Barkerville Gold (2 page)
Some folks began to view Three Finger with suspicion. His hair definitely needed invigorating, he certainly enjoyed his whiskey, and if he stole all that gold, wouldn't he need something to put it in? However, most people, without any real evidence to back them up, blamed a young Chinese man, Eng Quan, who was often seen walking the streets at night and so could very well have robbed the stores.
This is too cool,
Rusty thought and put down the book. Katie was still concentrating on her mystery novel and he wanted to tell her that here, in his book, was a real live mystery to solve. But he couldn't say anything now, with their grandparents in the front seat, not after they had promised not to worry Gram and GJ by getting involved in another mystery. He picked up the book again.
On the afternoon of September 16, 1868, Three Finger was at Barry and Adler's Saloon along with the usual crowd of miners and “Hurdy Gurdy,” or dancing, girls. Three Finger told van der Boorg that he had finally saved up enough money to go home. “My backpack is ready, loaded with enough food and drink for the trail and stashed behind my outhouse where no one's likely to steal it. Tonight, at midnight, I'm leaving this town forever.”
No one knows exactly what happened that day, but the story goes that a miner, trying to force a Hurdy Gurdy girl to kiss him, bumped against the woodstove and knocked a hot pipe against the canvas ceiling. In minutes the saloon was ablaze. Flames leaped across the street and quickly spread through the town, which was built entirely of wood, tinder dry after a long drought.
People scrambled to gather their possessions, which they placed in Williams Creek. Then someone remembered that fifty kegs of blasting powder were sitting in a store, and everyone rushed to move them into a dry shaft so they would not explode.
In slightly over an hour it was all over. No one was hurt, but the lower part of town was destroyed. When people returned to retrieve their meager possessions from the creek, they discovered that even as the fire raged, someone had crept in and gone through their belongings. Gold nuggets they had carefully saved were missing. Most blamed the Chinese who lived in the upper town, scarcely touched by the fire.
But a few miners, facing a long cold night with no shelter and few blankets to keep them warm, got to talking. They decided that Three Finger was a likely culprit.
They drank some whiskey to help keep warm and talked some more. Hidden by darkness, van der Boorg heard all of this and sneaked off to warn his friend. By moonlight he climbed the trail northwest of Barkerville, up toward Lowhee Creek, and arrived at the cabin long before midnight. Finding no sign of Three Finger, van der Boorg hoped he had already left town. He made his way to the outhouse and was dismayed to find Three Finger's backpack behind it. That's when he heard familiar voices. The angry miners had come after Three Finger. Clutching the pack, van der Boorg disappeared into the woods.
Next morning, when Three Finger did not show up, van der Boorg searched down mine shafts, at the bottom of the canyon, throughout the surrounding woods and finally inside the outhouse, but Three Finger had disappeared, never to be seen alive again.
However, one of the leather pouches stolen from Mason and Daly's was found half buried under the back stairs of the apothecary shop owned by Eng Chung, the father of Eng Quan. The pouch contained traces of gold dust.
Three Finger was instantly forgotten, and blame shifted back to Eng Quan, who lived with his elderly father above the apothecary shop. When miners went to find him, Eng Quan was gone. His broken body was later found at the base of a cliff.
It is probable that Three Finger also perished in the rugged terrain surrounding Barkerville. Without supplies, unable to show his face on the road, even an expert woodsman didn't stand much of a chance. And Three Finger was no expert.
For years men searched for the gold, believing that whichever man stole it, he must have buried it in a safe place until he was ready to leave town. However, it was never recovered.
Soon after Three Finger's disappearance, some folks began to see, at midnight, a small thin man wearing a wide-brimmed hat, bandanna, vest, plaid shirt, pants and heavy boots limp his solitary way between Stout's Gulch Trail and the Lowhee Trail. Even today, he is occasionally spotted on moonlit nights, at midnight. Perhaps James Evans is still searching for his fortune in gold so that he can finally go home.
“We're here!” GJ called out. He slowed the truck and steered onto a narrow road leading into a provincial campground. “Keep your eyes peeled for a good campsite.”
Rusty read the wooden sign near the gate:
Lowhee
Campground.
He closed his book.
A
fter dinner that evening, Rusty settled outside on a folding chair to sketch Three Finger Evans. He started with the hat: round, flat top, wide brim.
“Do you want to play Crazy Eights with us?” Gram asked.
Rusty looked up. His grandmother held a pack of cards, and everyone was gathering around the picnic table. He closed his sketchbook and joined them.
It was sometime during the game, when they were all guzzling ice water, munching potato chips and complaining about the heat, that Rusty got the idea. “Can we pitch our tents out here tonight?” he asked. “It's way too hot to sleep inside the trailer.”
Gram and GJ looked at each other and both nodded at once. But GJ turned to Rusty with a stern look. “Be sure you don't take any food into your tent. I mean nothing. No potato chips, no chocolate bars, no apples, nothing.”
“Hey, why look at me? Tell that to Katie and Sheila.”
“You're the walking stomach,” Katie reminded him, “not me.”
“No food in any tent,” GJ said firmly. “Unless, of course, you want to attract bears.”
Bears?
Rusty swallowed. He opened his backpack and removed the pile of chocolate chip cookies and half bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips he had been saving for emergencies. But GJ held out his hand.
“Oh, man!” Rusty fished around in the bottom and pulled out a big chocolate bar. “It's still wrapped. How's a bear supposed to smell it?”
“You'd be surprised,” Sheila told him. “Bears might not have very good eyesight, but they can sniff out a chocolate bar from miles away.”
At first they considered pitching their little one-person tents in a far corner of the campsite, near the trees. But with thoughts of black bears lurking in all of their minds, they ended up pitching them side by side in a neat row between the trailer and picnic table.
“We'll close only the screen door,” Gram said as they dragged foamies out to their tents, “so if you need anything, you can slip inside.”
By the time it was almost dark, they were anxious to try out their tents for the first time.
“I'm going to listen to music,” Sheila said, unzipping the flap on her tent, “so if you two are talking and I don't answer, you'll know why.”
“We won't be talking.” Katie, on her knees, was already half into the middle tent, her mystery novel tucked under one arm. “I want to finish my book. I think I know who did it.”
“Who did what?” Rusty asked.
“You'll have to read the book,” Katie called from inside. The zipper gave a high-pitched squeal as she zipped her door closed.
Rusty dragged his backpack into his tent and pulled out his ghost book, sketchbook and pencils. There was enough room to sit on his mattress and just enough light to see. With his sketchbook balanced on both knees, Rusty set to work. First he drew a bearded face below the wide-brimmed hat. Then he added a plaid shirt, vest and three-fingered hand. He gave the man short legs covered by loose-fitting pants that wrinkled at the knees and tucked into high boots. His sketch was similar to the drawing in the book, but he placed Three Finger walking instead of crouched over a gold pan.
Rusty skimmed quickly through the Three Finger Evans story again, in an effort to pick out any details he may have missed, things he could add to his drawing. He decided to draw a bottle of Hair Invigorator in Three Finger's good hand, but when he turned back to his sketch he had difficulty seeing it in the fading light. He lay down on his stomach and inched forward to hold his sketchbook as close as possible to the mesh door, then sketched a bottle into Three Finger's good hand.
Yawning, Rusty put down his pencil and looked outside. Everything was in shades of gray now, and the outlines of trees were black against the starlit sky; the short stretch of road in front of the campsite shone silvery white in the moonlight. He yawned again, tucked the sketchbook under his pillow and rolled onto his back. Thousands of stars, so bright overhead, seemed closer here than they ever did at home. His eyes closed.
Rusty didn't know what woke him up. It could not have been the sound of footsteps because they were so faint he was not even aware of them until after he saw the ghost.
Whatever it was, something made him open his eyes. When he did, he was facing a triangle of mesh doorway, several shades lighter than the tent walls surrounding it. From the corner of his eye, Rusty caught a hint of movement out on the road. He lifted his head from the pillow. His eyes grew huge and he gasped softly. He held his breath.
A lone figure on the silvery road stood out clearly against the dark trees. It was a small thin man wearing a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his eyes. Although the colors were indistinct, his full beard shone white beneath the moon, and Rusty saw that he wore a bandanna, shirt, vest and pants tucked into boots that reached almost to his knees. He carried something in his left hand, on the far side of his body. Rusty could not make out exactly what it was, but it looked like a large cloth bag with something heavy inside. The man hurried along the road past the campsite.
Rusty's heart thudded against his ribs. Its quick
thump-
thump-thump
mingled with the soft
puff, puff, puff
of footsteps on dust. When the man disappeared from sight, Rusty pressed the little button on his watch and its face lit up: 12:00. Midnight. A chill ran up his spine.
He turned toward Katie's tent, next to his, and was relieved to see a faint glow, right through the nylon of his own tent. Trust her to still be reading at this hour.
“Katie!” he tried to call, but his voice caught somewhere in his throat and all that emerged was a faint squeak. He swallowed.
Okay
, he told himself,
don't panic. Do not panic. Think this through
. Rusty took a deep breath and counted on his fingers:
1. Midnight.
2. The man from his book.
3. The same man he sketched before falling asleep.
4. His voice refused to work.
5. This was his last finger.
Obviously he was dreaming, and there was one sure way to prove it. He pinched himself on the cheek, just below his eye. Hard. “Ouch!” That really hurt! Which could only meanâ¦
“Rusty? What's going on?”
Oh, man! Katie had heard him. “Nothing.”
“You okay? Why did you say
ouch?
”
“I'm fine.” He hesitated, but had to ask. “Did you see the ghost?”
“Huh?”
“The ghost, did you see it walk by?”
“You mean that old guy dressed like a prospector from the gold rush?”
“So you did see it!”
“I saw a man. I didn't see a ghost. How many times do I have to tell you I don't believe in ghosts?”
Rusty couldn't think of an answer.
“Soâwhy did you say he was a ghost?”
“C'mon outside,” he said, “and bring your flashlight. I'll show you.”
They sat at the picnic table and spoke in whispers.
Rusty handed Katie his sketch. She shone her flashlight on it and studied it for a moment. “Good drawing,” she said. “It looks just like him. But I don't know why you dragged me out here to see it. I already know you're good at drawing people.”
“Katie, don't you see? I drew that
before
he walked past! And look at this.” He shoved
Spirits of the Cariboo
across the picnic table toward her, open to the story of Three Finger Evans. “This is a brand-new book, just published.”
“Rusty, I only have two pages left in my mystery. I don't want to read something else right now.”
“But you have to. It's important. Look at the little picture in the corner.”
Katie shone her light on the drawing, then on Rusty's sketch, then on the photograph again. She started to read. Rusty drummed his fingers on the table and watched his cousin until she finally looked up. “That old guy fits the description perfectly.”
Rusty nodded.
Katie switched off her flashlight and jumped up. “Let's go!”
Rusty grinned to himself. He had no idea where they were going, but he didn't much care. All it took was a hint of suspicion, the smallest suggestion of mystery, and his cousin would be hooked. She would never want to leave Barkerville until she solved it.
O
n this cloudless, northern summer night there was enough light to clearly see where they were going as Rusty followed his cousin toward the road. He had no idea why she stopped suddenly at the edge of the road and switched on her flashlight, so he kept on walking.
“Stop!” Katie whispered and grabbed his shirt.
“Why?”
“Look!” Her flashlight shot a bright oval onto the dusty road.
Katie crept onto the road, stopped and directed the beam straight down. Rusty followed. Spotlighted in the dust was a perfect print. An unusual print. Not an animal print; not made by a sandal or a sneaker or a bare foot; the tread pattern was very different from anything Rusty had seen before.
“Do ghosts usually leave footprints?” Katie whispered.
He shook his head. “No. I don't know. Who knows?”
“Trust me, they don't.” Katie straightened up. “We need a picture of this. I wish we had a camera.”
