docilely at the kitchen table, drank deeply from a glass already half empty, and said, almost eagerly, “It’s Hamp, Tom. It’s been Hamp from the start. He put the McCords up to wrecking your house — he knew they’d do it just naturally.”
“Who the hell are they anyway?”
“People he’s known for years. They were squatting on some land he owns in the valley. He’s rich, Tom, very very rich.”
He poured more from a bottle into his glass and raised it shakily to his mouth.
“Tell me again about these offers to buy the place,” Benton said. “And don’t gimme no garbage about it being the McCords. How come Carswell wants to buy what he’s wrecking?”
Harry waved a hand. “But it was the McCords, it is the McCords, Tom. They want to buy it.”
“Using what? Carswell’s money?”
“Yes. They don t have a dime.”
“So why?” Benton sat down at the table and took command of the bottle, his hand wrapped around the base. He didn’t want Moss to curl up inside the thing, not just yet. From the front part of the house, music had started, loud — Mrs. Moss was insulating herself from her husband’s world.
“God!” Moss said. “It’s a long, dumb story.”
“Tell it to me.”
“Hamp salted that old river bed your dad tried to work once. He wanted the McCords to work it, to tear the whole thing up. He knew it would start an erosion process that wouldn’t quit, that would work into the trees—”
“Salted it? You mean he planted gold in it?”
“Yeah — dust, and a few nuggets. He’s kept it up for two full years now. He salted it as they worked — like dangling a carrot in front of a mule. Hidden out there, nobody but them knew it was going on.”
“And you.”
“All right, and me — but not at first, Tom.”
“You could have stopped it.”
“No, I couldn’t! I didn’t have the guts. You don’t know those people.”
Benton paused, assessing Harry’s fear and feeling obliquely awed by Carswell’s fixation, or compulsion, or whatever it was. He went on, almost intoning, “And Carswell bought all that equipment, piped the water up from the creek, provided the gold for salt—”