LIZA SHUFFLED THE HOT PIE, bunching the towel to spare her fingers while she listened beside the open window.
Eddy’s voice rose outside. “Gold, I tell you! That fellow from up north, he found gold!”
“On Foxfire Ridge?” came Al’s deeper voice. “Never heard of gold in these parts.”
“Look,” Eddy said. Paper rustled. “I jotted down the message. ‘Come prepared,’ he said, then a few words I didn’t catch, then, ‘it’s gold.'”
“‘Cave, Foxfire Ridge,'” Al read aloud. “‘Bring miners helmets.’ Did Mr. Sawyer know you were listening?”
“He doesn’t believe me. I keep telling him I’m good enough at Morse code to take messages when he’s out, but he says, ‘Go back to your primer.’ Primer, hah! Kids’ stuff.”
Al hummed a moment, “You may be right. That means we need to move fast, before out-of-towners flood the valley and up the ridge and take all the gold. It belongs to us as live here.”
“We’ll need lanterns, picks and shovels,” Eddy said.
“Gold pans, and bags to carry ore out for sluicing.”
“A basket of grub, and jugs of water,” Al said. “It’ll be a long day’s work.”
“That’ll weigh a ton. Hey, we can take Sleepy Sue to carry it all!”
Liza plunked her pie on the windowsill to cool, braced hands on either side of it, and leaned out. “Sleepy Sue won’t budge for anyone but me,” she told her brother and his friend. “And as mule driver, I get a third of the loot.”
All the way up Foxfire Ridge, Al and Eddy grumbled at having a girl join their quest.
Liza just smiled. Sleepy Sue plodded along behind her, picks and shovels rattling in the panniers along with the hearty lunch she’d packed.
When Eddy had jabbed her about eavesdropping, she had thrust right back about telegram etiquette. The threat to tell his employer went unspoken.
The boys had tried to talk her down to one quarter the haul since she’d be doing none of the labor, but she changed to her old stained laundry-day dress and put on her field boots. “Who manured the whole garden last week while you were off hunting?” she asked.
They had rolled their eyes.
“Caved in, have you?” Liza had said with a grin.
They had groaned.
It took all morning for Al to track the northerner’s blundering trail up the steep wooded slopes. “A lousy hunter,” he said.
“Didn’t even have a rifle,” Eddy hooted.
“What was he looking for if not game?” Liza wondered.
“Stalactites and stalagmites,” the northerner told them when he found them wandering perplexed through the cave. “A magnificent limestone formation, isn’t it? My colleagues from the university will arrive tomorrow to map out the caverns.”
“But what about the gold?” Eddy asked.
“You’re the lad from the telegraph office, aren’t you? I said nothing about gold.” The bespectacled northerner knit his brows in thought. “I did mention the cold.”
Al and Liza glared at Eddy.
He shrugged and looked sheepish. “G and C are almost the same in Morse code.”
First posted on Hindsight on January 8, 2021.
text: © 2021 Joyce Holt
artwork: 19th century artwork. Public domain info here.
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