by Gwen Moffat
Below her the continent unrolled: snow, forests, plains, the Rockies. She was suddenly wide awake, seeing his face again and properly. All trace of sensuousness had gone. The hint of a smile remained but she thought it was unconscious, that his lips would often lift at the corners, even when he was angry. The mouth curved upwards but the eyes that observed Miss Pink were merely observant. Of course, she chided herself, the situation was subjective; she was bound for a land which she adored, she was excited and receptive, her mind seduced by the sense of adventure.
What had happened there as she dozed was that it was she who was asking questions: wondering if she was starting in the wrong place, should have flown to Omaha, where he had landed. But Gabriel was only a few hundred miles from San Francisco … He had been fit, bored but looking forward to the mountains when he was in Gabriel. ‘Leaving tomorrow thank God.’ Could he have been drinking when he wrote that? Taking his last postcard from her briefcase, she studied the dilapidated store fronts. They might have been studio furniture, throw-outs from Hollywood, tourist gimmicks. If there was a bar or a motel in Gabriel they were behind the photographer. On the other hand Argent could have brought his own liquor with him, could have slept rough – but what had attracted him to Gabriel in the first place?
‘It’s just a collection of shacks, it’ll blow away one day in a high wind.’ Irving Dodge spoke absently, his attention on a mamillaria deserti on the greenhouse shelf. ‘Wide place in the road,’ he murmured. ‘Silver mines, not gold.’
‘It’s close to Nevada,’ Miss Pink said. ‘It would be silver, wouldn’t it? All the gold’s on the Pacific slope, in California.’
‘Not always.’ Grace Dodge straightened from her weeding and looked in at the open window. ‘There’s gold on the east slope of the Sierras too. Bodie was gold, and that’s way out in the desert. So was Dogtown. Gabriel could have been either. Is it important?’
‘I wouldn’t think so. My feeling is that Tim Argent’s silence relates to something personal, and something more recent than an old mine.’
‘Unless he fell down a shaft,’ Irving said, suddenly intrigued.
Grace Dodge’s pleasant face registered protest but she caught their guest’s expression and hesitated. Irving’s smile faded. ‘Not to be taken seriously,’ he assured them.
The Dodges were old friends of Miss Pink and she had taken them into her confidence. She could trust them not to spread word of her true mission (already, among their circle, she was using the cover of a new book to explain her presence in California) and she needed their help. Who better to fill her in than a botanist and an amateur naturalist who travelled widely in the Southwest?
The Dodges didn’t look like great travellers: elderly and rotund, they would never walk when they could take a car – but they had the facts, they provided a launching pad. Now she considered Irving’s last remark. ‘Everything’s to be taken seriously,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe the problem is drink or a woman, or even both of those. He’d have got in touch. But experienced explorers don’t fall down mineshafts.’
‘Unless he was pushed.’ It slipped out. Grace hadn’t meant to say it and her hand flew to her lips. ‘I read too much crime,’ she said.
Miss Pink and Irving emerged from the greenhouse, a marmalade cat weaving about their ankles. Miss Pink frowned. ‘As far as I can make out, the Joplins went over a pass to the west of Gabriel. But there’s no pass marked on the map.’
‘No road,’ Irving said. ‘There’s Breakneck Pass further south, and west of Dogtown, but nothing approaches it from this side. No road, I mean. There’s a Forest road serves the Pacific slope. The loggers use it.’
‘There’s a ranch road coming over Breakneck from Dogtown,’ Grace said. ‘It’s the way they take the cattle to Palmer Meadows.’
‘And then you’ve got a stretch of high country,’ Irving told Miss Pink, ‘with the odd dirt road – pretty primitive, and hopeless without four-wheel drive. We were up there once looking for condors but we were in a big party on a Sierra Club excursion; you’d be mad to risk it alone, even in a Jeep – ’
They exchanged startled glances. They’d all had the same thought but it was Miss Pink who voiced it: ‘In a place like that he might have gone over the edge and no one would know?’
Irving shrugged. ‘Anything could have happened. Don’t go that way, Melinda. Cross the Sierras by Tioga Pass and approach Gabriel from the north. And if you do come to suspect he’s had an accident in the high country, contact the police. Don’t tackle that area of the Sierras on your own.’
‘I want to avoid the police.’
‘Then hire a guide,’ Grace urged. ‘There are lots of packers on the other side who take hunters in the mountains in the fall. You’ll be safe on a horse and with a local man.’
‘A local man could be just who she shouldn’t take.’
‘Irving, for Heavens’ sakes!’
Lying in her bath, a Tio Pepe on the side, Miss Pink reflected on the conversation and found it bizarre. The coastal foothills south of San Francisco are a lotus-land, for climate and culture, and ahead of her was an evening of good food and wine, friends, the opera, and the drive home from the city above the sable light-sprinkled bay. It was a lush sophisticated world where the name Timothy Argent meant a book on the coffee table, an exciting personality on the box, not a black hole out there on the other side of the Sierras.
The opera was her send-off. Next day she crossed California, west to east, from the Pacific Ocean to the Sierra Nevada. The afternoon found her climbing through Yosemite’s forests to Tioga Pass, her hired Cherokee pulling well on the long gradients. The sun was behind her and ahead was the granite crest of the mountains. Beyond them were the deserts.
The Cherokee drifted across the high meadows where the Tuolumne River ran clear and shallow between low banks and rock domes reared like mammoths above the conifers. She came to Tioga and started the long descent to Mono Lake. Around ten thousand feet the air and the light were exquisite, tempting her to stop. But there was no point in stopping unless she were to stay there – and she had taken the king’s shilling; there was work ahead. She looked at the dim blue smear of Mono Lake and grimaced. Down there, three thousand feet below, the temperature would be around a hundred Fahrenheit.
She was wrong. The deserts were sweltering in a heat wave and even beside Mono, on the fringe of the Mojave Desert where the lake shore was fretted with salt pinnacles, it was 110 degrees.
She turned south, running parallel with the tall escarpment. As the miles unrolled she caught glimpses of towers and minarets at the heads of deep canyons, and she stopped regretting Yosemite; the Sierras continued for a hundred and sixty miles beyond Tioga and somewhere in that high country of timber and granite was the Joplin Trail.
Shadows stretched across her road and the air, which had seemed stagnant in the sun, began to move. It was still velvety, not sparkling as it had been on top, but with the windows and sunroof open there were air currents inside the Cherokee. She needed them. After three hundred miles of hard driving she was running out of steam, but with shade and a breeze she thought she might reach Gabriel tonight.
Near Endeavor, not a hundred miles from Mono Lake, she found herself bumping along the sandy shoulder. There was a derisive blast from a horn, fading as a pick-up passed. She allowed the sand to stop the truck and she switched off the ignition, trembling.
When she had recovered, had walked round her vehicle once or twice and leaned on its far side, breathing deeply and absorbing the lovely line of the mountains, she climbed back behind the wheel and drove on to find a bed in Endeavor.
Her cover story was accepted without question. Waking with a clear mind she realised that she was already on Argent’s trail, had struck it after coming down from Tioga. The Joplins came this way, pushing south, searching for a pass that was clear of snow.
In the local library she was received with courtesy but without surprise. They were accustomed to visits from historians and W
estern buffs following the old trails. Even English people were not unknown at the library; there had been one from London back in the summer: Timothy Argent, the travel writer. Miss Pink was fascinated; was he researching a book?
The librarian, plump and middle-aged, beamed. ‘The Joplin story, isn’t that something: to be written up by Timothy Argent! He knew Permelia Joplin’s journal by heart. What he didn’t know was which way they crossed the mountains. I was able to help him there.’
‘It was Breakneck Pass – surely?’
‘No, not at all. They went up Danger Canyon and over Deadboy Pass.’ Seeing Miss Pink’s bewilderment the other was indulgent. ‘It’s only tradition says they went over Breakneck, because the road’s there, but the road was put in fifty years after the Joplins came through. Deadboy Pass is named for the child in the Joplin train that died of pneumonia.’
‘I see.’ Miss Pink was thoughtful. ‘Was this Argent’s theory?’
‘It’s not a theory, it’s what happened. It was me told Timothy. He was impressed, said he’d go that way. I had to warn him, other people had theories, he’d meet plenty of those where he was going – ’ her voice took on a sinister timbre, ‘ – Timothy just didn’t know what he was getting into. They’d be on to him like buzzards. I warned him – and he loved it! Said so. “I love it,” he said.’
‘Warned him about what?’
‘Why, all those crazy ideas about they went up Crazy Mule Canyon – and like you said: over Breakneck. He said: “I’ll try all the routes and that way I’m bound to hit the trail some time.” I told him: “You’ll be wasting your energy,” I said, and that’s not right, is it? Time’s money to an author.’
‘I shall follow your lead,’ Miss Pink said firmly, adding in a lighter tone: ‘Who are these people who’d try to lure me into Crazy Mule Canyon and up to Breakneck Pass? Such evocative names.’
‘Crazy Mule leads to Trouble – that’s Trouble Pass, of course. Danger Creek comes down from Deadboy. You’ll sort them out. As for the people, they’ll find you, you won’t be able to avoid them. You have to go past Dogtown: that’s a ghost town in the Rattlesnake Hills. But then you mustn’t miss Dogtown; they have a lot of old mining artefacts, and all the houses are the original buildings from the time of the gold diggings. They’re restoring the place for a tourist attraction, not so much restoring as preserving: arrested decay, they call it.’
‘They?’
‘Individuals. A bunch of people moved in from all over: San Francisco, LA, the deserts, you name it. They think they’re going to make a fortune out of the tourists. Could be, at that.’
‘Like Gabriel?’
‘No, Gabriel’s finished. Obviously you never saw it. There’s nothing left even to vandalise. Dogtown’s on the upgrade; it’s more like Bodie except Bodie’s a state park and Dogtown’s private.’
‘People stay there?’ Miss Pink was concerned. ‘I take it there’s a motel?’
‘You’d be far better to stay in Endeavor. There’s what they call a hotel in Dogtown but the rooms aren’t ready yet. Most people following the Joplins camp. The Trails party that’s coming by bring recreational vehicles and tow Jeeps.’
‘A Trails party?’
‘Every summer they follow a different trail. So this year it’s the Joplins. You’ll run into them, you stay long enough – although where you’re going to stay’s another matter. They might rent you a cabin at Dogtown, full of snakes and roaches, I shouldn’t wonder. Best thing you can do is stay here.’
‘Where did Tim Argent stay?’
‘He camped. At least, I always assumed he did, but he’d be used to it.’
Although she was in Levis and a plaid shirt, Miss Pink’s advanced age might suggest to a layman that she’d never been closer to a wilderness than on a Nature Trail in a national park. Now she said: ‘You didn’t see him again? He never got in touch to tell you which way he decided the Joplins went?’
‘No.’ The librarian was puzzled. ‘I’d expected to hear from him, know how he got on. He said he would write. Of course, it will be in his book, maybe he’ll mention Endeavor. That’s the trend: what the author did and saw, who he spoke to at the same time he was following an old trail.’
Miss Pink picked up her bag. They were sitting in the librarian’s office. ‘Now I follow him,’ she announced inanely. ‘Or can I? He’d be more accustomed to rough roads than I.’
‘What are you driving?’
‘A Cherokee.’
‘You’ll need it, but don’t go alone. Timothy had a Jeep: one of the basic models – pale blue. He was embarrassed by the colour: baby-blue, he called it. “Not really me, is it?” he said when I went outside with him. And then he drove away.’
‘Alone?’
‘Oh yes, there was no one with him.’
‘I mean, he went on to cross the Sierras on his own.’
‘I wouldn’t – he didn’t say he was meeting anyone.’ Her eyes sharpened. ‘Why do you ask?’
Miss Pink was flustered. ‘I just thought: if he went alone – and a Cherokee is more powerful than a basic Jeep?’
The librarian suppressed a smile. ‘But he was a man. I mean: young, powerful – ’ she brightened, ‘ – able to fix things: broken fan belts, punctures, all that stuff. You wait for the Trails people. They’re fun; you’ll have a good time with them.’
‘Perhaps I should do that.’ Miss Pink nodded sagely. ‘If I were to explore while I’m waiting for them I could hire a horse and take a guide.’
‘Well, yes, just be careful who you take, is all.’
Chapter 3
It was well into the afternoon when she reached her next fixed point. It was three o’clock before she tracked down the rancher who owned the land where Gabriel once stood, still stood if a few piles of planks and some old foundations warranted a name. She was directed down a dusty track to a reservoir and on its bank she found all that was left of Gabriel. Even the three store fronts depicted on Argent’s postcard had collapsed, but he’d been here, camping in the sage; the rancher told her that much.
He’d told her little else, or nothing significant. As in the library she hadn’t needed to ask about her predecessor; information was volunteered simply because Argent and she were both English, both following the same trail. She wondered how long it would be before people started to think that her arrival might not be a coincidence.
Argent had appeared on an afternoon in July. He hadn’t come to the house; the rancher – a leathery old fellow, not over-clean – had been alerted by the stranger’s dust trail as he drove down the track. He wasn’t bothered; tourists were always going to see the old ruins. However, when the Jeep didn’t come back and he figured the visitor planned on spending the night, he went down in his pick-up just to be sure the guy wasn’t up to mischief.
He’d found Argent reading and stayed with him a while, charmed by him: ‘A well-educated gentleman, knew more about these old trails than I do.’
Miss Pink, registering interest in her compatriot, did push it a little then but learned scarcely more than she knew already. The rancher hadn’t picked up much about his visitor; it was evident that Argent, like any good writer, didn’t talk so much as listen. She learned that he was alone, that he slept at the site of Gabriel, that he left the following day. Nothing was said of his drinking nor that he had asked for a postcard to be mailed from Endeavor, nor could she think of a way of eliciting this information without exciting suspicion. She did assure herself that he had left the site. Recalling that the Joplins had followed the course of the river from Gabriel she wondered aloud how she might do this, as Argent had done.
He shook his head. ‘No, ma’am, that’s all private land, and fenced. You got to come back to the highway same as he did, pick up the Joplin trail again near to Dogtown.’
‘What a pity. It’s quite impossible to go exactly the way they went?’
‘Believe me, if it could be done, that Englishman would have. No, he come back to the highway not long af
ter sunrise; I was out early too, shifting a bunch of cows before it got too hot. He waved.’
For form’s sake she poked about the piles of timber that were the remains of Gabriel, talking loudly, not to herself but to warn the snakes. Sustaining her cover she took a few pictures but there was nothing to claim her interest in this dull desert, for desert it was, the river having dried up since its headwaters had been diverted by the Los Angeles aqueduct.
She returned to the highway, the mountains a lavender line in the west. Argent would have seen them too, but hard and bright in the sunrise – and he’d longed to be up there; he’d said so on the postcard. Where had he bought that? She hadn’t seen a replica in Endeavor although she’d looked. She hadn’t dared to show the one in her possession to the librarian.
The sun was sinking when she saw a sign for Dogtown pointing her along a dirt road towards a range of hills the colour of cocoa. It was an arid region, the only vegetation the odd prickly plant and a few grey spires of mullein beside the road. After a mile or two she emerged from a cutting in brown bluffs to a no-man’s-land between umber slopes and the forested foothills of the mountains. A creek ran here, lined with cottonwoods, and the road forked. Another sign pointed to her right and she drove through the trees to a lunar landscape dotted with buildings below old mine-tips.
It was a typical ghost town, contriving to appear raw and at the same time old, or old for California. The planks of the houses looked as if they’d been sawn from unseasoned pine straight out of the forest, and under the desert sun the bright brown wood had retained its colour but it had shrunk and splintered. Nails had fallen from their sockets, seams had parted, few walls were vertical. The community looked like cheap clothing that starts to fall apart as soon as it’s laundered.
Litter was everywhere: old iron, timber, rusty cars, but here and there, outside houses only slightly less decrepit than their neighbours, stood a pick-up of recent vintage.
One building was of brick, square and uncompromising with a stepped pediment fronting a flat roof. Across the façade above triple arches of windows and door was some illegible print. Beside the door a hardboard panel leaned against the bricks. ‘Grand Imperial Hotel’ it read.
