Bridge to Trouble: Chapter V
I tried to picture his face if one of our attempts did pan out some visible flecks of gold—not improbable in this country. That would certainly make things interesting for him...
Bridge to Trouble is a romantic-suspense novella set in 1920s Montana.
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And all the day they hunted,
And nothing could they find…
- Three Jovial Welshmen -“Well, I’ve been waiting for you!”
Sonny Barton, in the act of turning his horse into the corral, swung around in surprise. I smiled at him from my perch on the top rail, my arms folded across my knees. “No, don’t look so flattered. You’re in trouble, Sonny, you know that? I think it’s high time you came clean.”
“What’s the charge?” he said, swinging the gate shut with one hand, neither the word nor the action entirely convincing in its gaiety.
I put my chin in my hand, enjoying his discomfiture a bit. “I’ve had plenty of time to think since this morning, and things are starting to make a whole lot of sense to me. Can’t you guess?”
“Terrible at guessing.”
“Oh, come now. The man from the mining company! I can see as far into a brick wall as anybody, you know, and to me that man has a distinct air of Somebody Who Has Been Here Before. Tell the truth, Sonny. Has he been paying you to let him sniff around up here while Mother and I were gone?”
“I guess I should’ve known you’d figure it out sooner or later,” said Sonny, looking shamefaced, but there was an undercurrent of relief as well. He leaned back against the corral fence and pushed his hat up; I saw the sweat glisten on his forehead in the sunlight. “I didn’t think it could do any harm. I mean—he had all the mining jargon glib at the tip of his tongue, and kept talking about his big firm in Seattle every other minute—he said he just wanted an idea of the value of the find so he could talk to Mrs. Pierpont before anybody else did. And he was—well, yeah—persuasive.” Sonny smiled thinly. “I wouldn’t have let him, honest, if I thought it would cause trouble. I don’t know too much about mining myself, but I didn’t think whatever he found would be rich enough for him to be carrying off a fortune in his pockets.”
“Good gosh, I never even thought of that,” I said. “But I suppose he wouldn’t have come back to talk to me if there wasn’t still something here he was interested in. He tried to hide it, of course, but I could tell he was excited about what he’d seen.”
“Didn’t want to show his hand too far. He didn’t talk near as free to me, either, after he’d had a look or two around,” said Sonny.
I leaned forward a little. “Where on the Pont did he go? Did you play guide for him?”
“Well, I sort of played compass. I took him out a ways and pointed him in the direction he wanted to go, and told him how to follow the streams back so he wouldn’t get lost.”
I tapped my fingertips meditatively on one knee. “Do you think you could do the same for me?”
Sonny gave me a quick glance. “Show you where? Pretty near, anyway. I know where he spent most of his time…”
I sat up straight and caught hold of the corral post to swing down. “Show me, then! I’d love to get a good look at that gold for myself before I speak to Mr. Mills or anyone else about it again. I’ll see if I can find one of my father’s pans—or just an old tin plate would do, I suppose; and we can try panning a few places along the stream where Mills was.”
In five minutes we had saddled our horses and cobbled together some makeshift panning equipment. Sonny entered into it with what I would have said was exactly the right spirit if the whole thing had been real: enthusiasm for a lark, combined with slightly over-eager deference to make up for his past lapses. Once outside the pasture gate I let him take the lead, and he bore to the west, just as I had expected. We rode up into the valley I had come down the morning before, close beside the creek, and every time the way narrowed so our horses’ hooves splashed among the rocks at the creek’s edge, I leaned over looking down interestedly as if I expected to see visible grains of gold gleaming beneath the shallow rippling currents. Sonny Barton didn’t say anything, but I caught him smiling to himself one time when I straightened up. So far, so good, for both of us.
A rank whiff of sheep met us as we turned into the broadest stretch of the valley. Jacot’s wagon was still where it had been, but the flock was grazing further up the valley today. Their faint, intermittent bleating increased on our ears as we rode toward them, and the figure of the herder, sitting on a stump off to one side, never moved except for a slow owl-like turning of the head, his gaze following us as we passed with an expression that said absolutely nothing. I waved a hand, neither expecting nor receiving a response.
“If I didn’t know any better I’d think he grew there,” said Sonny. “You can’t tell where the toadstools leave off and he begins. Suits his profession.”
“Saith the cowboy,” I said. “Jacot’s really an excellent herder.”
Sonny gave a true cowman’s snort. “Spare me an introduction to a man who understands a sheep. Oh, I tried to pass the time of day with him the first time I wandered over this way, but he just stared at me like a riddle he couldn’t read. What’s the matter with him, is he half-witted?”
I was about to disclaim the notion, when it struck me that it might not be a bad idea to let Sonny go on thinking that. If he and his cohorts believed that Jacot neither saw nor heard, they might be a little freer in their movements about the Pont. So I sacrificed Jacot’s reputation without a twinge of conscience. “I’d say so. I hate to call him that, poor old thing, but you’ve only got to talk to him a minute to know he isn’t all there. He’s marvelous with the lambing, though.”
Sonny nodded, satisfied and uninterested. We continued at a trot up the valley until the creek, which had corkscrewed itself into a narrow gully among the pines on our left for a while, flashed into sight again and spread itself out in a shallow S shape across the green valley floor before taking to the woods on the other side. At the first bend I pulled up my horse. “I can’t imagine anyone going panning and not starting here. Do you suppose it’s really rich enough to show this far down? And to think how many times I’ve gone wading here since I was a little girl! I might have had gold between my toes and never known it.”
I settled myself on my heels by the stream where the current was quick and the bottom sandy, and dipped in with the tin plate I’d brought along. I’d panned for gold once or twice before, chiefly for fun, and it’s rather intoxicating even when you’re pretty certain you’re not going to find anything. Before long I was wet to the elbows, my sleeves pushed up, the front of my skirt damp and muddy where I’d edged my knees too close to the stream, as again and again I brought up a sifting of sand from the creek bed and tried to get the motion of swirling it around in the plate just right.
“I didn’t actually tag along and watch Mills work,” offered Sonny presently, “so I don’t know the exact places he tried.”
“And I’m no prospector,” I rejoined, laughing, “so I don’t know if I’d recognize what I find. I need someone to tell me whether I’m getting warmer or cooler.”
“Let’s try upstream a ways. It looks like there’s a place you can cross on the rocks up here.”
We picked our way across and tried again. Some of the sand I brought up here was coarse and glittered, and I toyed with the idea of “striking it rich.” But I had no idea how much Sonny Barton really knew about gold mining, and I didn’t want to push his credulity too far and expose myself. I tried to picture his face if one of our attempts did pan out some visible flecks of gold—not improbable in this country. That would certainly make things interesting for him. But it might make them altogether too interesting for me to manage, so I supposed it was better the contingency was unlikely.
I shook out my tin plate impatiently. “I don’t think I’ve got the knack of this right. What a disgrace of a prospector’s daughter I am!”
“I heard a story once about a lady miner who used to sing to the gold and coax it out. You ought to try it.”
“I couldn’t carry a tune in a—tin pan,” I retorted. “Besides, I suspect you just made that story up.”
“Better let me have a try, then. Gosh, this water’s cold!”
I laughed at the face he made as he shook off a wet hand and then slid the tin plate into the stream again, but there was a slight sour taste back of it. That he could be so affable and amusing—good company, even—while leading me on and lying to me every other minute, was enough to bring my cynicism back in full force. How easily people could hide whatever they wanted to hide behind a smile and a friendly speech which, if you didn’t know any better, kept you from ever questioning their sincerity. Unbidden, a quick vision of Keith Phillips’ merry, roguish gray eyes rose before my memory. What was it that had made me trust him, however unwillingly? Was it just because his story fit with my own pre-existing skepticism about Sonny Barton?
An unsettling thought came to me. Though I was supposed to be decoying Sonny, Keith Phillips had done an awfully good job of getting me out of the way for a few hours. Suppose he really was a clever agent of another mining—no, that wouldn’t do. The whole business of the gold “strike” was too flimsy from every angle; it couldn’t be that.
What if the whole story about the Conover kidnapping was true, and Keith Phillips was in it with the rest of them?
To hide any outward sign of the roiling in my stomach from Sonny, I began pulling down the rolled-up sleeves of my blouse, smoothing out the wrinkles and buttoning the cuffs at my wrists with fingers that wouldn’t seem to do what I wanted them to—they might well be numb from the icy water of the mountain stream. Keith would hardly have told me point-blank about the kidnappers hiding here if he was in it. Unless they were hard put to it to come up with two fake stories one after the other, and had to risk a daring bluff with the truth. What about his bandaged leg? Could it have come from some kind of clash with the law, covered up by the rockslide story? But no—I had seen the evidence of that, and if Keith had made up that story on the spur of the moment the traces of his fall and the dislodged boulder wouldn’t have been prepared beforehand.
This wouldn’t do. I was almost shaking, wholly from my own imagination. I got up and picked my way back across the stream on the rocks again toward our horses, calling back to Sonny that I wanted to try further upstream. I’d committed myself—I had to at least finish this expedition without messing it up.
We explored as far up the stream and one of its tributaries as we could go before the sun began to edge down behind the pines; panned in every likely place and came up with nothing but a little pyrite that startled both of us good and proper for about ten seconds. Finally, at the end of our exploring, I stood with each foot on a wet rock and one hand in the small of my back and declared, “Well, either I’m no good as a prospector or Mills is.”
“In which case, the Pacifico-Northwestern Mining Company’s in trouble,” said Sonny.
“I’d say Mills is in trouble,” I said. “With me on one side of him and the Pacifico-Northwestern on the other. Well, we’re not going to find anything today, so let’s go back.”
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