by Howard Blum
DESPITE HIS excitement, Charlie waited until he finished his shift to put his theory to the test. He’d considered not reporting to work, just going off first thing in the morning, but he’d decided such rashness would be a mistake. He’d put in too much time creating the cover of Lee Davis, machine oiler, and it’d be plumb foolishness to wreck it now—especially since he’d still need to round up the thieves and recover the gold. Accomplishing that would be a tall order; he’d have to win the trust of some unsavory sorts, and he wouldn’t stand a chance if they even as much as suspected that he was a detective. So that morning, patience ruled.
Yet all through the shift as Charlie, oil can in hand, went about his duties, his mind was elsewhere. Regardless of the tasks he appeared to be performing, Charlie passed the hours laying out in a precise, orderly way what he knew for certain about the thefts.
Fact: Gold bars stamped with the TM mark of the Treadwell mine had been taken from the warehouse. On three occasions.
Fact: The thefts had gone undetected until the weekly routine warehouse inventories.
Fact: The gold was nowhere to be found. Durkin had had teams of men scour the island, digging beneath piles of rocks, poking into rotted tree trunks, tearing apart the ferry—and they’d discover not even a trace of yellow dust. Meanwhile, the banks in Seattle and Tacoma had reported that no one had tried to cash bars marked with the Treadwell stamp.
Fact: It was the perfect crime.
Or it had been, Charlie told himself as his shift ticked slowly on, until he’d sorted it all out.
AND THEN it was six P.M. His shift was over. The previous night the facts had led Charlie to a theory, and now he was at last ready to confirm it. But once again he realized that restraint was necessary. In one more accommodation to his cover, after clocking out he went directly to supper at the dining hall. He feared that his absence might be noted; anyone with reason to be wary would very likely be keeping a sharp eye. Breaking routine, McParland had warned, will get an undercover operative exposed or, no less likely, killed. So for what seemed like an eternity, Charlie ate food he was unaware of swallowing, and made conversation without any notion of what he was saying. He sat at the long refectory table, but in truth he was in another world.
When the men finally began exiting the hall, he lingered at the rear of the crowd. He stayed back until he was all alone; and after he was certain no one was watching, he disappeared into the night shadows. Avoiding the path, he bolted into the spruce forest. Hidden among the tall trees, Charlie felt elated; after the day’s excruciating delays, he could at last proceed. Yet in the next moment another realization struck, and he cursed his stupidity. Why hadn’t he brought a lantern? But then a gust of wind moved the clouds across the sky to reveal a hunter’s moon hanging high and bright in the sky, as if put there to show him the way.
He stayed in the trees, and as the grade grew steeper, he followed it. When he reached the summit of a densely wooded hill, he stopped; he listened to the country to see if he could detect the sound of someone trailing him; and when he was certain he was alone, he took his bearings. The warehouse, Charlie knew, sat on a hilltop on the northeast corner of the island. He had climbed the same hill, but from an opposite direction. With the North Star as his guide, he’d be able to stay unseen, hidden behind the curtain of trees, until he was fairly close. And after an easy ten-minute walk, there it was.
In his mind, Charlie was imagining he was one of the thieves. His plan was to do what they’d done, except, of course, for actually making off with the gold. So he moved up to where the tree line began to thin out and, being careful to stay in the shadows, he began searching. Without having to try too hard, Charlie found what he’d been looking for. A half dozen big rocks had been moved to form a barrier, and a pile of spruce boughs had been scattered on the ground as a buffer against the cold. It reminded Charlie of one of the hunter’s blinds he’d occupied in the New Mexico hills, only these hunters weren’t after antelopes. When Charlie settled in, he discovered that it provided a perfect sight line through the trees, toward the warehouse. Which was just as he’d expected. So he sat and watched, same as he was certain the thieves had done.
He had to pass a very cold hour, far colder than he’d supposed, until he saw two guards approach the building. They opened the warehouse door, shined their lanterns around for a few curious moments, and, apparently satisfied, then moved off to complete the remainder of their nightly rounds. He’d have about an hour, Charlie judged, before they returned.
When Charlie saw the two men disappear down the hill and into the darkness, he raced from the trees. It was a good thirty yards or so to the warehouse, and all he could do was run as fast as he could and hope no one was lurking about. He reached the front door without a shout ringing out; and, buoyed, Charlie pressed himself flat against the building.
Then he saw it: A big padlock secured the front door. Charlie didn’t have a key, but he expected the robbers hadn’t had one, either. If they could figure a way in, he confidently told himself, he would, too. He walked slowly around the building looking for access: a window, a gap in the foundation he could wiggle beneath, a back door. But Charlie found nothing. After five minutes, he was back once more staring at the padlock.
Charlie studied it carefully, and then held it in his hand. It was a heavy, irksome hunk of metal; Durkin must’ve thought a lock of that size and heft would be bound to discourage break-ins. Sure, he knew he could find a rock and split the hasp open. But there’d been no reports of any busted locks, and such an irregularity would surely have been noticed by the guards in the course of their rounds. The alarm would’ve been immediately sounded. Only the thefts had gone undetected for days. So how had the robbers managed it? How had they gotten into the warehouse without destroying the padlock? Charlie focused all his attention on the lock, aware that if he didn’t figure something out soon, the guards would be returning. Then all he’d have to show for his three months on the island would be a lot of useless conjecture. He’d be back where he’d started—utterly dumbfounded. He was trying not to panic, but his mind was racing. Then he hit on an idea.
Charlie reached under his shirt for the scabbard he wore tied across his chest by a leather strap, and removed his knife. Using the blade, he pried off the metal hinge that had been hammered into one side of the door to hold the lock in place. When he was done, the padlock was still closed, only now it was no longer secured to the door; it just dangled ineffectively alongside the hinge. He made sure to gather up the nails that had fallen to the ground and put them in his pocket; he’d need them later. Then he gave the front door a firm push and stepped in. The room was darker than McParland’s office, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness Charlie noticed that a lantern had been thoughtfully left on a shelf by the door. He took a match from his pocket, lit the wick, and stared out at a treasure of gold.
Or so he assumed. From his position by the door, it was impossible to be certain. All he knew for sure was what he saw: The room was crammed wall to wall with crates stacked chest-high in neat rows. But when he used his knife to lift the top of one the crates, he wasn’t disappointed. It was packed with shiny bars.
Nevertheless—and this was what had dawned on him in his eureka moment the previous night—as long as the crates were nailed shut, there was no telling what was inside. A box might’ve been picked clean, and then its top nailed back on. The watchmen would stop in every hour or so while on their rounds, give a quick glance to see if the rows of crates were in place and undisturbed, and figure all’s right with the world. They never bothered to look inside any of the boxes. Nor could they’ve been expected to. There were at least two hundred crates; a careful inspection would’ve taken hours and hours, and they had an entire island to patrol.
Deceiving the watchmen, Charlie had determined, would be simple enough—as long as the thieves weren’t greedy. If they didn’t walk off with crate after crate but took only the amount of gold that two men could carry before the w
atchmen circled back, then it’d be as easy as shooting grazing buffaloes. Two men making two trips, say, could grab forty or fifty bars and still have time to nail the crates shut again and fix the hinge on the front door before the guards returned. No one would be the wiser until the weekly warehouse inventories.
Yes, Charlie told himself as he put the lantern back on its shelf, removing the gold from the warehouse without being discovered would be the easy part. The hard part would be figuring out a plan to get the fifty bars down the long hill and then off the island. Well, he quickly corrected, getting the booty off the island wouldn’t require too much invention. Best he could make out, there were only two possible ways: Either you swam or you had a boat. But the odds of anyone swimming across the frigid channel waters while dragging a sack of gold bars and surviving to rob the mine another day were too overwhelming. There was just no way that could’ve happened. So Charlie felt certain they must’ve had a boat, maybe even a canoe, anchored off some dark cove on the less hectic side of the island.
No, the real mystery was how they’d been able to get fifty bars of gold down the hill and across the island to their boat. And, Charlie didn’t need to remind himself, gold was heavy. Fifty bars would weigh, he guessed, near on three hundred pounds. From the front door of the warehouse down to the beach was more than two miles. And it was anyone’s guess where along the island’s coastline their boat would’ve been moored; that could add further miles to the escape route. Two men—Charlie had by now come to believe it was a two-man job or more bars would’ve been stolen—lugging that much gold would need to make several trips. Yet they couldn’t load up gunnysacks, or stack it in wheelbarrows, or, for that matter, carry it in their arms. Besides the watchmen, there were a thousand people on the island, and they worked day and night. Someone would be bound to notice. So, Charlie asked himself, how’d the robbers do it? The only answer he could come up with was—I’ll be damned if I know.
But Charlie hadn’t come this far—or this close, he truly believed—only to give up. He hoped that if he continued to put himself in the thieves’ shoes, the solution would come to him. So he closed the warehouse door behind him and found a rock to nail the metal hinge back in place. Then, imagining he’d a dozen or so gold bars cradled in his arms, he began to look for a way to get his hoard to the beach without any alarms being sounded or shots fired.
He stood on the hilltop, a sentinel surveying the busy island stretched out below him. Electric lights illuminated many of the buildings, and their glow shimmered in long pools across the swift, dark waters of the channel. He searched in all directions, hoping to see something that’d reveal the thieves’ plan. Yet nothing sparked a notion that made any sense. He dreaded the possibility that he’d fail to sort out this last part of the crime. If he was going to catch the thieves, he’d need to know how they’d made off with the gold. If they got away, he’d be letting McParland down; and he’d given the superintendent his word. But the more Charlie focused his attention, the more he continued to look in all directions, the more futile his search proved. Mamie, he begged in silent desperation, tell me what I’m missing.
A moment later, as if in answer to his question, a loud noise startled him. At first Charlie thought it was the sound of deer running through the woods. But it grew larger; and he realized it wasn’t the commotion of scattering animal hooves. It was something more powerful. Like a torrent of rushing water. That was it, he was now certain. He was hearing a raging creek, its waters high from the spring rains. Only there was no creek on the island.
So what could it be? The noise carried easily through the night, and he followed it. As the sound of thrashing, streaming water became clearer and more distinct, he hurried toward it. All his instincts alerted him that the solution he’d been looking for was now at hand. Yet even as the realization took hold, Charlie had no expectation of what he’d find.
He had gone at most two hundred yards before he was able to stand on the edge of a shallow ravine and gaze down on what looked like a giant twisting black snake. But a moment later Charlie’s mind worked out what his eyes were seeing. The long snake was a metal pipeline. With the light of the moon, he could see that the pipeline climbed up one side of the island and then angled down the other. Later, he’d learn that it was eighteen miles long. But even that night he quickly understood why he’d suddenly heard the sound of rushing water. And how the pipeline had allowed the thieves to get away with the gold.
In itself, the pipeline was an ingenious piece of engineering. It carried the water powering the generators that allowed the mill machines to run and the electric lights to shine. Yet its basic operating principles, as Charlie grasped them, were simple enough. With the natural rising tides in the channel, water was carried up through the pipeline to a small reservoir that sat on the high ground adjacent to the warehouse. Depending on the demand for electricity, water would be released from the reservoir. Then it would flood downhill through the pipeline in a torrent, its speed a crucial part of the physics necessary to create hydroelectric power. The roar Charlie had heard was the rush of a new stream of water as it charged through the pipeline. It was also the answer to many of his questions.
With a renewed sense of triumph, Charlie scurried down the ravine and, his eyes to the ground, began his search. He followed the pipeline, and after only a few yards, spotted what he’d anticipated: a pile of mud.
Ignoring the muck, Charlie went down on his knees and began running his fingers along the cold metal of the pipeline. In a moment, he found the rope. He was now convinced that he knew how the thieves had transported the gold, but just to be sure he began to unravel the circles of rope. Once they lay loose, it required just a strong pull for a section of the pipeline to be removed. He ran his hand over the metal edge: It had been carefully sawed. Satisfied, he fitted the two sections back together until they were joined as tightly as two hands in a deal-binding grip. Then he began wrapping the cords of rope back around the metal cylinder so the pieces would stay in place.
While he worked, Charlie couldn’t help but admire the thieves’ plan. They’d sawed through a section of the pipeline—anyone could lift a hacksaw from the tool shop—and then let the rushing water take the gold down-island. It was the same principle used by the rubber conveyor belts that transported the gold rocks to the various mill shops for processing; perhaps that’d even been their inspiration. Safely hidden, the bars would be carried down to the beach without anyone being the wiser. Oh, there were two telltale signs: the mud produced by the water that had rushed out of the pipeline when they’d removed a section; and the rope they’d wrapped around to bind the sections when they were done. But if you hadn’t already figured things out, you probably never would’ve noticed. Sure enough, Charlie told Mamie in an exulting burst of pride, a darn near perfect crime—until we came along.
The rest of the evening moved on quickly. Continuing to follow the pipeline, he hurried down to the beach and set to looking for a section tied with rope. When he saw it, he knew he’d found the spot where they’d removed the gold after its journey down the hill. From there, he walked east, following the shoreline toward a thickly forested corner of the island. In a small cove shaped like a perfect U and surrounded by tall spruces, a rowboat was anchored.
The getaway boat was still here! The thieves were still on the island! Charlie’s spirits soared. He now had no doubt that the thieves were planning to strike again. And when they did, Charlie Siringo, the cowboy detective, would catch ’em in the act.
ONCE AGAIN, Charlie forced himself to rein in all his eagerness. He reported to work the next morning at the machine shop and went through the motions. He told himself that maintaining his cover remained essential. There was no way of knowing when the robbers would make their move. It might be tonight, but he could just as well wind up waiting for a week or longer. In the meantime, Charlie understood he must not take any actions that’d make them suspicious. If the thieves fled before he caught them in the act, the case mig
ht never be completely resolved. He might never recover the stolen gold. Charlie did, however, make one concession prompted by the previous nights’ discoveries. Beneath his mackinaw, he’d tucked his Colt into the waistband of his pants. No one could see it, but as he went about his work he felt it pressing against him, a reminder of what was at stake.
After dinner, he retraced his steps to the spot in the woods where the thieves had constructed the covert to monitor the warehouse. His plan was to conceal himself in the trees near their hideout, watching and waiting in silence until they entered the warehouse. Then he’d charge in with his Colt drawn to make the arrests.
Charlie moved with great alertness. He knew a snapped branch would echo like the crack of a rifle shot in the night. His large hope was that the thieves would be crouched behind the rocks, that they’d break into the warehouse tonight. But as soon as he approached the spot, a sudden sense of dread stabbed his heart. All at once he ran toward the hideout, now unconcerned about the noise. One look had told him it no longer mattered. It was too late. The rocks and the spruce boughs had been scattered. Whether this had been done in an outburst of anger over having been discovered or in an attempt to disguise the hideout, he had no way of knowing. Nor did he have any idea whether he had carelessly left a clue that had betrayed his presence on the previous night or if they had simply decided to call things off.