The Last Pan Off Bonanza Creek

Duncan’s Yard

We drove into Dawson that afternoon. It was the last day of September, and Duncan’s yard was full the way it always is at the end of the season, trucks parked nose to tail along the fence and men leaning on tailgates waiting their turn.

You know everybody in that yard, more or less. Families from Bonanza and Eldorado, Hunker and Sulphur and Dominion, some of them with three generations on the same ground.

They nodded to me as I walked through. A couple of the older men took off their caps.

Hap was there with his own little jar. He took his cap off too, and then he put a hand on Eli’s shoulder as we went by, and left it there a second longer than he needed to.

Inside, the building was warm and smelled of coffee and hot metal.

Duncan’s daughter Lorna was at the front desk doing the paperwork, the way she had for years. She looked up and saw me, and her face went careful.

“Is Dad here?” I asked her. “I need him to look at something. It won’t wait.”

Duncan came out from the back wiping his hands. He was a small, stooped man with glasses pushed up on his forehead and a cardigan with the elbows gone, and he had the steadiest eyes of anybody I ever met.

“Wynn,” he said. “I was sorry about Clay. He was a good man. A good miner.” He looked at Eli. “So’s his boy, I hear.”

I set Clay’s black pan on his counter, the gold lying in the bottom of it.

The big bay door behind him was rolled up for the afternoon light, and through it every man in the yard could see the counter if he cared to look. Most of them cared to look.

“This came off our cut yesterday morning,” I said. “Clay’s cut, on our claim off Bonanza. Hap ran the machine and saw it go through the plant. I need you to put it beside the gold Rand sold you last week.”

Duncan did not say anything for a long moment. He picked up the pan and tipped a little of it into his palm, and turned it in the light from the door.

“Rand’s coming at three,” he said quietly. “For his second payment. I advanced him sixty thousand on Monday. The rest was due after the melt.”

“Then I’ll wait,” I said.