Pete Digger had pulled on a pair of pants and pushed his feet into boots when he had heard the car coming. He was a bit embarrassed about coming out and meeting people, but after I persuaded him it was all right, he seemed sheepish about the gun act. It was Alta who saved the day. She acted interested and perfectly natural.
Pete wanted to make up the bed before he had us come in, but Alta said, “Nothing doing,” and we all filed in. The windows were open, and the stove was cold, but I found a pile of twigs and dried bark and started the fire while Pete was apologetically getting into a shirt and coat. That seemed to make a hit with him.
There was one thing about the little shack. It heated up quickly, and the stove roared into a businesslike job. Pete came over and sat down, looked longingly at the fragrant Perfecto handed him by Ashbury, and said, “Nope. That’s rich man’s fodder. I’m a poor guy. My pipe is my friend, and I don’t go back on my friends. See?”
Alta and I had cigarettes. After we were all blowing smoke into a blue cloud which hung heavy over the table and the roaring fire made the place seem even warmer and more cosy than the thermometer would indicate, Pete said, “Okay. What you got on your mind?”
“Pete,” I said, “I’m going to give you a chance to make five hundred dollars.”
“Make what?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
“What’s the catch?” he asked.
I said, “You’ve got to salt a claim.”
“What for?”
“Can I trust you?”
“Damned if I know,” Pete said with a grin. “I don’t double-cross my friends, but I raise hell with my enemies. Pay your money and take your choice.”
I leaned over across the table. “I was stringing you when I told you that I was a writer looking for local color,” said.
Pete Digger threw back his head and roared. “That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in forty years,” he said.
“What is?” Ashbury asked.
“This young chap thinkin’ I didn’t know he was lyin’ when he told me he was a writer. He’s up here snoopin’ around. I figure he’s a young lawyer tryin’ to get somethin’ on that dredgin’ company. That’s what he was after. Writer, he? Haw haw haw!”
I grinned and said, “Well, we’ve got that over with. Now then, Pete, I’m stuck on that stock position.”
“ You are?”
“Uh-huh. I got soft and bought some stock in there,” I said.
Pete’s face darkened. “The damn bunch of crooks,” he said. “We’d oughta go down there an’ dynamite their drill rig, give ’em a coat of tar and feathers, and dump ’em in the river to cool ’em off.”
“No,” I said. “There’s a better way.”
“What’s that?”
“Do you think they know how much gold they’re putting in those holes?”
“Sure, they do. The way a proposition like that figures the ground has to test uniform. If you get one hole that runs way up, an’ another hole that runs down, capital gets suspicious. A river don’t deposit gold that way. That gold’s been droppin’ down in that channel for millions of years. Get the idea?”
“All right, that’s the way I hoped it would be. Now, then, they’re keeping track of the gold they take out, aren’t they?”
“Sure.”
“Pete,” I said, “you mentioned that you could salt a claim artistically. What do you mean by it?”
Pete looked at us and said, “You said I could make five hundred bucks. What did you mean by it?”
Ashbury, who was a good judge of character, and had been studying Pete over the tops of his glasses, wordlessly took a wallet from his pocket, and counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills. “That’s what he meant,” he said, and shoved them across to Pete.
Pete picked the bills up, looked at them, twisted them in his fingers, then dropped them and let them lie in the center of the table.
“Don’t want them?” Ashbury asked.
“Not until you say the word,” Pete said.
“I’m saying it.”
“Wait until you hear what I got to say.”
“Go ahead,” I told him.
“Well,” Pete said, “I know a couple of pretty smooth ways of salting a gold-dredger claim so that the devil himself can’t figure it out.”
“What are they?”
“Well, now,” Pete said, “in order to really get the idea, I got to tell you a couple of stories. This goes back to the Klondike when a big company was figurin’ on comin’ in there. A guy had a bunch of ground he wanted to sell, and the company didn’t think it was any good, but the bird told such a story they decided to drill it.
“Well, the minute they started drillin’ it, they knew they’d struck a bonanza. Values were there just the way they should be. They started low at the top, and were heavy down on bedrock. They punched hole after hole, and every hole gave ’em the same results. The ground was absolutely uniform. They bought the place, but just before they started dredgin’ somebody got a bright idea and punched down a couple more test holes— The values were so thin you couldn’t see ’em with a magnifying glass.”
“What had happened?” I asked. “Was the claim salted?”
“Sure it was salted.”
“But weren’t they looking out for that?”
“Of course they were watching out for it, and the guy salted it right under their noses. Here, I’ll show you how. Ever see gold panned?”
I shook my head.
Pete picked up a gold pan with its typical sloping sides, and curled rim. He squatted down on his heels and held the gold pan balanced in between his knees. “This is the way a guy pans gold, see?” He twisted the pan back and forth, shaking it with his wrists. “You keep the stuff under water. The idea is to get all the gold mixed up with the water so it settles to the bottom of the pan.”
I nodded.
“Well,” Pete said, “a man pans like this. He’s smokin’. See? He’s always got a right to smoke. He takes a sack of tobacco outa his pocket an’ rolls his own, or, if he’s a little different type, he has a package of tailor-made cigarettes in his pocket. Me, I use my own, because the minute I started smokin’ tailor made cigarettes, anybody that knew me would get suspicious.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Well,” Pete said, “that’s all there is to it.”
“I don’t get you,” Ashbury said.
“Don’t you see? The tobacco is just about a quarter gold dust. I put just as much tobacco as I want into the cigarette, and I determine the values in each pan by the length of time it takes me to pan it out. While I’m smoking, the ashes from the cigarette are droppin’ down into the gold pan. Nobody thinks anything of that.”
Ashbury gave a low whistle.
“And then there’s another way,” Pete went on. “You climb up on a drill rig, an’ you take a marlinspike an’ spread the strands of the rope apart, then you put in a bunch of gold dust. You do that all the way down the whole length of the rope, then in the mornin’ when they start drillin’, the jar of the bit on the ground dislodged little particles of gold dust which drop down the casing into the hole.”
I said, “All right, Pete, what we want is to have those holes show so much more gold coming out than they’re putting in, that they’ll come to the conclusion they really have a bonanza. But it’ll have to be done so all the values show up after they get below the old level of work.”
“Shucks,” Pete said. “They don’t know where the old level of work was. That bunch don’t know anything. They’re just goin’ through motions. I watched ’em. They’re so damn clumsy, I swear to God I almost started over and said to the driller, ‘Look here, buddy, I don’t want to tell a man his business, but if you can’t make a better job of salting a claim than that, for God’s sake, stand to one side and let a guy that really knows how give you a few pointers.’ ”
Ashbury chuckled. Alta laughed out loud. I pushed the five one-hundred-dollar bills across the table toward Pete Digger.
“It’s all yours,” I said.
Pete picked up the bills, folded them, and put them in his pocket.
“When can you start?” Ashbury asked.
“You’re in a hurry?”
“Yes.”
“I got a little dust in there,” Pete said, jerking his head toward a cupboard. “Stuff I’ve picked up here and there in the pockets, pay dirt that had dropped out of some of the old cleanups. It’s enough for what we’ll want.”
“How can you get on the property?” I asked him.
“That’s a cinch. They’ve been trying to get me to work ever since they started. They don’t know too much about handling the job.”
“You don’t dare to have values start running up just before you go to work. It would be too much of a coincidence,” I warned.
“Leave that to me, brother. I’m going down there tonight in the moonlight an’ take a marlinspike, an’ salt a bunch of gold in that drill rope. Their values’ll start pickin’ up tomorrow. I think that drill rope’s all I’m goin’ to need.”
I said, “Keep it up until I tell you to stop.”
“How’ll you tell me?”
“When you get a postal card signed ‘D.L.’ saying, ‘Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here,’ you’ll know it’s time to quit.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll get started in about half an hour.”
We shook hands all around, and as we climbed in the car Ashbury said, “That’s a fine piece of work, Donald.”