I said, “I’m very much interested in this.”
“A writer you say?”
“Yes. If you wanted to make a few dollars, I could spend an evening with you, picking up some local colour, and make it worth your while.”
“How much?”
“Five dollars.”
“Give me the dough.”
I gave him a five-dollar bill.
“Stay for supper?”
“I’d like to.”
“Nothin’ but beans, hot cakes, and syrup.”
“It sounds good to me.”
“You ain’t a game warden?”
“No.”
“Okay, I’ve got a couple of cold quail. Let’s get the eatin’ over with an’ we can talk later.”
“Can I help?”
“Nope. You sit still. Keep out of the way over in that corner.”
I watched him get supper and found myself envying him. The place was crude, but it was clean. Everything was shipshape, a place for everything, and nothing hanging around where it shouldn’t be. Cupboards had been made out of wooden cases which had originally held two five-gallon oil cans. These boxes had been placed one on top of the other and nailed in strips. Pete found two agate-ware plates, knives, and forks. The syrup, he explained, was homemade, half white sugar and half brown, with a little maple flavor. The hot cakes were big flapjacks cooked in a huge skillet and turned by the simple process of flop ping them over. There was no butter. The beans had lots of garlic. The gravy was thick. The quail had been broiled Pete explained, over wood coals. He said that he killed game, when it was out of season, away from the camp picked it, cleaned it, buried the skins, entrails, legs, and heads, built a little fire, broiled the game, and carried it in already cooked. He kept it in a place where “no damn snooping game warden would find it.”
“Bothered much with them?” I asked.
“There’s a guy in town that got himself appointed a deputy,” Pete said. “He comes out once in a while and looks the place over.” He gave his characteristic chuckle again, and said, “He don’t find nothin’.”
It was a nice dinner. I wanted Pete to let me help with the dishes, but he had them washed and dried while I was still arguing about it. Everything went back to its place in the boxes. Pete put the coal-oil lamp on the centre of the home-made table.
“Like cigarettes?” I asked.
“Nope. Stay with my pipe. It’s cheaper. I like it — more satisfaction in it.”
I lit a cigarette. Pete lit his pipe. It was a big hod, so thoroughly soaked with nicotine that it filled the place with a heavy odour I could all but taste. It smelled good.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“You did prospecting?”
“Yep.”
“How did you prospect? I shouldn’t think it would be possible, since the values were all under water.”
“In those days,” he said, “we had a Keystone Drill. It’s simple to prospect. You punch down a casing right through to bedrock. You lift the stuff out with a sand pump. Every thing that comes out of the sand pump goes into a tub, and you pan that out and save the colors of gold.”
“Colours?” I asked.
“Yep. It’s gold that’s been ground down by the action of rivers and glaciers until it’s in little fine flakes about as big around as a pin head and thin as a piece of paper. Sometimes it’ll take a lot of ’em to make even a cent’s worth of gold.”
“Then you must get pretty much out of each hole you drill.”
“Nope. You don’t. Those big dredgers could work ground at a profit when there was a value of only ten cents a cubic yard. That’s more than a man could have handled in a day by old methods.”
“But how could they get an accurate idea of values from that sort of prospecting?”
“Cinch,” he said. “The engineers know down to a cubic inch how much dirt had been inside the casing by the time it was punched down to bedrock. They got the gold from each hole. They weighed it out carefully, and punched down holes every so many feet.”
“And they didn’t get a great deal of gold from any one hole?”
“Nope, just colours.”
I waited a while, then said, as though thinking out loud, “It would seem easy to doctor the results on that kind of a prospect.”
He took the pipe from his mouth, looked at me a minute, clamped his lips together in a firm, straight line, and said nothing.
“This the only place you prospected?” I asked.
“Nope. After I got to know the game,” he said, “they took me all over the country. I prospected up in the Klondike where the ground was frozen so solid you had to thaw it out with steam pipes before you could get a hole down. I was down in South America prospectin’. I went all over the country — then I came back and worked on dredgers.”
“Saved your money?” I asked.
“Not a damn cent.”
“But you’re not working now?”
“Nope. I get by.”
I was silent for a while, and then Pete said, “Don’t cost me hardly anything to live. I get most of my stuff from rustling around the country. Get a sack of beans once in a while, and I got a little vegetable patch out here. Buy my smokin’ tobacco, a little sugar, an’ flour in town. Buy a little bacon an’ save the grease for cookin’. You’d be surprised how little it takes for a man to live.”
I did a little more thinking and said, “I didn’t realise I was going to have an evening in such a comfortable place. There’s only one thing lacking.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“A good shot of hooch. Suppose we take a run into town and pick up a bottle?”
He didn’t say anything for a long time, just kept looking at me. “What kinda hooch do you drink?” he asked.
“Anything, just so it’s good.”
“How much you generally pay for it?”
“Around three dollars a quart.”
He said, “Stick around here a minute. I’ll be back.”
He got up and walked outside. I could hear his steps as he walked out about twenty feet from the door. Then he stood perfectly still. After that, his steps moved again. It was moonlight outside. Through the windows which weren’t covered with tin, I could see the moon casting black shadows beneath the digger pines and oaks. In the background the white piles of tailings caught and reflected the moonlight in a cold glitter that reminded me of the desert.
After a while Pete came back in and sat down. I looked at him for a minute, then took out my wallet, and took out three one-dollar bills.
He handed me back one of the dollar bills. “I only brought a pint,” he explained.
He took a bottle from his hip pocket and put it on the table while he got glasses. He poured some into each glass, then put the bottle back in his pocket.
It had a deep amber colour. I tasted it. It wasn’t at all bad.
“Good stuff,” I said.
“Thanks,” Pete said, modestly.
We sat there and drank and smoked. Pete told me stories of old mining camps, of lost mines in the desert, of claim-jumping, of feuds, and interspersed his conversation with comments about the old gold-dredging days.
Over the second glass, with my head feeling a little woozy, I said, “There’s some talk about a new dredging company coming in.”
Pete chuckled.
“Didn’t they miss a lot of bedrock around here?” I asked.
Pete said, “The company I was working for was run by old man Darniell. Anything he missed you could put in your eye.”
“But there were some places where they couldn’t get down to bedrock?”
“Yep.”
“Quite a lot of them?”
“Yep.”
“Then why can’t they redredge this country?”
“They can.”
“And make money?”
Pete pursed his lips. “Maybe.”