A river, flowing down from the mountains, broke through a cut near the town of Valleydale, spread out into smooth placid waters, and then ran through the ugly piles of rock tailings.
I found an auto court and registered, giving the license of the agency car and the name of Donald Lam. Later on, when it would be necessary to account for every minute of my time to the police, I didn’t want to have it appear that I’d taken an alias, or resorted to flight.
I went right to work.
The people who were left in the town hated gold-dredging with a bitter hatred. The ones who had owned the land originally had made their clean-up, taken the cash, and gone to the bigger cities. The dredgers had pumped prosperity into the town through pay rolls, machine shops, and offices, then they had worked out the ground. The machine shops had been moved. The offices stood deserted. There was an air of funereal despair about the town. Those who were left went dejectedly about their business, moving with the listless lassitude of persons who have lost their chance at winning big stakes and are plugging away simply because they can’t figure out how to quit.
No one knew what had happened to the records of the dredging company. The head office had always been somewhere else. The books were gone, the machinery was gone, and the employees were gone.
I made inquiries to find whether some of the old employees were still in the country. A man who kept a dry-goods store told me he thought an old hermit bachelor named Pete Something-or-Other had worked on the original dredgers and on the drills when the ground was prospected. He didn’t know Pete’s last name, and didn’t know exactly where he lived, but he had a shack about a mile down the river. There was a little strip of land the dredgers hadn’t got. Pete lived on it. He came into town once in a while for supplies. He paid cash and wasn’t sociable. No one seemed to know exactly how he lived.
I learned that a new company was planning to use some sort of a new invention to put the rocks underneath and bring the soil back on top. Old-timers said that even if the soil were put back on top, it would be years before it could grow anything. Others were of the opinion that scientific fertilization would have it producing crops in no time. None of them tried to marshal facts and reach an intelligent, impartial opinion from those facts. They advanced an opinion first, then selected illustrations, gossip, and garbled rumor to support that opinion. Anything which didn’t support it was ignored entirely. I figured there wasn’t much chance of finding out anything from them.
It was getting dark when I found Pete’s shack. It had at one time been the operating house on a gold dredger, with windows all around it. About half of the windows were covered with tin which Pete had flattened out from old five gallon coal-oil cans and nailed over the openings.
Pete was somewhere in the late sixties. He was big-boned and didn’t carry much flesh. There was no sag to him anywhere. His last name was Digger.
“What do you want?” he asked, indicating a homemade bench by a dilapidated stove which had been salvaged from a junk pile. There was a fire going in the stove, and a pot of beans simmering.
“I’m trying to get some of the old history of the place,” I said.
“What you want it for?”
“I’m a writer.”
“What you writing?”
“A history of gold dredging.”
Pete took the pipestem from his mouth and jerked it over his shoulder in the general direction of Valleydale. “They can tell you all about it.”
“They seem rather prejudiced,” I said.
Pete chuckled. It was a dry chuckle that was packed with philosophic amusement. “Helluva bunch,” he admitted.
I looked around the cabin. “This is a mighty cosy little place.”
“Suits me all right.”
“How did it happen the dredgers didn’t chew it up?”
“They had to leave it to keep the river out of the ground they were working. They intended to swing around and build a levee with tailings so they could come back to it later on. It didn’t work out that way.”
“How big a strip is it?”
“Oh, maybe half a mile long by a couple of hundred yards wide.”
“It’s nice-looking country. Was it all like this before the dredgers came?”
“Nope. This was wasteland. It had been worked by hand. The old tailing piles left by the Chinks are still here. They weren’t big piles, just four or five feet — there was some pretty good land here before the dredgers started farther up the valley.”
“This strip looks nice to me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I saw some rabbits on it as I drove in.”
“Quite a few rabbits. I get a meal from ’em once in a while.” He jerked his head to indicate a rusted twenty-two calibre rifle which hung on the wall. “She doesn’t look like much outside, but she’s smooth as a mirror inside.”
“Who owns the land?”
His eyes glittered. “I do.”
“Makes it nice,” I said. “It’s better living this way than in town.”
“It is for a fact. The town’s dead. This place is all right. How’d you happen to find it?”
“Someone in town told me you were down here and could tell me something about the gold-dredging.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Oh, just general facts.”
Pete jerked his pipestem in the general direction of Valleydale again. “Those folks make me sick. I’ve seen the whole damned business from the start. The land around here was pretty good. In the old horse-and-buggy days it was just a jerkwater country town — then someone started promotin’ gold-dredgin’. Most of the inhabitants thought it wouldn’t work. They hung crape all over the idea, then when they found it would work, they went hog-wild. Real estate started goin’ up, an’ kept on goin’ up. No one would sell because they thought it was goin’ even higher. The Chamber of Commerce got busy. They kowtowed to the dredgin’ outfit, turned the whole town over to them. Everybody in town that wanted to work had a job, and then the company started importin’ men, lots of ’em. The town started boomin’. The merchants jacked prices up for all the traffic would bear. Every once in a while somebody would raise the question about what was goin’ to be left when the dredgin’ companies got done, and they’d all but tar an’ feather him an’ ride him out of town on a rail.
“Well, after a while things sort of levelled off. Then the birds that held the real estate thought it would be a good time to unload. The purchasers didn’t think so. Dredgers started cutting down on payrolls. There were homes for sale. Even then the Chamber of Commerce didn’t face the facts. They tried whistlin’ to keep their courage up. They thought a railroad was comin’ through. The town would be a big railroad centre. They were goin’ to put in rock crushers. There was a lot of hooey. Then things started goin’ downhill fast. Now, it’s like you see it today. Everybody’s cussin’ the dredgin’ company.”
“You worked for the dredging company?”
“Uh-huh.”
“When did you start working?”
“Just about the time they started dredging. I prospected this country.”
The fire blazed up a bit. The beans started bubbling until the steam raised the cover on the pot. Pete got up and shoved the beans a few inches to one side.