The Last Pan Off Bonanza Creek

Three O’Clock

Eli and I sat on the bench by the window. Lorna brought us coffee without asking. Outside, men finished their business and did not leave.

Word moves fast on a creek. By a quarter to three there were more trucks in the yard than there had been at two.

At three exactly, Rand’s truck pulled in through the gate. He parked by the fence and got out, and he saw the trucks, and then he saw mine. I watched him stand there with his hand on the door.

For a second I thought he would get back in. I almost wished he would.

Then he shut the door and walked across the yard, straight through the men, and they made room for him without anybody saying a word.

He came in and stopped. He looked at me on the bench and at Eli beside me, and at the pan on the counter.

“Wynn,” he said. “You didn’t need to come all the way to town.”

I did not answer him. I stood up, and walked to the counter, and slid the pan an inch closer to Duncan.

The yard outside had gone quiet. You could hear the generator behind the building and a dog barking somewhere down by the river. Nobody out there was pretending to talk anymore.

Duncan went to his safe and took out the lot Rand had sold him.

It was still in the jars I had labeled, with my labels scraped off and new tape stuck on in Rand’s blocky hand. He set them on the counter beside my pan.

Then he pulled his glasses down off his forehead, picked up his loupe, and leaned in.

He looked for a long time. He tipped some of Rand’s lot into one tray and some of mine into another, and moved them under the light, and turned the coarse pieces over with a little brass pick.

Then he took both samples back to the analyzer on the bench by the bay door, the gun he used to read silver content, and ran them one after the other, right where the yard could see. He wrote the numbers on a pad in pencil.

He came back to the counter and set the pad down where Rand could read it, and I could, and Eli could.

What Duncan Said

“Seven sixty-one,” Duncan said. “On the lot you sold me, Rand. Seven sixty-two on Wynn’s pan from yesterday.”

He said it in an ordinary voice, but the door was open and the yard was quiet, and it carried. I heard it go out over the tailgates.

“I’ve weighed Hunker gold for forty years,” Duncan said. “I’ve weighed yours, Rand, every season you’ve had over there. You never once ran under eight hundred. Not once. And you never once brought me gold with quartz on it, flat and rusty like this.”

He picked up one of the coarse pieces from Rand’s lot and one from my pan, and held them side by side in his palm, the white quartz on both of them catching the light.

“That’s Clay Halvorsen’s gold,” Duncan said. “Off Clay’s ground. Anybody in this yard who’s ever seen it would tell you the same, and I expect most of them have.”

Nobody laughed. Nobody said a word. Out in the yard, Hap took his cap off again and held it against his chest.

Rand stood at that counter with his hands at his sides. His face had gone a dull red, and then it went gray, and he looked, for the first time I could remember, like an old man.

“I’m stopping your second payment,” Duncan told him. “The balance goes to Wynn, less what I already advanced you. And I’ll be letting the mining recorder know whose claim this gold came off, so the royalty goes on the right ground.”

He did not say it cruelly. He did not have to. Every man and woman on four creeks was going to know by suppertime, and Rand knew it.