I switched off the motor and the lights. She snuggled over to me. A cottontail hopped across a patch of moonlight directly in front of the car. An owl swooped down on a mouse. The shadows were dark blotches in the canyons. The ridges were splashed with vivid moonlight, and the valley below bathed in tranquil brilliance. I could feel her body close against mine, could hear the even sound of her regular breathing. I looked down at her once, thinking she was asleep, but her eyes were wide open, drinking in the scenery.
Her hand came over and took possession of mine. Her pointed fingernails traced little designs along the edges of my fingers. Once she sighed, a tremulous sigh of deep content, then suddenly she looked up and asked, “Donald, do you like this?”
By way of answer, I leaned over and brushed my lips gently against the side of her forehead.
For a moment I thought she was going to put up her lips to be kissed, but instead she snuggled closer and sat perfectly still.
After a while I said, “We’d better go, and be there in the camp when your father arrives.”
“I suppose so.”
We had driven down the curving ribbon of concrete to the outskirts of Valleydale before she said anything. Then she said simply, “Donald, I could love you forever for that.”
“What?”
“Just everything about it.”
I laughed. “I didn’t make the view,” I said.
“No,” she said, “and there’s a lot of other things you didn’t try to make. Gosh, Donald, you’re a nice kid.”
“What,” I asked, “is all this leading up to?”
“Nothing. I just wanted you to know. It wouldn’t have been the same with anyone else. Other men I know would have talked too much, or pawed too much, or made me fight. I just relaxed with you and felt that you were a part of the scenery, and it was all a part of me.”
“In other words, I’m something of a non-combatant. Is that it?”
“Donald, stop it! You know better than that.”
“I know that a man is supposed to consider it a dubious compliment when a girl says she feels perfectly safe with him.”
Her laugh was nervous. “If you knew how utterly unsafe I felt with you, it would surprise you. What I meant was that it just all fitted in — oh, why did I try to explain it? I’m no good at that stuff anyway. Can’t you drive with one hand, Donald?”
“Yes.”
She took my right hand off the steering wheel, slipped it around her shoulders, and cuddled over. I drove slowly through the deserted streets of the little city, a city of ghosts, of memories, with houses that needed paint, with shade trees catching the moonlight on polished green leaves and shimmering it back into the night, while the dark blotches of shadow below seemed to be pools of Indian ink which had been splotched on the ground with some big brush.
Henry Ashbury was waiting for us at the auto camp. He’d chartered a plane and then hired a car to take him the rest of the way.
“Beat your schedule, Dad, didn’t you?” Alta asked.
He nodded and looked us over with thoughtful eyes. He shook hands with me, kissed Alta, and then turned to look at me again. He didn’t say anything.
“Well, don’t be so serious about it,” Alta said. “I hope you’ve got some whisky in that bag of yours because this town is closed up tight. There are some saucepans in here, and I could make a nice little toddy as a nightcap.”
We all went into the double cabin where Alta had registered for herself and her father. We sat down, and Alta made some hot whisky drinks, poured them in cups, and came in and joined us.
“What have you found out?” Ashbury asked me.
“Not very much,” I said, “but enough.”
“What’s happening?”
“They’re prospecting. It seems they prospect dredging land with a drill. Because a dredge can operate at a profit in ground where there are low values per cubic yard, it doesn’t require a great deal of gold to make a good job of salting a claim— And they can use the same gold over and over.”
“How much?”
“I don’t know, just a few dollars, I should judge.”
“How heavy are they salting it?”
“Apparently pretty heavy.”
“Then what’s going to happen?”
“The promoters will milk the company dry and skip out. They’d never dare to put a dredge on it. If they did, there would be such a discrepancy in values that it would show conclusively that the ground had been salted.”
He bit the end off a cigar and smoked for a while in silence. Twice, I caught him looking over the tops of his glasses at Alta.
“Well?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The next move,” I said, “is up to you.”
“How do you figure that?”
“It all depends on what you want to do.”
“I’m going to leave things entirely in your hands. I’m satisfied you can take care of us.”
I said, “You forget that tomorrow at this time I’ll probably be in a cell somewhere charged with murder.”
Alta Ashbury gave a quick little involuntary gasp.
Her father swivelled his eyes around to look at her for a moment, then back to me.
“What do you suggest?” he asked.
“How important is it that you keep Bob out of trouble?”
“Damned important. I’m engaged in some promotional work myself with three associates. To have something come up now that would rock the boat would put me in a most embarrassing position — not financially, but — dammit, it would make people look down their noses at me. There’d be a wagging of heads every time I walked into the club. Whispered conferences would stop abruptly when I came walking into a room. The whole damn petty mechanics of character assassination carried on right under my nose where I’d have to pretend I didn’t know anything about it.”
I said, “There’s only one way you could handle the thing.”
“How’s that?”
I said thoughtfully, “We might kill two birds with one stone.”
“What’s the other bird?”
I said, “Oh, just an incidental development.”
Alta pushed her cup and saucer to one side, and leaned across the table. “Dad, look at me.”
He looked at her.
“You’re worried because you think I’ve fallen in love with Donald, aren’t you?”
He met her eyes squarely. “Yes.”
“I don’t think I have. I’m trying not to. He’s helping me, and he’s a gentleman.”
“I gathered,” Ashbury said acidly, “that you’d taken him into your confidence. You didn’t take me.”
“I know I didn’t, Dad. I should have. I’m going to tell you now.”
“Not now,” he said. “Later. Donald, what’s your idea?”
I said hotly, “I’m not trying to horn in on the Ashbury millions or thousands or hundreds or whatever the hell they are. I’ve tried to give you a square deal, a—”
His hand came over to rest on my arm. The fingers tightened until I could feel the full strength of the man’s grip. “I’m not kicking about you, Donald,” he said. “It’s Alta. Usually, men flock around her, and she makes them jump through hoops. It makes me sore the way she treats them, not sore at her, but sore at my sex for standing all that damn bossing around—” Abruptly, he turned to face Alta, and said, “And you may feel relieved to know that before I left, I told Mrs. Ashbury she could see her lawyer, arrange a settlement, go to Reno, and get a quiet divorce, and take her son with her. Now then, Donald, what’s the idea?”
I said, “The brains back of this whole business is a lawyer by the name of Crumweather. I thought I could head things off and put the screws on him. I can on one end of it. I can’t on the other. There’s been too much stock sold.”