Chapter nine
Valleydale had at one time been something about which a Chamber of Commerce could wax eloquent. The mountains, covered with digger pine, chaparral, manzanita, and, lower down, with big live oaks, broke into peaceful rolling hills, then into what had once been a fertile agricultural valley.
Now, it was a mass of rocks, piled in serrated ridges where the conveyor belts of the gold dredgers had dumped them. They were rounded rocks that had been worn by ancient glaciers and rivers. They were the bones of what had at one time been huge boulders, and now they glistened in the sunlight like bleached bones in the desert. Here and there an attempt had been made to level off the ground and plant orchards. On the rolling hillsides which the dredgers hadn’t touched, the massive oaks cast dark pools of inviting shadow. The slopes were broken here and there with bits of vineyard and, in places, with the green of orchards. They gave a clue to what the country must have been at one time.
A river, flowing down from the mountains, broke through a cut near the town of Valleydale, spread out into smooth placid waters, and then ran through the ugly piles of rock tailings.
I found an auto court and registered, giving the license of the agency car and the name of Donald Lam. Later on, when it would be necessary to account for every minute of my time to the police, I didn’t want to have it appear that I’d taken an alias, or resorted to flight.
I went right to work.
The people who were left in the town hated gold-dredging with a bitter hatred. The ones who had owned the land originally had made their clean-up, taken the cash, and gone to the bigger cities. The dredgers had pumped prosperity into the town through pay rolls, machine shops, and offices, then they had worked out the ground. The machine shops had been moved. The offices stood deserted. There was an air of funereal despair about the town. Those who were left went dejectedly about their business, moving with the listless lassitude of persons who have lost their chance at winning big stakes and are plugging away simply because they can’t figure out how to quit.
No one knew what had happened to the records of the dredging company. The head office had always been somewhere else. The books were gone, the machinery was gone, and the employees were gone.
I made inquiries to find whether some of the old employees were still in the country. A man who kept a dry-goods store told me he thought an old hermit bachelor named Pete Something-or-Other had worked on the original dredgers and on the drills when the ground was prospected. He didn’t know Pete’s last name, and didn’t know exactly where he lived, but he had a shack about a mile down the river. There was a little strip of land the dredgers hadn’t got. Pete lived on it. He came into town once in a while for supplies. He paid cash and wasn’t sociable. No one seemed to know exactly how he lived.
I learned that a new company was planning to use some sort of a new invention to put the rocks underneath and bring the soil back on top. Old-timers said that even if the soil were put back on top, it would be years before it could grow anything. Others were of the opinion that scientific fertilization would have it producing crops in no time. None of them tried to marshal facts and reach an intelligent, impartial opinion from those facts. They advanced an opinion first, then selected illustrations, gossip, and garbled rumor to support that opinion. Anything which didn’t support it was ignored entirely. I figured there wasn’t much chance of finding out anything from them.