Free Zachary's Gold by Stan Krumm Page A

hidden.
    The floor was solid earth, smooth and undisturbed as far as I could see, which was disappointing, for if he had buried the gold indoors I should probably have been able to spot something. I was looking for a fairly bulky load, and I quickly searched the ten-foot-square room to no avail.
    I did, however, find some things of interest in a small carrying satchel made of soft leather, which was half hidden behind the pile of clothes under the bed.
    First I drew out two bottles and, taking them closer to the kerosene lamp, discovered that they were sealed and certified as Scotch whisky, bottled in some distant place with a name that only a Scotsman could pronounce. To say that this was something rarer than gold would be an understatement. There were two brands of whisky produced and bottled in Barkerville, and the miners all agreed that they were “refiners’ liquor”—that is to say that if one poured the stuff over gold quartz, it would dissolve the rock and leave behind the pure metal. The precious stuff that the trapper kept under his bed was probably not available in most drinking establishments of San Francisco—certainly not in the nether corners of the Cariboo.
    I wasted no time before pouring a sample into a ceramic mug. I was no connoisseur of spirits, but it was most certainly pleasant to the taste and gentle in the throat, and I paused to savour it for a long moment before delving deeper into the leather bag.
    All that remained therein was a pair of steel-framed spectacles, two silver dollars, eight fancy brass buttons, and a small blue clothbound book—Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare . It was a well-read volume, wrinkled and dog-eared, marked randomly by pen scratches inside the cover page. The frontispiece was inscribed “To Neddy, on your birthday, 1854,” which brought a variety of thoughts and speculations to mind.
    That salutation, combined with the nature of the book, implied to me that the recipient might have been a very young man. A gift to a scholarly lad from mother or aunt. That would have made the man I hung from the poplar tree considerably younger than I had supposed. I had assumed him to be older than me, but he could, in fact, have been still in his twenties. A beard can certainly have a misleading effect.
    Then again, the inscription could well have been written by a sweetheart to her beau. In that case, where was this darling of ten years past? Were her affections long since alienated and forgotten, or was she now somewhere waiting for the lover whose life I had cut short?
    A third, very likely possibility was that the writing on the opening page had never been addressed to my dead trapper at all; that the book was given to another unknown, and I had shot a man named Archibald or Nathaniel.
    For convenience, I assumed from that time on that his name was indeed Edward, and I began to mentally refer to him as “Dead Ned.” The Lamb’s Tales was too well handled and given a very special hiding place; I could not believe it to be only a casual, second-hand possession.
    There were three other books in the cabin, but these stood in a row on the back of the table, held between two blocks of quartz/granite amalgam. Baker’s I Discovered Africa and a book of some mystic’s theories on the end of the world sat on either side of a large publication called The Trapper and Furrier’s Guide, which alone of the three seemed much used. It was a sort of almanac issued by the Hudson’s Bay Company, containing numerous hints and bits of information on the setting of traps, skinning of animals, and storing of pelts, along with price lists, maps, and diagrams of various tracks.
    Did my newly expired acquaintance learn his trade from a book? I wonder. Was the time he spent on the trapline purely a facade to hide his criminal activities, or was he rather a bona fide man of the wilderness, who had dabbled in robbery as a sort of sideline?
    Once again