The Last Pan Off Bonanza Creek

Before I Went Home

I did one more thing before I left town. I drove out the Hunker road to Rand’s camp.

I did not go to fight. I went because Clay would have given his brother a chance to make it right, and I owed Clay that much.

It was early afternoon and bright, the birches all gone yellow along the road and the creek low and clear.

Rand was sitting on the step of his trailer with a cup of coffee, looking at nothing.

His excavator was parked with the bucket down. It did not look like it had moved in a week.

He stood up when he saw my truck. He did not come toward me. I got out and stood by my door, and for a long moment neither of us said anything at all.

“I know you were in the gold room Sunday,” I said finally.

“Hap saw your truck. And I know you sold two hundred and twelve ounces to Duncan on Monday. Rand, that’s our season. That’s Eli’s claim.”

He set his cup on the step very carefully. He did not look at me. He looked at the hillside.

“That gold came off my ground,” he said. “Off Hunker. I had a good cleanup, Wynn. Finally. You’d begrudge me that, after the two years I’ve had?”

“Your ground’s been dead two seasons,” I said. “Everybody on this creek knows it.”

Then he did look at me, and I saw it in his face, not guilt so much as a man who had told himself a story so many times he almost believed it.

“Clay would have wanted family to share,” he said. “You know that. He’d have helped me. You’d have spent it on a new loader and I’d have lost everything. He’d have wanted it to go to me.”

“Clay would have given you the shirt off his back,” I said. “If you’d asked him. You didn’t ask. You waited until he was in the ground and I was out of town, and you took it.”

He said nothing to that. A raven went over, talking to itself.

“You can still go to Duncan and tell him the truth,” I said. “Before it goes any further. I’ll stand next to you when you do it.”

“There’s nothing to tell him,” Rand said. “Go home, Wynn.”

So I went home.