“Let’s go take a look.”
“Why?”
“I’m just curious.”
“I’m not.”
I said, “I’m trying to give you a break, Irene.”
“In return for what?”
“Perhaps nothing.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ve known men for a long time. They all want something. What is it you want?”
“I might be able to cut myself a piece of cake.”
“Where would that leave me?”
“With the rest of the cake.”
She looked me over for a minute, then said, “I suppose there’s as much of an art to being a detective as there is to being a strip-tease artist; and it probably takes a little more equipment — in different places. Come on, Donald.”
She led the way down the stairs into the garage and opened a door.
There was quite an assortment of junk inside.
I selected a mortar and pestle and a gold pan.
I said, “It’s going to attract attention if I am seen out there with you. Take this bucket and go out to where they’ve been dumping the crushed rock, pick up a few samples of the crushed rock here and there. Just try to get a pretty good cross section of the type of rock that’s been dumped in there. Get all the different colors you can find. If there are any tints in the rock I want to get a sample of each color.”
She looked at me for a moment without saying anything, then took the pail and walked out across the yard, skirted the swimming pool, went over to the back of the lot where trucks had been driving in and dumping crushed rock, and started picking up fragments here and there.
By the time she came in I had my little workshop fixed up. I started pounding up bits of rock in the mortar, pounding with the pestle until I had them reduced to a fine powder.
“Can you tell me what the idea of this is?”
“I’m mining.”
“Do you,” she asked, “expect to find the crushed rock that is delivered by a gravel company filled with diamonds?”
“Not exactly,” I told her. “I think we’ll hit gold. I certainly hope we do. If we don’t, I’ve put myself out on a limb.”
There was a galvanized washtub over in a corner of the garage. I filled it with water, perched myself on the end of a box and went to work panning.
She leaned over my shoulder and watched me.
The surface material was quickly washed away and we got down to a deposit of black sand in the bottom of the gold pan.
That took pretty careful manipulation if I wasn’t going to lose the values, and, working on that small a scale, just the difference of a color or two of gold might make a lot of difference in the value of a mine.
Then, of course, there was the chance that even if values were there they wouldn’t be “free-milling.” However, I thought I could tell something of what we had just by looking at the way the stuff panned out.
Gold is a beautiful metal, but no jeweler has ever been able to make gold as beautiful as when it is first seen in a gold pan nestling in a bed of black sand.
I spun the water around in the gold pan, and as the black sand washed away there was a long, wedge-shaped streamer of gold at the upper end of the little delta.
I had been expecting gold but not that much. It seemed as though the rock must have been a third black sand and a third gold.
Behind me I could hear Irene’s startled exclamation.
“That’s one thing about washing out gold in a gold pan. If you have ten cents’ worth it looks like two million dollars’ worth.”
“Donald!” she exclaimed, then, after a moment, she half whispered, “Donald!”
I gave the gold pan a twist and dumped a whole bunch of gold down into the tub, washed out the pan and put it away.
“Donald, aren’t you going to save that gold?”
“It would just make trouble.”
I drained the water off the tailings in the tub, dumped the tailings back in the bucket, and said, “Throw those out in the yard, Irene.”
She took the bucket out and dumped it, came back and stood looking at me, with a curiously thoughtful expression on her tired face.
I said, “Take your ten thousand dollars and buy stock in the Skyhook Mining and Development Syndicate.”
“But that’s my husband’s company.”
“Sure it is. That’s the last one. That’s where this rock came from.”
“How do you know, Donald? There are five or six companies.”
“It had to come from there,” I said, “because he was trying to get the bank to foreclose a loan.”
“But why would he want to do that?”
“So he could write an optimistic letter to the stockholders telling them that while the company was in temporary financial trouble due to the fact that the bank was insisting on payment of a note, the stockholders should not be discouraged, that there probably were good values in the mine and they should hang on to their stock.”
“Well?” she asked.
“The effect of that,” I said, “would be to cause a panic on the part of the stockholders. Every one of them would want his money back. Every one that had purchased stock would be ready to throw the stuff on the market for what he could get.”
“Can you tell me what this is all about?” she asked.
“Sure. People have certain habits of thought. If money is made by a mining company, people think it must come from a mine. If a check is received from a smelting company, the assumption is that it came from smelting ore out of rock.
“Your husband ran a smelting company. It paid him money in nice tinted checks. He owned mining companies that turned ore over to the smelting company.
“It never occurred to anyone that the ore was merely crushed rock and that the smelting company owned a profitable gambling house.”
She studied me. “Then I should buy stock in the smelting company?”
“In the mining company, Irene. The smelting company’s assets are being taken over by muscle men. Gambling houses don’t go through probate.”
“But how would I go about getting the stock; that is, knowing where to buy it?”
I said, “I have an idea your husband had already done some work along those lines. Let’s go take a look.”
We didn’t have to look far. In George Bishop’s desk was the rough draft of a letter to stockholders telling them not to lose faith in the company but that if they’d hang on through the period of financial adversity which was just ahead, they’d come out on top of the heap. The bank was bringing suit on a promissory note which had been signed to raise capital, but the mine was looking better and better and people who hung on could be almost certain of making a substantial profit, perhaps a hundred and fifty percent of their original investment, perhaps more.
It was a cleverly worded letter.
We found the list of addresses to which the letter was to be sent, together with the number of shares of stock owned by each individual.
“Want to take a chance?” I asked. “There seems to have been about thirty thousand dollars’ worth of stock sold. It probably can be bought in for around fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. But you’ll find that your husband kept controlling interest in the company. If you’re going to inherit his property you won’t have to buy anything. If not, you’d better invest this separate property of yours.”
“I think I’m going to inherit,” she said.
I prowled around the desk.
There were half a dozen or so heavy green cards, finely engraved with an elaborate pattern of curved lines.
They were passes to The Green Door, made out in blank, bearing the signature of Hartley L. Channing.
She looked at them in silence.
I slipped the whole bunch in my pocket. “These might come in handy,” I told her.