Читать книгу Midnight Sun - Kat Martin - Страница 10

The equipment arrived on schedule—something to do with the rain, no doubt. Fortunately, even with the mud, the road up the mountain was still passable. Charity wasn’t so sure it would be by the end of the day.

Men from D. K. Prospecting Supplies, Inc., unloaded the dredge and the rest of the machinery she and Buck had picked out, then headed back down the mountain before the mud got so deep they couldn’t make it. There was a workshop of sorts in one of the sheds out back and Buck had ordered the building materials he needed for the sluice box to be unloaded there.

“It’ll take a while to get everything put together,” he said, and started off in that direction, leaving Charity to examine the portable dredge the men had unloaded that would need to be assembled.

She had seen a variety of different kinds in the prospecting magazines she had been reading. A gold dredge was a piece of equipment that worked like an oversized vacuum cleaner, sucking creek water, rocks, gravel, and anything else it encountered into a long, flexible pipe at one end and dumping it into the sluice box at the other. Once the water passed through the box, it ran back into the creek, hopefully minus the gold it had been hiding.

Maude sauntered up just then. “That thing’s a real workhorse when it comes to findin’ gold, but you still gotta learn the basics. If a little rain don’t bother you, I can show you how to pan.” The sagging skin below her jaw jiggled as Maude looked down at the item in her hand, a round, green plastic gold pan, flat on the bottom with the slides sloping up. There were notches for catching gold about five inches long, maybe an inch and a half apart in one spot on the pan.

Charity grinned. “What’s a little rain when you’re lookin’ for color?” she said, using her best prospector’s accent.

“Come on, then. Let’s get to it.” They were wearing their knee-length yellow slickers, though the rain had slowed to a steady drizzle. Maude left her by the stream for a moment, returned to the cabin, and came back with the big plastic washtub they used to mop the floors.

“The gold pan is your basic minin’ tool,” she said. “But pannin’ ain’t as easy as it looks.”

Maude set the plastic tub in the sand at the edge of the water, bent down and filled Charity’s gold pan about a third full of stream gravel, then pulled a little glass vial from the pocket of her jeans.

“There’s a dozen flakes of gold in this here bottle.” She shook it, showing the flakes of gold suspended in the little tube of water. She opened the vial and dumped the gold and water into the pan. “The trick is to catch ’em.”

Maude began to demonstrate, first stirring the loose dirt and gravel into a state of suspension, then working the pan in a circular motion, slopping a little water over the brim with each rotation. “Gold is heavier than pret’ near anything else. If you use the pan just right, it’ll catch in the riffles and the gravel will slop on over.”

Sure enough, when Maude was done, the pan was empty except for the little slivers of gold in the notches. “Now you try it.”

Charity accepted the green plastic gold pan Maude gave her.

“Hold it over the tub like I did. When you’re done, we’ll count the flakes. Whatever you miss’ll wind up in the washtub and we can start all over again.”

Maude was right. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. After several tries, Charity had retrieved only a very few flakes. Then the sun broke through the clouds for a moment and when she stared into the pan, she saw a lot more gold.

“Look, Maude! There’s a whole bunch of it in here!”

Maude just shook her head. “That’s fool’s gold, honey. When the sun disappears, so will the glitter. Gold ain’t like that. That pretty yellow color stays true all the time.”

The clouds closed in again and the glitter of the fool’s gold disappeared just as Maude said. Charity kept at it. But after an hour of work, she had only caught half a dozen flakes. Her pant legs were wet, the toes of her hiking boots soaked—mental note to buy an extra pair on the next trip into Dawson—her feet freezing, and still she didn’t have the knack.

“It takes a hundred fifty, maybe two hundred pans to process a yard of gravel,” Maude said. “A good panner can manage maybe ten pans an hour, which means you can do ’bout half a yard a day, a little more if you get real good.”

Real good she wasn’t, and not real fast, either. It was backbreaking labor, but if the end product was gold …

Charity worked for another half an hour.

“Why don’t you take a rest?” Maude suggested. “Go on up to the house, warm up, and grab a bite to eat. You can try again a little later.”

“You go ahead.” Charity whirled the pan. “I’ll be up in a minute.” As soon as she got all twelve flakes. She’d come here for gold. She had known it wouldn’t be easy. She had always been a determined sort of person. Why should learning to pan for gold be any different?

“Suit yourself,” Maude said, turning toward the cabin, ambling up the bank in her funny seesaw gait.

Charity went back to work. By the time she finally captured all twelve flakes in her pan, she couldn’t feel her feet. But relief and a sense of accomplishment gave her a fresh shot of energy. She frowned as she stared down at the last flake glittering against the green of her plastic pan and started counting again, separating each thin piece with the end of a stick.

Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Thirteen. Thirteen flakes of gold!

Charity’s hands started to tremble. She looked down at the gravel Maude had scooped from the stream that now sat in the bottom of the washtub, then gazed at the bright yellow pieces wedged into the riffles of her pan. A huge grin broke across her face and she turned and started running.

“Maude! Maude, come out here and see what I found in the creek!”

Standing in front of the window in his living room, Call lowered the binoculars he’d been using, only faintly guilty for spying on his pretty next-door neighbor.

He checked the heavy chrome Rolex strapped to his wrist. Three hours and forty-seven minutes. That’s how long she’d been standing out in the drizzle, working that damned gold pan. From the water stains on her clothes, he could see that her feet and legs were wet clear past her knees. She had to be freezing out there, but she hadn’t quit.

Damn fool woman. Probably come down with pneumonia.

Still, he had to give her credit. They couldn’t have paid him enough to stand out there in the drizzle that long.

He looked through the glasses again, saw the excitement flash in her face, watched her run frantically up the bank to the house. After all that work, it looked as if she’d been rewarded—found a little color, no doubt. It wasn’t hard to do up here, but apparently that didn’t lessen her excitement.

Call hadn’t felt that kind of thrill himself in so long he couldn’t remember.

Maybe he never would again.

Setting the binoculars down on the table beneath the window, he crossed the living room and opened the door leading into the big metal building he’d added to the house last year. It held his Jeep, a Chevy pickup he used for hauling supplies, a pair of snowmobiles, a canoe, and a wall full of other miscellaneous sporting gear.

His canvas flight bag sat near the door, ready whenever he went flying again. He owned a small floatplane, moored on the river at Dawson, practically a necessity up here. It was great for a trip into the interior, or down to Whitehorse if he had to catch a long-distance airline flight somewhere. Not that he did it that often.

The part of the building closest to the house was built as an office. This was the place he worked, now that he had started again. Of course, he worked for himself these days and he did it at a leisurely pace that would have shamed him four years ago. Back then he’d been consumed with the business of business, caught up in the never-ending race to make more and more money.

And for what?

Nothing he’d gained was worth what it had cost him.

Nothing was worth the loss of his wife and three-year-old little girl.

Don’t go there, his mind warned. There was no use torturing himself when it wouldn’t do an ounce of good.

In the past four years, at least he had learned that much. That no matter how much self-loathing he heaped on himself, no matter how much guilt he suffered, nothing could change what had happened on the road that snowy winter night a week before Christmas. Nothing could undo the fact that he had put his job—his ambition—ahead of his family, and because he had, the two people he loved most in the world were dead.

It had taken him nearly four years to accept their loss, but in the end he’d had no choice. His family was gone but he was alive, and he owed it to them to go on. It was time he continued the business of living, and in building this room he had made a start at doing just that.

Call pulled out the leather chair behind his desk, sat down at his computer and flipped on the switch, waiting with more patience than he used to have for the screen to light up and the desktop programs to appear.

The office was state-of-the-art: three computers, a laptop, and a couple of high-speed laser printers. The computer served as a fax and telephone answering machine and one computer was connected to a rain gauge, aerometer, barometer, and hydra sensor. With that equipment and what weather information he could download, he could do a better job than the weather service of predicting local weather.

Living this far out of town, getting on-line had posed a challenge at first, but satellite technology had come a long way, allowing him lightning-speed downloads, and more recent improvements now gave him uploading capabilities as well.

Mostly, he used the computer to keep track of his investments, to buy and sell stock, and do a little consulting. He wasn’t interested in more than that. If he’d learned one thing from his mistakes, it was not to let ambition get in the way of what was important in life.

Things like watching a sunset, or feeling the glide of a canoe through the pure blue waters of a lake.

Or absorbing the warmth of a woman as she took him deep inside her.

Call’s whole body tightened. Where the hell had that come from? But he only had to think of the woman in the yellow slicker working out in the rain and he knew. Damn, he wanted his life back to normal, or as normal as it ever would be. Some satisfying, no-strings sex was definitely on his agenda—with Sally Beecham, not his irritating next-door neighbor.

Call clicked his mouse and brought up his calendar, relatively empty now compared to four years ago when meetings and appointments filled his days, often lasting until well past midnight.

Between a scheduled call to Peter Held, a young chemist involved in an innovative hard-drive storage program Call had been working on, and one to Arthur Whitcomb, Chairman of Inner Dimensions, the software game company that had been his original avenue to success, he wrote himself a reminder to phone Sally and ask her out on Saturday night.

He would take her to dinner and afterward he would take her to bed.

He was going to start living again if it killed him.

Sally Beecham was a good place to start.

God, it was beautiful here. Unlike anyplace Charity had ever seen. And yet … in the oddest way, the country seemed familiar. The trees and the mountains, the rivers and the streams, all felt rooted in some inner part of her, somewhere deep in her cells. Perhaps it was the books she had read, for certainly she had read a lot of them. Whatever it was, it felt exactly right to be here.

This morning while Maude cleaned up the breakfast dishes, she decided to go for a walk, take a look at the piece of property she had purchased. Promising Maude she wouldn’t go far, she found a winding path that led up the hill behind the house, affording her a view of the creek and the narrow valley the meandering stream cut through.

Across the valley, wispy white tendrils of low-hanging clouds clung to the sides of the mountains, and the air was so crisp and clear she could see for miles around her. The real estate man, Boomer Smith, had told her the property backed up to millions of acres of forest, and looking at it now, it was easy to believe. The trees, mountains, and sky seemed to go on forever.

Inhaling an invigorating breath, thinking of her promise to Maude not to go too far and imagining the sort of wildlife that must occupy such a vast area of uninhabited mountains and woods, she reluctantly started back down the trail.

She had nearly reached the bottom when she heard a noise on the path in front of her. An animal appeared—a coyote, she thought at first, but it seemed bigger than the few she had seen on TV and its fur wasn’t yellow and brown, but gray and silver.

The hair on the back of her neck went up as the animal paused on the trail, his pale gray-blue eyes focusing on her with sudden interest. The beast was taller at the shoulders than a dog or a coyote, lean through the chest, and long-legged, built for power and speed. Wolf, she thought with a sudden chill, trying to recall how dangerous they were and what she should do if she ran across one. But her mind remained blank and completely uncooperative.

She stayed stock-still, frozen in place, hoping the animal would wander away, but it remained exactly where it stood, watching her with keen, intelligent eyes that kicked her already-racing heart into first gear. Her legs were shaking. She glanced down the hill to the house. Shouting for help crossed her mind, but she wasn’t sure they could hear her with the generator running.

The wolf’s mouth opened, showing a set of dangerous-looking teeth. Running might be good, but the animal was standing in the middle of the path, blocking her escape, and she couldn’t figure out how to get around it. Scaring it away seemed her only option. Reaching down, she fumbled for a heavy piece of wood she spotted at the edge of the path, figuring if he didn’t run and decided to attack, she would at least have a chance to defend herself.

Unfortunately, the moment she lifted the length of wood and hefted it against her shoulder, holding it like a baseball bat, the wolf began to snarl and the hackles at the back of his neck went up.

Her knees went weak. What would Max Mason do? But she didn’t remember reading where Max had come up against a wolf and even if he had, she wasn’t as brave as Max.

Her grip tightened on the wood, the wolf began to growl, and her mouth went bone dry.

“Drop the stick,” a man’s voice said from somewhere behind her. “He was mistreated when he was a pup. He thinks you’re going to hit him and he’ll attack in self-defense.”

She knew that deep voice, softer than usual, the calm tone meant to soothe her. Something like relief trickled through her that he was there and she wouldn’t have to face the wolf alone. Very carefully, she knelt and laid the stick back down on the ground near her feet.

The minute she did, the wolf sat down on its haunches and began to wag its tail. Call Hawkins walked up behind her.

“Come here, boy,” he said over her shoulder. “The lady isn’t going to hurt you.”

She stiffened a little as the wolf started trotting up the path in their direction. But his tail was wagging again and a second shot of relief swept through her. The animal sat down at Hawkins’s feet as if he belonged there and her relief melted into annoyance.

She turned to look up at him. “I don’t believe this. That wolf is your pet?”

His mouth faintly curved and though he still needed a shave, she thought it was a really nice mouth. Charity wondered what he would look like if he actually smiled.

“Smoke’s not a true wolf—he’s a wolf-husky mix. They’re not uncommon up here.”

She wanted to yell at him, to tell him he should have warned her about the dog, but just then the animal cocked its head in a very dog-like manner, reminding her of Swizzle, the big black lab that belonged to her family when she was a kid, and she found herself smiling instead.

“He’s absolutely gorgeous.” The dog was studying her with curiosity, as if he wasn’t sure he should trust her but looking as though he really wanted to. “Can I pet him?”

“He doesn’t usually take to strangers.”

But Charity was already down on her knees, holding out her hand, and Smoke was sniffing her fingers. The dog must have realized she wasn’t afraid of him anymore and he certainly wasn’t afraid of her. She ran her fingers through his long, silver coat.

“What a beautiful dog you are,” she crooned, casting a sideways glance at its master.

Hawkins was frowning again. Apparently he wanted his dog to dislike her as much as he did.

“You need to be careful out here, Ms. Sinclair. Smoke is tame, but there are lots of animals around that aren’t. This is grizzly country. There are black bears and moose. If you’re going to go hiking, you had better take someone with you who knows the terrain.”

“Funny, I must have missed the line of people offering to take me on a sight-seeing trip.”

He started to speak and for a moment she thought he meant to volunteer for the job. Instead, he clamped down on his jaw. “Come on. I’ll walk you back to the cabin.”

They weren’t very far away, but she didn’t point that out, just let him fall in behind her as she made her way back down the trail. She could feel him there, just behind her shoulders, purposely curbing his longer strides to keep from overrunning her shorter ones.

As soon as they reached the bottom of the hill, he whistled to his dog, who had run off after a squirrel.

“Remember what I said. Be careful out here.”

She didn’t answer, since she had no desire to do battle with a moose or a bear, and instead watched his tall figure retreat out of sight down the path beside the creek.

Call Hawkins was truly an enigma. Charity wondered if there was anyone else in his life besides the wolf-dog he kept for a pet.

It was late in the day by the time they were ready to set up Buck’s homemade sluice box, a long, wooden trough about eighteen inches wide tilted up on one end. The bottom was lined with wire mesh and every few inches metal riffles, like the steps of a ladder, poked out to catch the gold as it washed past.

A three-horse gasoline engine on top of a foam rubber pad set up vibrations that shook the box, separating the gold from the lighter mass of dirt and rock. Turning the engine speed up or down controlled the force, jiggling the gold into the riffles in the box.

It looked pretty homemade to Charity, but hey, she had come to Dawson for adventure and hopefully to find some gold. She never intended to embark on a professional mining career.

They positioned the box at the rear of the eight-inch dredge they had chosen after reviewing all the options, the inches signifying the diameter of the suction tube that went under the water to suck up the material in the streambed. The machine was five feet long and gasoline powered. The day they’d bought it, Buck made a deal with A-1 Fuel to set up a storage tank on the property for supplying gas to the dredge and the generator.

“Let’s see how it works,” Charity said.

Buck tightened a screw at the rear of the machine that helped keep the sluice box in place. “We’ll have to go into the water to operate the suction pipe. I’ve got my waders in the truck.” The stream was still icy cold, too cold to stay in for any length of time without special gear.

“I bought myself a pair the last time we went into town,” Charity said, proud of her foresight. She had watched a video made by the GPAA—Gold Prospectors Association of America—so she knew how the dredge was supposed to work. “I’ll just run up and get them.”

She was back on the bank of the creek a few minutes later, pulling the heavy rubber waders on over her jeans. They came up to her waist—big, baggy, rubber legs that basically was just stood in. A pair of wide red suspenders went over her shoulders to hold them in place, which Charity adjusted to fit.

Buck eyed her up and down as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “You sure you want to do this?”

Undoubtedly she did look pretty funny, with her black-and-white panda bear sweatshirt peeking out from under the suspenders and the lower half of her body swallowed up by the ugly rubber waders. Thank God she couldn’t see herself. She would probably be laughing so hard she wouldn’t be able to walk into the stream.

“I came here for gold,” she said. “Let’s get to it.”

Buck just grunted, stepped off the bank into the water, and slowly made his way to the length of flexible, eight-inch hose sticking out of the dredging machine.

She had pulled her hair up in a ponytail so it wouldn’t get wet and hoped that the waders would insulate her legs and feet. She looked down at the clear stretch of water unhampered by boulders that they had chosen for their initial effort—about three feet deep in this location—took a steadying breath, and waded in.

When Charity reached the place next to Buck, Maude turned on the dredging machine. It was louder than she had imagined. She thought of Call Hawkins and inwardly grinned. The suction pipe began sucking gravel up from the bottom of the stream and as it flowed through the dredge, Maude turned on the motor beneath the sluice box, making it vibrate back and forth.

“You got to be careful with these things,” Buck warned, pointing to the pipe. “Don’t get your hand in front of it. It can take your fingers off—or worse.”

A shiver of alarm raced through her. She hadn’t realized the job would be dangerous. She watched Buck’s big, blunt hands work the suction pipe, making the task look easy, and thought that surely she could learn to master it without losing any extremities.

“Want to try it?”

She bit her lip, more nervous than she cared to admit. But there was challenge in Buck’s eyes and a slight curl on his lips, and she wasn’t about to let him know that she was afraid. Her fingers gripped the end of the pipe and she felt the incredible suction power of the dredge. Careful to keep her hands away from the opening, she held it steady as water rushed into the pipe.

She was much shorter than Buck. Too bad she didn’t think of that before she bent to suck a load of gravel off the bottom of the stream. Water rushed into the top of the waders, filling them clear to the waist, making her so heavy she couldn’t stand up and sweeping her right her off her feet. Luckily, Buck grabbed the suction pipe or God only knew what might have happened.

Water rushed up to her neck and a heartbeat before she went under, she made the mistake of glancing toward the bank of the stream.

Call Hawkins stood there with his feet splayed, nearly doubled over with laugher. If she hadn’t been the butt of his joke, she might have thought how good he looked wearing a grin for once, instead of the scowl that usually darkened his face.