Barkerville Gold Read Online Free PDF Page A

Sheila. The girls stood side by side on the plank sidewalk, squinting against a cloud of dry dust that blew in their faces from the road several feet below.
    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.
    â€œIt’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.”
    â€œI 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.
    â€œWhat 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.
    â€œSorry,” Rusty murmured. And decided to make a hasty retreat. He stepped quickly back and landed on something soft. A