Barkerville Gold (4 page)

Rusty followed his grandparents outside. A woman strolled toward them along the boardwalk, wearing a green wide-skirted dress that hid her feet. Perched jauntily on top of her head was a small hat. She nodded politely as she passed. Rusty raised his hand to lift his baseball cap, just a touch, like a gentleman from the old days. But his head was bare. What happened to his baseball cap?

The woman crossed the street and nodded at two men lounging in front of the Goldfield Bakery. Both men raised their hats politely. Rusty wished he had a hat like theirs. Not cowboy hats exactly, they were smaller and flatter on top with narrower brims. In fact, they looked a lot like the hat in his ghost sketch.

He looked for his sketchbook. Where was it? Oh, man! He had been in Barkerville for less than an hour and had already lost two things. No wonder he drove other people crazy. He drove himself crazy too.

Rusty shrugged off his backpack, crouched down and dumped the contents onto the boardwalk. Water bottle, Swiss Army knife, a crunchy gray sock that used to be white and the old maps his father gave him. No cap. No sketchbook.

Wait. Okay, now he remembered. The sketchbook was tucked under his arm when he walked into Wake-Up Jake's, and he slipped it under his placemat. He scooped his stuff into his backpack and darted into the restaurant.

Two men sat at the table Rusty and the others had just left, both facing away from him. He spotted his red baseball cap hanging on the chair now occupied by a husky man with sandy-colored hair that curled over his collar. The man beside him looked small in comparison. He was thin with very short, absolutely straight black hair. Both men wore tan short-sleeved shirts above tan-colored jeans.

The big man's muscular arms rested on the placemat. Rusty grabbed his cap, plopped it backward on his head and peeked over the man's shoulder. He gulped when he spotted a book lying on the table.
Spirits of the Cariboo
by I.B. Spectre.

But his sketchbook. Was it still there, under the placemat, lodged beneath those two big hairy arms? Rusty raised up on his toes, leaned forward and tried to see. Impossible. So he reached his hand, fingers outstretched, to tap on the man's shoulder. He paused when he noticed a gray badge on the man's sleeve. On it, the word
Security
was printed in clear, gold letters.

“It's anyone's guess where that gold ended up. For my money, I'm betting Eng Quan made off with it,” said the big man.

Rusty froze, still leaning toward the man, arm outstretched and weight balanced on the toes of one foot. But he didn't dare move because he wanted to hear what these men had to say. They must have read the same story he did, about Three Finger, Eng Quan and the missing gold.

The smaller man shook his head. “I don't think Eng Quan had anything to do with the theft. Sounds to me like he was set up by Evans.”

“I dunno, Dave. Either way, though, thanks to this book, we can expect to be overrun with folks searching for that missing gold this summer. It's amazing how a new story like this can come out after all this time, but it means we have to work quickly to find the gold before…”

Suddenly everything fell apart. Someone tapped Rusty's arm. He lost his balance and his outstretched hand landed heavily on the big man's shoulder. Which might not have been so bad if the man hadn't just picked up a very full mug of hot black coffee.

“What the—” The man's chair crashed over backward as he leapt up. He whirled around, wiping frantically at the dark wet patch on the front of his pants.

“Sorry,” Rusty murmured. And decided to make a hasty retreat. He stepped quickly back and landed on something soft. A toe.

“Ow!”

He swung around and came face to face with the waitress. The beautiful waitress with the great smile. Only she was not smiling now. Her face was scrunched up in pain. “Nice work!” she said and thrust his sketchbook at him.

“Sorry,” he gulped.

Grabbing a large jug of ice water, the waitress scurried past him. “Hold still!” she yelled and tossed the water at the man's steaming pants.

“I'm sorry!” Rusty offered for the third time, but no one heard. So he tucked his sketchbook under his arm, scuttled for the door and almost collided with someone coming in. Rusty gaped. The man wore a red-and-black-checked shirt, brown vest and brown pants tucked into high leather boots. Pale gray eyes studied him from under bushy eyebrows that blended into scraggly gray hair and a full white beard. In his right hand was a wide-brimmed hat.

Rusty's eyes dropped to the sketchbook he was holding. The man's eyes followed, saw the ghost sketch and jerked back to Rusty's face. “Sorry,” Rusty said. He bolted out the door and along the boardwalk. At the corner of the Wake-Up Jake he skidded to a halt.

The adjoining building was set back several feet and its roof extended to overhang the plank sidewalk. A tall red-and-white-striped barber pole was tucked in the corner, next to a window. Standing in front of the barber pole were GJ and Gram. They did not look happy. A few feet away, Katie raised her left eyebrow and shook her head. Sheila rolled her eyes. Rusty turned back to his grandparents.

He couldn't blame them for being angry, even if he did have a good reason for disappearing this time. He was trying to think how to explain when, above his head, a wooden sign creaked in the wind. He glanced up. “Fashionable Haircutting,” he read aloud. “W.D. Moses… Wow…That's the famous barber!” Rusty drew a deep breath and continued on quickly, hoping to divert their attention. “Do you know? Wellington Delaney Moses was a black man who came here from the United States and opened a barbershop. One day James Barry came in for a haircut and Moses recognized the gold stickpin he was wearing because it looked exactly like a man's face.”

Gram and GJ did not look impressed, but Rusty pressed on.

“The stickpin belonged to Moses' friend Charles Blessing, and Moses was already worried because his friend went missing on the road from Quesnel. So he turned Barry in, and Barry was tried by Judge Begbie up in Richfield, and they hung him for murdering Blessing and…” His voice trailed off.

“Rusty.”

“And Moses was famous for his Hair Invigorator too. It restored hair in one week.” He paused, but they only kept looking at him, so he started for the door.

“Russell!” Gram's voice was sharp, no-nonsense. It stopped him in his tracks. Gram was a tall, slender woman with dark, curly hair like Katie's, except that Gram's was mixed with gray. Her green eyes flashed. “Russell J. Gates, you have got to stay with us and not go wandering off on your own without saying a word to anyone. Believe it or not, your parents expect us to bring all three of you children home to Victoria safe and sound. They do
not
want us to lose you somewhere in the wilds of British Columbia.”

Rusty's eyes shifted to his grandfather, but there was no hint of sympathy in those blue eyes. Grampa Jerry was a few inches taller than Gram, a stocky man whose hair, what there was left of it, was a pale imitation of the fiery red it had once been. “Your grandmother is right, Russell. If you can't stay with the group, we'll have to make other arrangements.”

Rusty gulped. “Sorry, it won't happen again.” He almost added,
I promise
, but changed his mind, just to be on the safe side, because it's never a good plan to make a promise you're not sure you can keep. He wondered what
arrangements
GJ had in mind.

The important thing now was to change the subject. “Let's go inside. I want to see that Hair Invigorator Moses invented. Hey, GJ! Maybe you could buy some and rub it all over your head before it's too late!”

Gram tried not to laugh, but couldn't help herself. Her face crinkled up. “I wonder if it works,” she said.

Katie and Sheila had already disappeared inside the shop, so Rusty barged in after them. He almost crashed into Katie just inside the door. She held up one hand and pointed at the floor with the other.

On the otherwise clean plank floor was the faint outline of a dusty bootprint. A bootprint with a most unusual tread. Before Rusty could look more closely, Gram and GJ crowded into the shop behind him.

“Oh, look!” Katie stepped around the print to grab GJ by the arm. She pointed at a shelf. “There's the famous Hair Invigorator. Let's go see.” While Katie and Sheila diverted his grandparents, Rusty glanced around to be sure no one was looking, then pulled the rubbing from his sketchbook and placed it beside the dusty print on the floor.

An exact match!

He scooped up the paper and nodded at Katie, whose brown eyes peeked over Gram's shoulder. Tucking the paper back into his sketchbook, Rusty joined the group.

Several bottles of Hair Invigorator were crowded together on a narrow shelf. Two of them were set apart, and while the others appeared to be empty, these two were full of liquid. They also seemed older somehow, or not so clean.

“Amazing stuff!” Gram said. “It not only restores your hair and revitalizes your skin, but it relieves headaches at the same time.” She glanced at Rusty. “I could use some of that right about now.”

“What's going on here?” said a sharp voice.

6
Two Dusty Bottles

T
he middle-aged woman behind them had a thin face, a sharp pointed nose and narrow gray eyes. Her gaze was fixed firmly upon the bottles. She wore a long gingham dress with a wide skirt that skimmed the tops of her button-up boots. Nestled in her frizzy brown hair was a tiny, squashed-looking hat. The overall effect of hair and hat reminded Rusty of bright red feathers from a dead bird caught in a tangled nest. And the way her hair floated around her head like soft brown cotton candy made him wonder if she had rubbed W.D. Moses' Hair Invigorator on her head once too often.

The thin birdlike woman pushed her way through the little group as if she didn't see them standing there. She reached up, took a bottle of Hair Invigorator from the shelf and examined it closely, turning it in her hands. “Dust,” she muttered and reached for a second bottle, “sticky, dried-on dust.”

“So?” Katie asked. “Aren't they old bottles?”

The woman's narrow eyes flicked to Katie. “I dusted them yesterday just before closing. But there were only three bottles then, I'm certain of it.” She frowned and shook her head. “Something weird is going on here—it's almost as if…” Her breath caught and she stared open-mouthed at the bottles in her hands.

“As if what?” Katie prompted.

But the woman turned away. “Nothing at all. I should not have said a thing.” She sniffed. “None of the young folk believe in him anyway.” Clutching the two dusty bottles close against her stomach, she started out the door.

Rusty ran after her. “Believe in who?” he called, but the woman only walked faster. He followed her out the door. “The ghost of James Evans? I saw him last night!”

Frizzy Hair whirled around. “You?” she glanced quickly from side to side, took two quick steps toward Rusty and glared at him. “What on earth are you talking about, boy?”

Pale gray and intense, her eyes bored into Rusty's. For such a small woman, she had a fierce and terrifying look about her. “Don't you go spreading any rumors,” she warned.

Rusty gulped.

“Rusty! Don't you go wandering off again.”

He stepped back, relieved to hear his grandmother's voice behind him. “I wasn't going to,” he said.

Frizzy Hair swung around and bustled along the plank sidewalk, her wide skirt swinging from side to side like a ringing church bell, her shoulders stooped forward to guard the two dusty bottles in her arms.

A shiny red stagecoach rumbled past on the road below. Fancy lettering on its side shone brilliant yellow, like its tall spoked wheels. Pulled by two patient brown horses, it was packed with tourists.

“Can we go for a stagecoach ride?” Sheila asked.

“I want to see the schoolhouse first,” Katie said.

“Let's go to the blacksmith shop,” Rusty suggested. Across the street a crowd spilled out through the wide open door of Cameron and Ames Blacksmith Shop, along with the sharp ring of metal hitting metal and the dry, nostril-burning smell of red-hot iron. “There's a demonstration going on over there.”

“Hold on, you three,” Gram said. “We need to get organized here. We'll have plenty of time to see everything over the next few days, but right now GJ and I will find out about the stagecoach ride. That's a good way to take a quick tour and decide what we want to see first.” She consulted her tourist map. “We need to go back to the Visitors' Center to buy tickets. So you three head on over to the blacksmith shop and we'll meet you there.”

GJ placed a heavy hand on Rusty's shoulder. “Listen, it's important that you three stick close together and no one wanders off alone. Sheila, since you're the oldest…”

“She's the same age as me!” Katie protested.

“I'm twleve,” Sheila reminded her. “Exactly how old are you?”

Katie pulled a face at her best friend. Sheila had turned twelve in June, but Katie's birthday was still two weeks away.

“And you have more sense than these two put together,” GJ continued. “I'm counting on you to see that my grandchildren don't do anything stupid.”

Sheila gulped. “I'll do my best, GJ,” she promised, “but it won't be easy.”

GJ threw back his head and laughed. “Don't I know it!” Then he turned serious. “Just stay together. That goes for the entire time we're here, not only this morning. You break that rule and we won't be able to let you out of our sight from then on. Agreed?”

After each of them solemnly promised to keep this rule, Gram and GJ left and Rusty finally had his chance to tell the girls what he overheard at Wake-Up Jake's. Carefully editing out any mention of scalded pants or crunched toes, he told them what the security guards said about the stolen gold. “And I saw him!” he added.