It was getting dark when I found Pete’s shack. It had at one time been the operating house on a gold dredger, with windows all around it. About half of the windows were covered with tin which Pete had flattened out from old five gallon coal-oil cans and nailed over the openings.
Pete was somewhere in the late sixties. He was big-boned and didn’t carry much flesh. There was no sag to him anywhere. His last name was Digger.
“What do you want?” he asked, indicating a homemade bench by a dilapidated stove which had been salvaged from a junk pile. There was a fire going in the stove, and a pot of beans simmering.
“I’m trying to get some of the old history of the place,” I said.
“What you want it for?”
“I’m a writer.”
“What you writing?”
“A history of gold dredging.”
Pete took the pipestem from his mouth and jerked it over his shoulder in the general direction of Valleydale. “They can tell you all about it.”
“They seem rather prejudiced,” I said.