The Gold Seekers Read Online Free PDF Page B

did try to get to them?”
    The old man inclined his balding white head. He said regretfully, “Oh, we tried all right, son, but it was hopeless. Tons o’ rock was brought down, you see, an’ even if we’d been able to shift it, there was no chance of any of them being’ alive. No chance at all.” He patted Luke’s slumped shoulders in an awkward gesture of sympathy. “You best stop here in camp tonight, an’ I’ll go out with you in the mornin’, so’s you can see for yourself. You won’t have eaten, I don’t suppose?”
    “No,” Luke admitted dully. “But I don’t want nothin’.” He was appalled by what Crocker had told him, and bewildered also, for had not Jasper Morgan always claimed to be an expert at handling blasting powder? An expert would not have permitted men to be inside the mine when a charge was about to be set off, and in the past Morgan had been careful —meticulously so. And the gunpowder had always been kept at a safe distance, with only the amount required for each charge taken to the rock face.
    He started to say this, but Crocker exchanged glances with the storekeeper and then said reluctantly, “Cap’n Morgan wasn’t there, son. He come through here in his wagon the day before it happened. Stopped at the store for supplies an’ told Mr. Logan he was on his way to ‘Frisco—that’s right, ain’t it, Mike?” Logan nodded, and the miners’ elected leader went on, avoiding Luke’s gaze, “So we all figure that ‘twas an accident. Maybe your brother and those two Australian boys he worked with weren’t—well, maybe they didn’t know how to handle the blasting powder. An’ with the cap’n not there …”
    He left his sentence unfinished, hanging in the air between them, with all its implications as plain to Luke as if he had voiced them. He bit back an indignant denial; Crocker was not trying to hurt him, he knew, but Dan was—had been —no fool. They all had learned to handle the powder charges under Morgan’s tuition, and Dan wasn’t one to take risks with other men’s lives, any more than with his own. It
    simply did not make sense. Luke’s brows met in an unhappy pucker as he tried to puzzle it out.
    Jasper Morgan had gone to San Francisco, as he had said he would, taking their gold—the partnership’s gold—with him, to sell to the United States Mint.
    “Did the captain have the girl with him, Mr. Logan?” he forced himself to ask. “His daughter, I mean?”
    Once again the two older men exchanged glances, and then Logan shook his head. “Nope, he was alone, Luke.”
    That, at least, was a relief, and Luke’s expression lightened. If Morgan had left his daughter behind, he would have to come back—Dan had been certain on that score. And then, when he had paid them their share of the money, they— Luke stiffened, and for all his effort to prevent it, a sob escaped him, as he remembered.
    Dan and the other two could not claim their shares. They were dead, all three of them, which meant that as the only other surviving partner he would have to claim their shares as well as his own—fifty percent, the same as Morgan’s. He would find a way to send Tom’s and Frankie’s shares to their folks in Australia; that was the least he could do, of course. And maybe he could talk Pa into accepting Dan’s—to give to the church, if that was what he wanted to do. He …
    Young Ted brought him a mug of scalding black coffee, and Luke sipped it gratefully, preferring it to the whiskey. Ephraim Crocker sat down and waited until he had drunk it, then asked thoughtfully, “Why did Cap’n Morgan go to ‘Frisco, son, d’you know? What reason had he?”
    “He went to sell our gold to the Mint, Mr. Crocker,” Luke answered, and broke off, belatedly recalling jasper Morgan’s insistence that he was not to talk of their strike to the men of Thayer’s Bend.
    Crocker eyed him with narrowed lids. “You made a strike, then?”
    There was no point now in attempting