Gold Lust – Chapter 1 – Book 1 in Ed’s Gold Lust Series

Digger looked out the passenger window so Nolen could not observe his face as he answered.  “She had no complaints. Why you waiting?  Can’t handle it?”

“Might as well try. I never did expect to see my 36th birthday.” Within seconds, the bumps in the trail started jackhammering the pickup.  Stomping the brakes did not slow their decent.  “Hold on.  This could be rough.”  Nolen wrestled the twisting steering wheel to keep the four-wheel drive pickup from flipping. It started a precarious slide sideways down the steep hillside.  Fighting to avoid a boulder, he sideswiped a fir tree guarding the limit of the trail.  Nolen fought for control, as he bounced the pickup across the rutted bottom of the ravine, and pointed the truck up the next sharp rise.  He gunned the engine, spinning the knobby tires and kicking up a shower of dry grit.

Beside him, Digger’s angular frame banged about, even though the old man tried to brace his body. “Your driving ain’t helping my bones any.  Even Pal doesn’t like this bumping around.”  Barking at the two men, a black Labrador struggled to remain upright in the packed truck bed.

“You were the one who told me to follow this route.  Actually, I think I’m doing a . . . Ouch! . . . damn good job.”

The truck flew off the top of a dirt embankment, and dropped onto a patch of powdery sand, blasting a tan cloud into the air.  Nolen skidded the pickup to a halt and leaned back.  “Yes!” he yelled shoving his fists above his head.  “Twice, I swore we were going to roll.”  Nolen took off his favorite camouflaged cap, and brushed wet strands of blond hair from his forehead while watching Digger rub his elbow.

“Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.  And, I told you before to quit babying me.”

Nolen shrugged.  “OK.  Let’s inspect your idea of a great gold site.”  He stepped out of the pickup, then flipped the seat forward to open a protective case containing his portable computer, binoculars, and several U.S. Geologic Survey maps.

After Nolen set up the computer and maps on the hood of the pickup, the two men and the dog moved to the edge of the gravel shoreline.  There, they surveyed the cold, churning creek.  To their right, green water tumbled fifty feet, crashing against slate-gray boulders.  From the white water pool at the base of the waterfall, the stream shot through an expanding rock canal. On the far shore, the water raced along a moss-covered, granite wall.  Where the wall ended, the creek deflected left and widened, allowing the current to lose two-thirds of its momentum, and swirl past a crescent-shaped sandbar.

“You were correct when we did our library research,” Nolen said.  “The 1849 prospectors used the ravine as a convenient place to toss debris from the upstream mines.”

Digger scratched his white-stubbled chin, and squinted at the man-made dam.  “Perfect!  This here creek’s been washing through that ore from those old claims.  Even if we don’t find a hard rock vein, there’s bound to be gold on the bottom.”

“It’s perfect all right — perfectly dangerous.  You want me to dive to the bottom, fight the surge from the waterfall, and poke around in the dark for gold.  How long did it take you to dream up this idea?”

“Didn’t take no time a’tall,” the old man replied with a grin.  “Just thought about how you crave adventure.  Like when you were in the Army, jumping from airplanes with explosives strapped to your back, becoming a war hero by saving women and children.  I knew you wouldn’t back away from this site.”

Nolen lifted his binoculars to inspect the rock formations near the pool, looking for fingers of white quartz in the gray stone.  “Why is this spot so much better than the places we worked downstream yesterday, and the day before that?”

“Current.  Here, it’s fast and it’s tricky.  Sure to scare off most prospectors.  Working other locations would be much safer.”

Nolen returned to the pickup and entered site details into the computer program.  He analyzed the updated map on the laptop’s screen, with its red speckles of clustered numbers, highlighting the ten-square-mile box they had been searching during the last week.  Through some of the clusters, a white vector line sliced, predicting the presence of a gold vein.  “Well, the probability program agrees with you.  There’s a ten percent better chance here than downstream.”

“Yup, this could be the place where we find the eastern vein of the California mother lode.”  Smiling and flapping his elbows the old man danced a little jig in the sand.

“Digger, I’ve listened to your big dream for years.  All you need now is a nice little strike.  One with enough gold to pay off Hilda’s many medical bills, and allow you to take her to a good cancer specialist.”

“Don’t you forget — it’s your foster mother’s dream too.  That’s why she’s stood by me for the last twenty-six years, while I’ve prospected both sides of the Sierra Nevada.”  As he spoke, Digger traced a line across the unfolded survey map with his shaky hand.  “I’ve hunted gold from Mariposa in the south, to El Dorado in the north, one hundred twenty miles of the greatest gold country in the USA.”

“Long on hope, but short on results,” Nolen quipped.

“That’s why over the last eight years, I’ve been working more to the east, in the Reno-Susanville area.  It’s here someplace.”

“Not many promising surface signs,” Nolen replied.  “The original miners may have found all the lode gold in this area.”

“It’s been over a century and a half since then.  Lots of weather and earthquakes have exposed rock that hasn’t been worked yet.  Remember what I told you when we studied the mining records and old maps?  Any unfound veins are goin’ to be in overlooked or hard to reach spots.”

“Like the bottom of this pool?”  Nolen placed his hand on Diggers arm to quiet him.  “Hear that grinding noise?  That’s a boulder in the pool shifting after the sand has been washed away from its bottom.  The recent rains have got this stream raging.”  A shiver of apprehension shook Nolen.

“Don’t you worry about the pool.  After we find that branch of the mother lode, there’s goin’ be another gold rush in California.  It’ll be bigger than in 1849 when thousands of people from the east coast suffered months of hardship to come here.  Just imagine 100,000 people, in their cars and trucks, flooding into this area overnight.”

Nolen closed the computer and returned it to the cab of the truck.  “Digger, don’t forget all the problems that erupt with a huge strike.  Remember you taught me that more people steal gold from prospectors than find it on their own.”

“Stop being a pessimist, boy.  That high-tech program you wrote is goin’ to help find our vein.  I’ve finally got a technology as good — if not better — than the big exploration companies!  Those crooks can all kiss my ass now.”

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End of sample section.