Auraria: A Novel

by Tim Westover

  Chapter Four

  Holtzclaw’s success compensated the eerie feeling that he brought with him out of the Strickland house. Eleanor was not a ghost, even if her children seemed not to see her, even if she said nothing, even if her luminous skin had its own light. Holtzclaw resolved not to think on it any more. It mattered little to him what Edgar Strickland did with the money that Holtzclaw had paid him; the strained relations between Edgar and Eleanor, ghost or not, were unimportant to his mission. Holtzclaw’s interest in the matter should have ended when Edgar signed over the deed.

  The next property, which Holtzclaw feared would come with its own mystery, was at the head of the valley, upstream, at the foot of Sinking Mountain. Today’s road proved much less bewildering than yesterday’s. After a half hour’s walk, Holtzclaw arrived at a property owned by Shadrach Bogan.

  On Holtzclaw’s map, Shadburn had written “Vast empty swath of useless cleared land leading to empty mine tunnels,” but this was incorrect. The land was covered in close-packed pine trees, thick scrub, and patches of laurel and mountain hemlock.

  Holtzclaw found the property’s owner sitting in front of a crack in the mountainside. He was carving a new handle for a pickaxe from a tree branch. The knife he was using was far too large for the job, and yet Bogan whittled and whistled.

  “Help you?” said Bogan.

  “I am hoping we can help each other,” said Holtzclaw. “You are in possession of a piece of land, and I may be interested in purchasing it.” The direct method, Holtzclaw had found, was universally appropriate when facing parties that held large knives. They did not care for verbal tricks.

  “What do you need it for?” said Bogan.

  “I am a dealer in scrap metal.”

  “Well, there’s a ton of it down there under Sinking Mountain,” said Bogan. “Mostly gets in my way. Want to go take a look?” He gestured with his head toward the crack in the mountain. The passage was not braced up against collapse. Loose boulders were stacked to each side. “It used to have another way in, over on the widow’s side of the mountain, but I had to blast my own way in. Imagine, blast into my own mountain, ’cause I didn’t buy a front door! Look what I got instead.”

  Bogan got up and scurried over a line of boulders. On the other side, there was a lake.

  It was the last thing that Holtzclaw expected to see; he did not think lakes could emerge from hiding so suddenly. It ambushed him with its beauty.

  The lake was filled at one end by a waterfall and drained at the other end through jagged rocks. Stone, blasted into a crater, embraced the body of water; the sidewalls were deeply concave and fifty feet tall. The water was a deep blue, darker than a summer sky. Within the water, a vein of paler color—robin’s-egg blue—concentrated in one shaded pocket and then diffused in thin tendrils.

  “It’s astounding,” said Holtzclaw. “Does it have a name?”

  “’Course it has a name. Every hump and hummock has a name. Get two horses pissing next to each other, and someone will name the river they make. This started out as a fat spot in the creek. Some fellows were getting good pans just below here and then nothing higher upstream, past where the waterfall is. So they figured—smart fellows—that the gold must be right in here. They took some dynamite … what am I saying, some? They took a mess of dynamite and packed it all around here. Boom! Sudden lake, or sudden hole for a lake, and it doesn’t take the water long to fill it in. They must have blasted down into a spring to get that color. So they called it Cobalt Springs Lake.”

  It would be pleasant to own such a piece of property, thought Holtzclaw. He would put a cabin on the ridge, with a wide veranda that overlooked the waterfall. Perhaps he could persuade Shadburn to set aside this piece, which had no evident commercial value, and Holtzclaw could reinvest a part of his salary into this retreat. A cool place for his health to be sheltered from seasonal miasmas.

  “It’s a wrong lake,” said Bogan. “Unnatural. No fish in it. Bluer than the sky—nothing should be bluer than the sky. I’d rather drink from an honest pond: brown, muddy, filled with skeeters and crayfish, frogs singing on the edge of it.”

  That the lake was a product of industry only made it more attractive to Holtzclaw. He ran his fingers in the current—the water was cool and left his fingers tingling.

  Bogan continued his narrative. “Worst of it was, after those fellows set off the dynamite and made themselves a lake, they couldn’t find a bit of gold, upstream or downstream. You can try it with that hat of yours. You can run the sand three times through the rocker box. Completely empty, not a cent in the whole lake. Boy, that was the biggest news here in Auraria for months! What most people figured was that when they opened up that spring—the Cobalt Spring—all the gold got washed away. Whoosh! Like some flood. But I figured the gold had been running out of some tunnel, and when the fellows made their lake, they closed up that tunnel, and the gold stayed stuck in Sinking Mountain. Maybe even built up, like it was sediment. When the old owners absquatulated, they sold me this here Sinking Mountain, and the bottomlands where they had their camp, and Cobalt Springs Lake—they wouldn’t sell it without the lake, even though I didn’t want it. That’s enough about lakes. Are we going to go look at some scrap metal?”

  Holtzclaw eyed the precarious passage into the mountain. If he wanted to maintain his cover story, he had no choice. He nodded, and Bogan handed him a lantern.

  “Always check it for fuel before you go in. See, that’s got plenty in it. Take some matches and candles. Don’t want to run out of light—you’ll never get out! I got ropes, though we probably aren’t going to need them. Got some water and victuals too—couple peaches.”

  “Will we be gone that long?” said Holtzclaw.

  “Never know,” said Bogan. “Might find a treasure tunnel. Might sprain your ankle.” They passed through the narrow crack and into the darkness under the mountain. Within a few paces, the light from the outside world was gone. Two lanterns floated in the gloom.

  “You’d probably have to widen this part up a bit to bring up any of the larger pieces,” said Bogan. “I can help you with that. It would take some careful dynamiting. That’s what I’ve been doing for ten years now, careful dynamiting.”

  Holtzclaw kept his lantern close by. Its feeble light did not penetrate the darkness very far. The floor was uneven and jagged, as were the walls. Numerous side tunnels cut off to the left and right.

  “Those look like tunnels, but they only go a few feet,” said Bogan. Those were my mistakes. Took me eight months to make it through here. I didn’t want to bring the mountain down on me. Sometimes I had to feel out if the ceiling was going soft, and if it was, I had to back up and come another way. I was looking for the mine shaft, too, and if I felt like I was getting away from that, I would have to come back and rethink. Of course, the real aim was gold. A few times I chased a seam of quartz for a bit. Didn’t pan out, though! Sorry, that’s miner humor. Hey, here we go! I made this part nicer, so I wouldn’t need to pull out a rope every time I came through.”

  The tunnel veered left ninety degrees and descended on a set of rough-hewn steps, and then it opened up into another tunnel of a very different character. It was eight feet square with a smooth floor, along which ran a narrow gauge rail.

  “If you head left, you’ll get to the end of the old tunnel and then into my diggings. Not much there for a buyer like you. We’ll head to the right. You could pull up all this rail line here. I don’t need it. You might leave it until the end, though, because it would help you move the bigger pieces.”

  “Bigger pieces?” said Holtzclaw, though he hardly needed to encourage the garrulous miner to continue.

  “Like this mine cart up ahead here. All metal, even the sides. Wheels still turn. Not rusted because I’ve kept it out of the water. A solid piece of equipment.”

  The mine cart straddled the narrow gauge track and filled the width of the tunnel. Holtzclaw squeezed past it along the far side, inspecting it for show.

>   “Whoa whoa whoa!” Bogan grabbed Holtzclaw’s arm and pulled him back. Holtzclaw’s lantern revealed a pit large enough to swallow up an inattentive miner.

  “I near fell in that one myself,” said Bogan. “I was pushing a different cart along here, moving some rock out of my way. Well, the track had bent whenever this hole was made, and I didn’t see that. The cart flipped over. I had the good sense to not fight it, to let it go. The whole mine cart just disappeared. I never even heard it hit the bottom. A big heavy thing like that, imagine! Not even a clatter.”

  Holtzclaw kicked a rock over the precipice. It bounced twice off the sides of the drop. He stood listening for a minute, but no sound reported the depth.

  “I leave that cart there to remind me about the hole. Sometimes you get sleepy down here. Only takes one mistake.”

  Bogan edged past the cart on the opposite side from the pit. They turned down a side passage. Holtzclaw placed his hand against the wall to steady himself. Its surface was cool, slick, and damp.

  “Is there a spring here?” asked Holtzclaw.

  “Springs everywhere. Painter’s Creek running over our heads, down the side of Sinking Mountain. All the mountains here are filled with water. It’s because there’s a layer of some hard stone above us that this tunnel stays dry. The water’s got to find a different way to go. Where the water goes, that’s where the gold goes too.”

  A fat drop of water fell from a crevice over head. It plopped plumply onto Bogan’s face, leaving him sputtering, and from there rebounded wondrously over the glass of the lamp, which guttered and fizzled in an instant.

  “Mules take it!” cried Bogan, and there followed a terrible crash of metal clattering over rock. Bogan had tossed his extinguished lamp in frustration. He skittered after it.

  “Sometimes, it’s just so hard, don’t you know?” said Bogan, out of the darkness.

  Holtzclaw held up his lamp so that Bogan could relight his.

  “I’m sorry about that,” said Bogan. “It’s a sickness of the deep. Us folks that don’t see the light so much, sometimes we get a little wrathy. Not that I’d really want to give up digging. That’s me, you see. I’m a digger, or a miner, I should say. But sometimes, that sickness. It just makes you think—it would be nice to spend some time in the sun.”

  Holtzclaw nodded. “Perhaps I can help with that.”

  “Well, I’d hope so. Have you seen enough yet to make me an offer on the scrap?”

  “Let’s get on back to the realm of the light,” said Holtzclaw. “It’s a bit hard to write a contract down here, in the dark.”

  A bit of bluster came back into Bogan. “The way I figure it, while I got you down here, I might get another few bucks as a tip,” he said. “You know, for being your guide. There’s the rails, six big pumps—I’ll keep the one nearest my diggings—ten mine carts, then the statue, the beds, the huts, the chandelier, all of those cups and pipes and troughs.” Holtzclaw raised an eyebrow at the mention of such variety. “You would think there’s not much down here, but every tunnel is filled with so many things. Glance up and down the big tunnel, and it might look empty. Look down the side passages, on the other side of the mine cart, and it’s like the shelves of a store.”

  “There is another matter,” said Holtzclaw. “To bring all this selection up to the surface, I will need room on land. Space for a camp, a smelting and refashioning operation, even as a staging area for some other reclamation projects in the area.”

  “So you want to buy the land too? Couldn’t let that happen. I have ten years of digging here.”

  “I don’t mean to buy your diggings. You’ll retain the mineral rights. I need only the trees, or rather, the earth on which those trees stand.”

  “Well, my stars, I didn’t know that you could just buy and sell the outside and leave the innards. I wouldn’t have bought all that up there. Empty lake? Scrubby trees? What do I care? If you want it, Mr. Holtzclaw, you can have it.”

  Bogan held both lamps, which provided just enough light for Holtzclaw, bearing down on the rusted pump, to perform his tallies. Bogan argued over the prices Holtzclaw assigned to the various pieces of scrap, most of which Holtzclaw had not seen, but he said not a word against Holtzclaw’s price per acre for the surface land. Holtzclaw regretted not reducing his offer to offset the concessions he was making for scrap iron.

  “And what about the mineral rights?” said Bogan. Holtzclaw appended a standard clause to the contract, asserting that any minerals to be discovered below the described property would remain the property of Bogan. It was a powerful clause not because of what it asserted, but what it lacked. The wording did not compel Shadburn to conduct any mining operation or even to let Bogan enter his tunnels.

  Bogan and Holtzclaw began to retrace their steps out of the tunnels. “Did you see the bats?” said Bogan. “They always come back to the same place every year. If one is missing, it’s not because he’s found a new home.” Bogan held up his lantern three inches from a crevice. Inside was a small warm creature, softly breathing.

  “You’re going to wake him up,” said Holtzclaw.

  “Hasn’t happened yet.”

  •

  At the threshold of the outside, Bogan bid farewell to Holtzclaw and turned back into the mines. Holtzclaw stepped alone into the sunlight, then crossed over the rocky slope again to inspect his new lake and shake off the dank of the mines. The sun had traveled behind a high ridge of Sinking Mountain and its thick cover of trees, bringing a premature afternoon to the hollow. The cobalt blue water took on a deeper hue. It was an unusual lake, to be sure, but Holtzclaw was glad that the oddities in Auraria were not all eerie and unpleasant. Nature and dynamite had made a lovely work here. Neither could have done it without the other.

  His next purchase was halfway back to town, and Holtzclaw was certain that it would not call for another underground excursion. On the plat map, the property was listed as a small farm containing a cabin, barn, and springhouse. As he neared, he was struck by a chill. The weather had turned cold; Holtzclaw wished he had brought an overcoat to guard against the wind. Strange, that an eastern exposure site should be cooler than its neighbors! The suddenness of the chill reminded him of the bathers from the previous night, but the air felt different. The teeth of the wind gnawed at his fingertips, and he shoved his free hand into his pocket. The other hand gripped the walking stick.

  Holtzclaw reached a break in a split-rail fence that marked the property; the fence was rimed with frost, a remnant of cold dew. The ground was crisp, and a hundred paces onto the property, Holtzclaw slipped on snow.

  The farm resembled a Currier and Ives winter scene, but without the human comforts. No roaring fires or sleds or roasting chestnuts. The roof of the farmhouse was layered with snow several feet thick, and its walls groaned under the weight. Only a few of the thickest tree branches remained intact, and even these bore a load of ice. A drift of snow had piled against the sides of the barn so high that one could have walked up on to the roof; a few chickens had done so, but now they were frozen ornaments. A lean mule roamed the farmyard, digging holes in the snow with a scrawny hoof.

  Holtzclaw was dumbstruck. He pushed his gold-panning hat low down over his ears, which were already complaining of frost. He tried to turn up the collar of his traveling cloak, but it wouldn’t stay. Nothing in his wardrobe was suited to tundra in the Georgia mountains.

  But he should have been prepared for it. A good traveler is prepared for anything, including the unseasonable weather that one may find in the higher elevations, sheltered coves, more northerly latitudes, and complex terrain of the mountains, which might conduct Arctic air this far south. This seemed an extreme example of such phenomena—and one nearly beyond belief—and yet Holtzclaw still should have been prepared.

  Holtzclaw knocked at the farmhouse, but there was no answer. He braved the icy blasts and continued across the property, searching for the owner. The source of the cold was a small structure in a grove of ice pillars that
had once been trees. He recognized this as a springhouse. Rural people, lacking iceboxes, dig down several feet around a spring, then build a small hut over their diggings. Inside are shelves filled with turnips, potatoes, apples, peaches, and other produce. Some even pack up winter ice in layers of straw. As long as the door of the springhouse is shut, the dark and damp conditions keep the food cool.

  The door of this springhouse had a gaping hole in it. Holtzclaw could not approach to investigate. Looking at the springhouse was like turning toward the storm. A well-equipped polar expedition could come nearer, but Holtzclaw could not. He pressed on to find the owner.

  The creek in the rear of the property flowed at a trickle among the ice-covered rocks. A reedy figure dipped a pan into the feeble flow, swirled its contents, and then tipped them out with disgust.

  “It’s terrible weather we’re having, isn’t it?” said the man. “Name’s Moss.”

  “Holtzclaw, delighted to meet you. The weather is peculiar to your property, Mr. Moss. Down in the valley, it’s a pleasant day.”

  “Well, don’t that beat all. Seems like it’s been snowing hard ever since I can remember. It’s that springhouse, I reckon. Always cold in there, and I know I let it out. It’s that door. I’ll fix it someday, but I’m always too busy.” He held up the pan.

  Realizing that the conversation was turning against him, Holtzclaw changed tactics, hoping to make a deal; the explanation and solution to this bizarre weather would have to wait. Holtzclaw gestured to Moss’s pan. “How’s your luck today?”

  “Not so good right now. The funny thing about luck is that it likes to change on you. The more bad luck you get, that’s just the more certain you’ll get some good luck soon. The Five Forks Creek hasn’t given up all that it’s got.”

  At the edge of the creek was a hole cleared in the ice. Moss scratched in it with clumsy blue-tipped fingers and loosened a few handfuls of half-frozen black mud, which he transferred to his pan and worked with practiced motions. But either the creek was overzealous in its work and carried away the gold downstream, or more likely, there was no gold to find in the black mud.

  “I have a business proposition that you might consider a turn of luck,” said Holtzclaw. “Is there a warmer place we can discuss it?”

  “I’m fine here,” said Moss.

  “Yes, but I wasn’t prepared for a blizzard.”

  “That’s a personal problem.” Moss was intent on his work.

  Holtzclaw shivered again as he watched Moss dip another pan into the creek and wash its contents downriver.

  “Do you care to hear my business proposition?” asked Holtzclaw.

  “Will it cost me anything to listen?”

  “Of course not. I would propose to buy from you, at a fair price, your farmlands and pay immediately in federal notes, or if you prefer, gold coins.” He spoke quickly, hoping to get back to more seasonable weather.

  “Buy the farmlands? You want to get in before the harvest. We have a good crop of corn coming up this year.”

  Holtzclaw had not seen any corn, frozen or fresh. “We can make allowances for future crop yields, structural improvements, and mineral rights.”

  “You’d buy the gold still in the ground?”

  “I haven’t seen any gold. But if you had other provable minerals, like coal or iron, those can be considered.”

  “What do you need my farm so bad for that you’d just walk up and buy it?”

  “It is a convenience, not a necessity. I deal in scrap metal, and we are excavating a few of the abandoned mines here in the Lost Creek Valley. To move the scrap, we need a right-of-way, and it would be easiest to run through the land of your farm.” It was nonsense, but it would have been more convincing if Holtzclaw’s teeth were not chattering.

  Moss did not look up from his panning. “What do you think you’d pay for a place like this? Only because I’m curious.”

  Holtzclaw began his ritual of tabulation. He may as well have been quoting tonnage rates on cotton or rainfall rates in the desert for all the impact that the figures had on Moss.

  “I just couldn’t do it,” said Moss, interrupting. “One good strike here in the creek and I’d have half again as much as that.”

  “You’ve been digging here for how many years? Five? Ten?” said Holtzclaw, his frustration rushing out. “And what have you found? I don’t even see how there could be gold here. Where would the vein be? How would it wash into the creek? Yet it doesn’t stop you from looking. Your crops are dead, your trees are bare sticks, your farm is frozen over because your head was so filled with saw dust that you couldn’t remember to fix the door on your springhouse. Here comes a rare chance, a piece of good fortune such as you haven’t had in all your years. I am offering you gold, man, gold! You can pretend that you found it digging and panning because it’s almost the truth. Instead, you tell me that you’re going to keep the property, all this ice and dirt, because you’ve found nothing.”

  “Yes, that’s why I can’t sell. Because I’ve found nothing yet.”

  Furious and freezing, Holtzclaw stormed away. Of all the owners that Holtzclaw had met, Moss should have been the most eager to sell his worthless frosted property. And the absence of gold was not evidence of a future reward—that’s the gambler’s fallacy. But Holtzclaw couldn’t persuade Moss by pointing out his irrationalities. Moss lived in the midst of one.

  A sheet of snow began to fall upon Holtzclaw’s new hat, dampening it. He plotted his next move. It would be interesting to see Moss’s change of mind if he were to find a piece of gold on his property. He might redouble his digging efforts, chasing the next nugget because one is never enough, and work himself into a pneumonia from which the property might be wrested. Or Moss might trade the nugget for a bellyful of drink and from that state find himself landless.

  These possibilities gummed up in the small moral caramel of Holtzclaw’s brain: the sweet sticky morsel that was to blame for occasional sentimentality in difficult situations.

  Still, hiding a piece of gold on a man’s property—giving him a gold nugget! This could not be considered a crime. It would break the impasse. He could not use a gold coin from his collection. A jeweler could melt one into a convincing lump, but Holtzclaw doubted he could find a discreet accomplice on short notice. Holtzclaw could try melting coins in his fireplace. When would Moss be absent from his creek? Could Holtzclaw endure the wintry blast from the springhouse long enough to plant the nugget a few inches deep?

  Holtzclaw had traveled a quarter mile along the road and into warmer winds, before he heard frantic calling behind him. “Wait, sir, wait, wait!” He turned around to see a flushed Moss rushing to him. “Is the offer still good? Will you still buy?”

  “I suppose that in ten minutes, little could happen to the land that would change the offer.”

  “Everything’s changed. I took the luck from it.” Moss thrust a piece of metal toward Holtzclaw. It was gold—a thin, reedy piece. It did not resemble other nuggets that Holtzclaw had seen, which were globular and smooth, like candle wax dripped into a bucket. But however unusual it was, Moss’s nugget was larger than a squirrel turd and would be celebrated in the local taverns.

  “You found this in the dirt where you were digging?” Holtzclaw struggled to suppress the excitement in his voice.

  “Just about three pans farther down. Hoo boy, it finally happened!”

  “And you want to sell now? Your auriferous creek? Your gilded muck and golden sand? Now that you know there’s gold there?”

  “There’s no luck in the land now. You can dig and dig there all you want. You could dig until winter, dig until the creek freezes over, dig until the world freezes over. You’re not going to find anything. I knew there was one good strike in that farm, and I struck it, and now I’m going to move on.”

  “Well, if that is your decision, sir,” said Holtzclaw. “Would you like the sum remitted in federal notes or gold coin?”

  “I got my gold. You can pay me in notes.
Better for traveling anyway.”

  Both men were filled with glee—Moss at what he’d found; Holtzclaw at what he hoped to find. And the promise of the land was enhanced by the thrill of success. He’d had never bought a lake and a gold-bearing creek in the same day. Even Shadburn would think it remarkable.

  •

  From Moss’s farm, Holtzclaw bounded along the shore of the Five Forks Creek, which flowed cool and free outside the influence of the peculiar weather around the springhouse. When the air had warmed back up to its usual temperature, Holtzclaw paused to rest on a fallen tree that extended into the creek. His fingers were chapped, but they were flexible again. The bite of frost at the end of his nose was healed. Nothing could be more splendid except for a bit of something to eat and drink.

  He had been hurrying the whole morning, and a dull hunger rumbled in his gut. He should have bought something at the confectioner’s shop, but he had been distracted by Abigail, and now he was short on provisions. He would have to stop in town for some sustenance, if he did not want to expire on the road. One of the properties he had to buy was back in town. If he aimed for this one now, he would be able to have a little dinner and not cause too much delay. With everything on schedule, he could afford the slightly circuitous route.

  Holtzclaw bent down for a handful of water; when he lifted his head, he saw that he was not alone. Princess Trahlyta sat on the log beside him, dangling her feet into the flowing creek. She had become his special familiar.

  “Hello, Princess Trahlyta,” said Holtzclaw. “What a coincidence.”

  “How is your ankle, James?”

  “Well enough to walk on, thank you. How have you happened to come here?”

  “I’m making my rounds,” she said. “A royal tour.”

  “Have you been following me all morning?”

  “I’ve taken an interest in you, James.”

  “An interest? A pestilence, more like. Why are you pushing your nose into my business?”

  “I had a gift for Moss. It’s not my custom to give away gold. It does so little good. But this is a special chance.”

  “You hid that nugget on his land?”

  “Gold is not rare, James. It’s just shy. It is happiest in the darkness, and it’s very angry when it’s pulled into the light.”

  Holtzclaw’s spurt of anger turned to pity. Whose money had she given away? Would she be punished?

  “Moss is a forgetful man,” said Princess Trahlyta. “He wouldn’t fix his springhouse door. Here, all the mothers say, ‘Young man! Close that springhouse door! You’re letting the cold out! Are you trying to freeze over all of outdoors?’ He couldn’t be trusted to keep watch. He was distracted enough to let his farm freeze over. In time, it would have been the entire valley.”

  “So you are proposing that that blizzard is caused by a wondrous springhouse and not by some local phenomenon? The crook of the valley? The shade of the trees? Shortened days or isolated winds? I find these explanations more reasonable.”

  “Do you really? James, it’s a lovely day everywhere else, except for Moss’s springhouse. I would think that a better explanation—for haunted pianos and ghost wives and sudden blizzards—is that Auraria has its own particular spirits.”

  “The laws of nature are general, not particular.”

  “But you’ve got snow on your boots.”

  The princess smiled and slid off the fallen tree into the creek. Water rushed past her knees. “Moss would have found that nugget, but not for years. We all would have been so cold.”

  She had helped him, thought Holtzclaw. It was a strange way to help—not profitable, certainly. But the money had not been his or Shadburn’s, and so what was it to him? The end result was just what he wanted.

  “Well, I suppose I should be grateful to you, Princess,” he said. “You paid off Moss, got him to sell his property, and now my employer can do something useful with that land. We won’t let it go to frozen waste.”

  “And it’s the same with the others too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, James. You are not as persuasive as you suppose. Strickland needed no convincing; he’s been wanting to leave for years. But when the widow Smith Patterson stretched her bones, and they groaned and shuddered, and she felt that weariness of the world inside her and thought, perhaps, she’d like to put up her feet—well, who whispered to the wind to gnaw at her? And when the water dribbled on Bogan’s head and put out his lamp, the last in a long line of struggles and vanities that made him consider that, perhaps, he’d do well to sell his land? They are the smallest little streams, Holtzclaw, and yet they did the work that you could not.”

  Holtzclaw stuck his walking stick deeper into the mud. “You should give me some more faith than that, Princess. I’ve been apprentice to the greatest negotiator since Demosthenes for more years than I care to recount. I know all the tricks. The Asheville Attitude. The Fitzgerald Flip. And I have gold—local gold. Do these count for nothing?”

  “Less than you’d suppose, James.”

  Holtzclaw hurriedly turned away to go—there was no point in debating over such absurdities. But he’d only gone three steps before he spun again and marched back to the princess. He was taller than she was, but he didn’t feel it. He couldn’t lord himself over her, and thus his question came out with less vitriol and more pleading than he’d wanted.

  “If you could do these things—why would you?”

  “For the same reasons that you have, James! We want to please our employers.”

  “Aha!” But what company would employ such a strange girl as its emissary? “Who are you working for? Is it those men from the Old Rock Falls?”

  “Just the opposite,” said the princess.

  “My employers have no love for gold. They want to be rid of it.”

  “Then they must be even stranger than you, Princess. What do they want instead?”

  “They want to leave this valley with less than they came with. They want a healthful holiday.”

  “Tourists?”

  The princess nodded. “We have good water here.”

  “Where do they stay? At the Old Rock Falls? It has at least one peculiar inhabitant already. That trick piano.”

  “Oh, James. It will take you much longer to adjust if you keep fighting with Mr. Bad Thing. You’ll never settle in to the valley if you insist on doubting what you see here.”

  “I don’t mean to settle in. I want to finish my tasks and then depart.”

  “You’ve already started to settle. You’ve drunk our water. You saw a boy catch a wild wonder fish from the mist. You’ve met several ghosts, even tipped your hat to them. You’ve seen my employers—their bathing habits, their old passages. You shielded your ears from a wind blowing out of a springhouse, a wind like you’ve never felt before. You’ve seen the laws of nature made particular, not general. And here we are, having a nice chat. You haven’t gone raving mad.”

  Holtzclaw leaned toward the creek and brought up another handful of water. He examined it in his cupped palms. It looked like ordinary water, clear and fresh. He sniffed it and detected a slight metallic odor. But many springs and resorts praise their water’s mineral content. He tasted it, musing over the flavors as he would a fine claret. There was nothing to surprise him here.

  If these things that she’d mentioned are spirits, and not just fantastic tricks, and if they do have some peculiar nature here in Auraria—well, it doesn’t matter much, does it? Money still spends the same in Auraria as it does anywhere. Whether a bit of land is covered in sweet potatoes or in supernatural frost did not change Holtzclaw’s purpose. He saw no profit in being perplexed.

  “That’s a start, James.” The princess left him with a curtsey at the edge of the Five Forks Creek. She sauntered across the flowing face of the water as though it were a paved pathway. It was a curiosity, to be sure, but Holtzclaw repressed any astonishment. Local spirits are bound by land deeds, just like any other soul.