His clothes were always clean. I know, because I was the one who cleaned them, not that I ever found a speck of dirt or the tiniest stain on them. He brought me his clothes neatly folded. They looked as if they’d never been unfolded, much less worn, but I figured if he wanted me to wash clean clothes, so be it. I was in no position to turn down work.
Monk seemed very pleased with my laundering and came back to my tent by the river almost every morning. I never saw him on a horse or even near one. He seemed repulsed by the animals. He got where he was going on foot or by railroad.
One day when he showed up at my tent I was gone and my tent was empty, so he searched the town for me. He found me outside of one of the saloons with my trunk at my side.
I was trying to swallow down my misgivings and enter the sporting life. It must have been obvious to him what was going through my mind.
“You can’t do this,” he said.
“I don’t have any choice, Mr. Monk. It’s the only thing of value that I have to sell.”
“You are excellent at laundering,” he said. “Nobody here has ever done it better.”
“I can’t survive doing that.”
“But I need you,” Monk said.
“And I need food, a warm place to sleep, and a roof over my head.”
“Done,” he said.
I turned to look at him. “What do you mean?”
“I’ll hire you,” Monk said. “You can live in the spare room in my office.”
I eyed him warily. “What do you expect in return, Mr. Monk?”
“Not what you are prepared to give in there, Mrs. Guthrie,” he said, tipping his head towards the saloon. “I need an assistant to keep my life clean and orderly. It’s becoming too much for me to handle alone and still do my work.”
We settled on a price, one that would sustain me and allow me to set a little aside so that I could someday return to Kansas.
He accepted my terms so quickly that I wondered if I’d set my price too low. But I was grateful for the opportunity and I moved in that day.
It was a purely chaste arrangement, though I’m sure nobody believed that.
I didn’t care what they thought. All that mattered to me was that I wouldn’t have to become a sporting woman, at least not yet.
I soon discovered that keeping his life clean and orderly involved far more than simple housekeeping and that his skills, and service to the community, extended beyond detecting minerals in rocks.
Artemis Monk solved crimes.
The commerce in Trouble relied almost exclusively on gold dust, which people carried around in leather pokes tied to their belts. A pinch was worth about a dollar and just about everybody, from the clerk at the general store to the sporting women, had a set of scales.
It was usually the seller who did the pinching, and it was common for them to engage in some trickery to gain a few extra grains of gold in the transaction.
Most of the bartenders, shopkeepers, barbers, and sporting women in town kept their nails long, the better to capture dust in a pinch, and in their spare time, rolled rough pebbles between their thumbs and index fingers to create indentations in their skin to trap more dust.
The shopkeeper at the general store went a step further. He was known for his abundant, and slickly greased, head of hair, which he smoothed before every transaction and then raked his fingers through afterwards as the customer was leaving. According to Monk, that was because the gold stuck to his greased fingers during the pinch and was wiped off in his hair afterwards. Each night the shopkeeper washed his hair into a gold pan and made more than most prospectors did squatting beside a river.
But I suppose it all evened out in the end, since many prospectors and miners were known to salt their gold with pyrite and brass filings to give their poke a little more volume.
Monk didn’t bother himself with those petty crimes, but he did catch plenty of the more ingenious thieves.
I remember one situation in particular, because it happened in the first few weeks that I was working for him and because it also happened to be the first murder I’d seen him solve.
It was a warm morning in September and I was indexing samples and updating his assay ledgers in the front office of his large, perfectly square cabin.
Monk kept a representative sample of the rocks that were brought in for him to test. He placed the sample in a jar and labeled it with the date it was tested and index numbers that corresponded to entries in a ledger he kept of the various claims, their locations, and the owners. The ledger also contained the results of his assays. It was part of my job to maintain those records.
The shelves in the front office were neatly organized with sample jars, reference books, maps, and various rock specimens. His prospecting tools were carefully organized according to size, shape, and function. The tools rested on pegs in the wall specifically fitted for the individual implements.
The cabin was divided into four equal sections — the front office, which doubled as our kitchen and communal living area, the laboratory, Monk’s room, and my room.
Monk spent most of his time in the laboratory, where he worked at an enormous desk that he somehow managed to keep dust-free, even though he regularly worked with rocks and dirt. The shelves were filled with the specialized tools, chemicals, crucibles, microscopes, and balances required for his trade.
The rear of his laboratory was reserved for the crushing of rock samples into dust, which he would then fire in the two-deck clay furnace in the back as part of some complicated process I don’t pretend to understand. All I know is that when it was done, and the pulverized rocks had been melted, poured into cupels, cooled and cleaned and chemicals added, he could separate the gold from everything else and tell you how rich or poor your claim was likely to be.
Monk was in his lab when a young prospector walked into the front office. I immediately stopped him at the door and led him back outside to the porch.
“I need to see Mr. Monk,” he said.
“You can’t come in here like that,” I said.
“Like what?”
I could tell he was a greenhorn, fresh off the boat, train, or trail and eager to make it rich in the gold country. He had the same feverish look in his eye that my Hank, and hundreds of other men, had. But it was more than that.
His wool shirt was still a recognizable shade of red, his trousers weren’t patched, but both were covered with dirt. He had the blistered hands and stumbling gait of someone unaccustomed to working with a shovel and pick, or the long hours squatting in the cold river, swishing gravel around in a pan. He was thin from lack of good food and possibly a touch of land scurvy too. His whiskers were mangy but not yet obscuring his youthful features, and his hair was long but not yet wild and matted.
“You’re too dirty,” I said. “Mr. Monk only allows people inside who are freshly washed and dressed in their clean Sunday best.”
“This ain’t no church, and I don’t want to marry him. I just want him to look at my rocks.”
“What is your name, sir?”
“Nate Klebbin,” he said.
“You can give me your samples, Mr. Klebbin, and I will take them in to Mr. Monk. You may wait here on the porch if you like,” I said, motioning to the guest bench. “Or I can fetch you in the saloon when Mr. Monk is finished.”
“I’ll wait here.” He handed me his sack of rocks and took a seat on the bench.
I went inside and carried the sack to Monk, who greeted me at the doorway of his laboratory.