Jasper and the Riddle of Riley's Mine

by Caroline Starr Rose

  I inch closer to the creek bank, near enough to leap to solid ground. Pain shoots through my feet as I land, so awful, I have to bite my lip to keep from bawling. Just as he takes his final steps, Frank’s foot pierces a weak spot in the ice. He shouts and stumbles, the muffler tight between us. When he lifts his foot, even through the darkness I can tell his leg is wet almost to his knee. In just a few short steps, Frank’s limping. He ain’t only soaked—he’s hurt, too.

  We near the first cabin. Frank pushes me forward and waits out of sight, near a patch of spruce trees. I bang and bang on the door, but no one answers. Even though the gun ain’t rammed against me anymore, I feel it, like it’s still pressed to my back.

  Out along the stream again, I trek deep into the darkness while Frank limps along behind. The night is big and cold and empty, but at least the snow has stopped for now. Mel’s got to be real worried. Is Spare-Rib wandering Queen Creek in search of me? We’ve only stayed with Spare-Rib for one night and a morning, but even so, his tiny cabin feels homey with its jam-jar window and tree-stump stools and his pot of spruce needle tea.

  Maybe this is my chance to run. I spin around, look to see how close Frank is behind me. But I can’t tell exactly where he is. If I took off, he might shoot. Even if I got free, there ain’t no way I’d make it to Little Skookum on my own.

  I got no choice but to continue on. The cabin up ahead is a small dark lump set far from the creek bank. I pound at the door until it swings open.

  “What do ye want?” The man inside holds a lantern that casts a golden ring of light. He wears a coat made from a blanket. Black curls brush his shoulders.

  “Riley?” Could it be?

  “Who’s that?”

  I shake my head to clear it. This man ain’t Riley. He left a year ago. “Please, do you know about Victory?”

  The man squints at me strange-like. “What are you on about? What’s Victory?”

  “I think it’s a place,” I say, and oh, I hear how strange that sounds.

  “I ain’t ever heard of Victory. This here’s O’Neal Creek.”

  Riley left five clues. I know for certain nine below’s the last, and I got a real strong feeling the Victory clue falls right before it. Don’t victory come at the end of battle, when the winning’s sure? These clues have been a load of work, but I’ve put up a real good fight. Frank may get the gold, but he can’t take finding the claim from me. I ain’t gonna get this close just to be defeated.

  “Any chance there’s a creek named for a king nearby?”

  He holds that lantern close to me. “What are you doing, son? You got me out of bed just to ask ridiculous questions?”

  Everything inside me wants to tell him about Frank Hazard covered in the black of night, the gun he points at my back.

  “Please. I need your help. Do you know a creek named for a king?”

  “Well, I don’t know about no kings. But come to think of it, there’s Victoria, a little creek not much bigger than O’Neal, and mostly dried up, anyhow. I suppose it was named for the queen.” He points over his shoulder. “It’s out that way.”

  Victoria. That could be it! The English queen Miss Stapleton talked about. She’s got a name like Victory. Guess one of them lessons my teacher gave counts for something after all.

  When the door shuts tight, Frank grabs my wrists to tie me up again. We travel back along O’Neal. Frank’s slower now. He lunges forward like that foot of his is stiff. I bet he twisted it when he stumbled like he did. The wet and cold must make it hurt a whole lot worse. My feet ain’t got much feeling left, but at least they’re dry. They burn each time they hit the ground. That’s good. It means there’s life in them, there’s life in me. I ain’t gonna give up yet.

  “How did Albert get that Riley clue?” I’ve been wondering about him for a real long time. Maybe it ain’t smart to ask, but I figure since Frank’s forced me to work for him, I got a right to know.

  “That fool. He still came to the Klondike even though them Mounties kicked him out last spring.”

  Kicked out by the Mounties? No wonder he was so cagey about the law. He must have stole here, too. It ain’t exactly an answer to my question, but I know better than to push for more.

  “Which way did that man say the creek was?”

  “Over there.” I wave my hand, but now that we’re out in the middle of nothing, I can’t quite remember which direction we’re supposed to go.

  Frank wanders left, then veers to the right, a tangle of footprints trailing behind us.

  The heavy clouds have thinned enough that moonlight brightens the snow. Strange green lights float across the sky, shoot up like waving banners, shift and twist in silence.

  “You see that?” Frank says.

  Who could miss it? I stop for just a moment. They must be the Northern Lights Spare-Rib talked about.

  He shoves my shoulder. “Not in the sky. Over there.”

  • • •

  I can barely make out the shell of a cabin, half burned and abandoned. We walk over and step through the wall, where the door should be. Snow’s piled in one corner, a rickety bed’s against the other standing wall. It’s been empty a good while.

  Frank turns around. “This must be Victoria.” Frank moves faster now.

  I spy two old mining troughs and a couple more empty cabins tucked up in the hills.

  “Folks must have left the creek when it went dry.”

  Whatever I imagined Riley’s creek to look like, it sure weren’t this.

  “What are you waiting for?” Frank says. “Find nine below.”

  “Please, how about you let me go. You can find the claim yourself. You don’t need me anymore.”

  Not even finding Riley’s claim matters to me now. It’s living that’s important. This life I’ve got I want to last.

  Frost clusters on Frank’s eyebrows. Icicles droop from his mustache. He strikes the revolver’s barrel on my shoulder, and pain rings through my bones. “Find nine below,” he says again.

  That’s when I kick him in the shin, the one that’s already banged up good. He howls and grabs his leg. I try to run along Victoria’s dried-up creek bed, but it’s real dark. My hands are still tied together and the snow’s right deep. I make my way as best I can, passing cabins along empty and abandoned mine shafts. Then I reach a claim that’s different from the others. The cabin sits closer to the creek bed than the ones behind me did, but that ain’t what feels peculiar. This claim feels bigger. Double the size, I reckon. It must be discovery claim. Every gold creek’s got one. The first place gold’s found, the prospector’s rewarded with two claims joined together.

  Frank lumbers like he’s hurting, but it don’t take him long to catch me. He grabs the end of my muffler and yanks me close. The revolver presses against my back. “I should shoot you now, to get it over with.”

  I shake as bad as when me and Pa traveled in the wagon down that old rutted road that ran behind the wool mill. “Please don’t. This is discovery claim. I’ll get you to Riley’s from here.”

  All that’s left to find Riley’s place is count off nine more stakes downriver.

  Frank kicks my heels. “Get moving, then.”

  My heart thuds painfully inside my chest. Why’s he keeping me around? Frank could find Riley’s mine real easily on his own. He don’t got a need for me.

  He counts the claims as we pass through, searches for markers to show where one starts and another ends.

  “One.”

  The moonlight shines on a bandanna tied around a branch.

  “Two.”

  A bit of wood wedged in the ground.

  “Three.”

  A pile of rocks.

  “Four.”

  An awful feeling rises in my throat.

  “Five.”

  Since the Palmer House, Riley’s mine is what I�
�ve dreamed about.

  “Six.” Frank jerks the muffler. “Hurry up.”

  But once Frank’s got the gold . . .

  “Seven.”

  . . . what’s left for him to do . . .

  “Eight.”

  . . . but shoot me dead?

  “Nine.”

  A shiver creeps across my shoulders, and it ain’t from the biting cold. I’m really here, at Riley’s mine. Mel’s the one who’s meant to be with me. If things had been a little different, maybe we would have found this place together. The mine ain’t like I pictured it back on the Chilkoot, a cabin stocked with all them tools I imagined Riley left for the lucky soul who found it first. If there was ever a cabin here, it’s long gone. Rusty tools are scattered everywhere. Three mine shafts line the creek bed.

  Frank loosens the muffler around my wrists, points to the first hole. “Get in there and look around.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say, hoping to buy his favor. He’ll get nothing but sweetness from me now.

  • • •

  I dangle my feet over the edge of the first mine shaft. It ain’t much wider than my shoulders. Them dirt walls are as smooth as the shaft is cramped. Now I know why Frank kept me around. A man the size of a grizzly bear ain’t gonna fit inside. He needs me to do the work for him. With a deep breath I jump and land a good ten feet down in a mess of snow. There ain’t no way to see but by the faintest moonlight.

  I run my hands over every inch of the shaft, careful as I can. “I don’t see nothing,” I shout. “Don’t feel nothing, either.”

  Frank reaches in. I got to dig my toes and fingers in them smooth shaft walls and climb until I grab his hand. “Where’d he stash it?” he says. “Where’d he hide the gold?”

  Even though he sees my hands are empty, Frank makes me turn my pockets out, like I might have tucked something away while he blinked.

  The second shaft is much the same—dark and narrow without nothing inside.

  At the bottom of the last shaft, half buried in a drift of snow and tucked behind a rock, I feel an old tin can. It’s light and kinda squashed, the only thing I’ve found on this whole dern claim. I stuff it in my pocket and climb up as best I can.

  Frank don’t even notice when I’m out. He’s too busy searching under fallen branches and scanning every inch of the dried-up creek. He mumbles about how much he deserves Riley’s gold, that with all his years of steady mining he should be filthy rich. He kicks at rusty tools and scattered logs, madder every minute.

  I lift that can to the moonlight. A small white square’s inside. It could be Riley’s hankie or a letter from back home. It ain’t soft like fabric when I pull it out. It’s a folded piece of worn-out paper. I close my eye behind the broken lens and tilt the paper toward the light.

  If you made it here, you’ve got your wits about you. I worked this claim for three years and all for nothing. No more than an ounce or two of gold did it ever yield. But that ain’t the way I want to be remembered. So I made up this little story, see, of my wealthy claim.

  Keep this worthless place if you want it, or curse my name. It don’t matter to me. I’ve had my fun.

  Riley

  I grab a broken pickax and dash it to the creek bed.

  Riley’s a liar. He ain’t no better than them Therouxs. His mine was only a story, a big joke on everyone who heard it and believed. All those weeks I dreamed of this place, the new home meant for us Johnson boys, they were for nothing.

  It was a hoax, an awful trick made up by One-Eyed Riley.

  I pick up a rock and slam it to the ground.

  Frank stops his searching. “What’s wrong with you?”

  I don’t say nothing, just hold out Riley’s letter.

  Frank’s curse words tell me he’s read it to the end. He lobs stones at a tree trunk, picks up more, and hurls them at the creek bed. “You cheat! You liar!” He shouts loud enough I bet Riley, wherever he is, feels deep in his belly that he’s been found out.

  Suddenly, a shot fires, then two more.

  I dive for the ground.

  Pain tears through my leg.

  Then darkness overtakes me.

  • • •

  I’m propped against a pine tree when I come to, tired and cold except for the fire raging in my leg. My muffler’s wound around my calf, where a thick patch of blood’s begun to spread. Frank shot me, then he doctored me up? My mind ain’t quite right yet, but it’s good enough to know that’s strange.

  Frank pries off his boot and pulls down his sock, which crackles with ice. Even in the faint moonlight I see how red and swollen his foot is. His toes have them white spots Spare-Rib mentioned, the ones that mean frostbite has settled in. I can’t feel my toes no more, but at least I didn’t step through a sheet of ice. Frank’s in a real bad way.

  Truth be told, I ain’t much better. I got a bullet in my leg, and I’m trapped with the man who did it, who threatened me all afternoon and had me think I wouldn’t last the night.

  But the green muffler’s knotted firm below my knee. What am I to make of that?

  Frank pulls a tin of matches from the pocket of his long fur coat. He tries to set a pile of damp branches alight, but so far he’s only managed loads of curling smoke. He grabs that tin of matches and throws it at the dry creek bed. The matches fly in a hundred directions.

  “How I see it, I got two choices.”

  Two choices. My belly tightens. Frank ain’t talking about his sorry fire. What decision has he got left to make but leave me all alone or finish me off quick?

  Far away the strangest sound drifts in, a wailing like a wolf, a whole pack of them.

  “I can pretend I never found the mine, or I can say I never looked for it at all.”

  The pain’s real bad. Maybe that’s why I don’t understand. “Why would you do either of them things?”

  Frank turns his head so quick, his icicled mustache swings like willow branches stirred up in a breeze. “I ain’t gonna be called a fool. If others learn about Riley’s trick, that’s what folks will think of me.”

  “Folks think what they want to, anyhow.” That I know for sure.

  The wailing becomes barks, and it’s a whole lot louder now. Frank pulls himself to his feet, puts all his weight on the leg that didn’t crash through the frozen river. “What’s out there?”

  I try to look, but it ain’t so easy to move.

  How I long to ask Frank what he’s got planned, but I ain’t sure I want to hear what he’ll say. “Where do you think Riley is now?” I ask instead.

  “That I’d like to know.”

  Behind us comes a scraping sound, like something slides across the snow. I shift to see what’s going on, and my leg smarts with jabbing pain.

  A dog team races from the direction of O’Neal Creek. Lantern light dances across the drifts as the sled behind it slows. Two fellows ride along, one in red and one in black. The fellow in red pulls out a rifle and aims it straight at Frank. “You’re under arrest for kidnapping and possession of a firearm.”

  Frank breaks into a clumsy run and the Mountie follows after. His coat flaps like some hairy wing, but he ain’t quick enough on his bum foot. The Mountie pins him in the snow, a tussle of red and furry brown. With his knee on Frank’s back, the Mountie cuffs Frank’s wrists behind him, then hauls him off the ground.

  Everything happens so quick, my head can’t quite keep up.

  The fellow in black rushes to my side, and I see it ain’t no fellow but Sister Mary Agnes. She wraps me in a blan- ket, folds me in a hug inside her long dark robes, and oh, I yelp with pain.

  “What is it? What happened to you?”

  “I’m hurt,” I say.

  “Did that man injure you somehow?” Her eyes are fierce.

  I nod. “His gun went off, and I felt an awful burning in my leg.”

&nbs
p; Mary Agnes spreads the blanket on the ground and eases me down.

  How come after a night as Frank’s prisoner, it’s the kindness of a Sister that gets my eyes to watering?

  “It’s going to be all right,” Mary Agnes says. “I’ll be right back.”

  I let what’s happening sink deep as I breathe in the scent of the snow-damp blanket, feel its itchy wool pressed against my cheek. I’m out from under Frank’s control. “I’m safe,” I say to the black night, to Mama’s memory. “I’m gonna be okay.”

  Mary Agnes returns with the lantern and unties the muffler from my leg. “Oh, Jasper.” I feel the searing cold of snow as she cleans it. “You must be hurting dreadfully.” I gotta bite my lip while she pokes around. “The bullet’s gone, but you’ve got an ugly graze.” She tears a portion of her long black robe and fastens it around the wound.

  Soon as she’s tied that ragged bandage in a knot, Sister Mary Agnes storms over to Frank while the Mountie leads him to the sled. She tells him he should be ashamed of how he’s treated me. I ain’t never seen a lady as mad as she is.

  That Frank won’t even look my way. “It was an acci- dent,” he tells the Mountie. “I dropped my gun and it went off.”

  As I hear Frank say it, his words strike me as true. Why else would he have bandaged my leg?

  That don’t sway the Mountie none, and it shouldn’t. “Like it was an accident you took this boy and pretended to be his pa.”

  Pa. A heap of thoughts comes flooding back, a mix of bad and good. But something shifts inside me. Them awful moments the last two years, they can’t be erased, but they also don’t deserve to be the first place my mind goes when I remember him.

  Mary Agnes helps me sit again. She holds me close. “How’d you know?” I whisper. How’d the Mountie learn Frank had taken me? How’d Mary Agnes figure where to search?

  “All of Dawson’s heard about you,” she says. “Last evening a fellow walked into town, straight for the Mountie station. He said a boy had been kidnapped by a man with a revolver. The last he’d seen, the two of you had headed to the woods above Bonanza.”