Stand-off at Copper Town Read online

  Then he realized what was happening. Gravity had finally won the battle to keep the car in its precarious position. It was tipping over the side of the bridge.

  Patrick had come to rest lying on his side clutching the gold while Foley tried ineffectually to free himself from the board that had trapped his leg.

  Patrick looked up at Nathan and winked. Then he flopped down, his dead weight rolling to the side to further hinder Foley’s efforts to extricate himself.

  ‘We have to get out now,’ Jeff said with his arms outstretched as he struggled to keep his balance.

  Nathan didn’t need any more encouragement. He turned to the doorway, but it was ten feet away and already the car had tipped to such an angle he could manage only a pace towards it.

  Worse, he then slid backwards as the car embarked on its inevitable final journey.

  Jeff lurched towards him. He grabbed his arm and tried to drag him towards the doorway, but he couldn’t clamber up the rapidly rising base either.

  Forlornly Nathan looked at Foley as he reached for the nugget as if that could somehow save him, but the sight of his ankle trapped in the floor gave Nathan an idea.

  With no time to think it through, he gathered a mutual grasping of arms with Jeff. Then he turned away from the doorway.

  Jeff resisted at first, but the rising car tipped him towards Nathan and gave him no choice but to let Nathan direct him.

  Both men took a staggered pace and then lost their footing in the rising car. They went sprawling on to the base amongst the benches and broken wood, but what was now the floor had once been the wall and Nathan rolled them towards a window.

  They fell through it and landed on the tracks as with some grace the car tipped away from them leaving them both lying on the bridge.

  Nathan had a last glimpse of Foley struggling and Patrick lying still. As the car slipped over the side, he was sure he saw a flash of gold from the nugget embedded in the wall.

  Then it fell from view, carrying Patrick and the gold away.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘We’ll never get down,’ Nathan said. ‘Leave it.’

  Jeff moved from side to side still looking for a way down the near sheer side of the gully to the water below, but with a slap of a fist against his thigh he accepted that Nathan was right.

  For the first hour after the demise of the car, they’d tramped up and down both sides of the gully, but they could find no way down. Even if they had been able to get down, the water was deep and the sides were so steep there wasn’t even enough room to stand.

  The car had landed on its side and floated fifty yards downriver where it’d caught on two protruding boulders. With the current battering against it, the car slowly broke up, releasing two bodies to the raging foam.

  So with an acceptance that rescuing the gold would be even harder than they’d thought, for the next hour they’d knocked ideas back and forth about what they could do if they had a rope and nerves of steel.

  Neither man felt enthused about the risk, even for the huge rock that was trapped inside the car. The sun was lowering towards the horizon when even that possibility disappeared.

  With a grinding of timbers the car succumbed to the pressure and snapped in two. Half of it went sailing down the river where it smashed into another boulder that broke it up further while the other half sank.

  Later, fragments bobbed up further downriver.

  ‘The gold nugget’s at the bottom of the river,’ Jeff said, summing up their problem again, as if that might help them find a solution.

  ‘It’s small enough to get moved by the water,’ Nathan said, ‘but large enough to take a while to fetch up somewhere.’

  ‘So we could head downriver and find somewhere where the water is shallow and then hope it rolls down to meet us.’

  Nathan snorted at the likelihood of this wild idea working before he waved a dismissive hand at the river and stood up. Jeff joined him and the two men walked back towards the bridge.

  As Foley had taken their horses from Copper Town, they were free to move on, if they were prepared to abandon the gold. With both men having already resigned themselves to failure, when they walked on to the bridge, Nathan broached the real decision they had to make before dark.

  ‘Back to Copper Town, or elsewhere?’ he asked.

  Jeff took one last look at the receding debris and then turned to look back along the railtracks towards the mine.

  ‘I never wanted to be a miner,’ he said. ‘What I saw back there hasn’t changed my mind.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘So I reckon we go back to Snake Pass and. . . .’

  ‘And?’ Nathan asked when Jeff didn’t continue.

  Jeff stood rigidly. Then he raised a hand bidding Nathan to stay back.

  With cautious steps he walked towards the section of the bridge where the car had toppled over. He dropped to one knee, scooped something up, and then came back grinning.

  He opened his hand to reveal the object on his palm. It was the size of Nathan’s thumbnail and golden.

  ‘It must have broken off when we were breaking through the door,’ Jeff said.

  Nathan grinned and then joined Jeff in searching for more pieces. With the low sun casting glittering reflections off the pieces and making them stand out, they found several more, although the first piece remained the largest.

  By the time darkness was descending, they’d gathered up a dozen small nodules of gold.

  ‘How much do you reckon these are worth?’ Nathan asked, peering at their collection.

  ‘I don’t know, but it’s sure to be enough for a few meals and a whiskey in Patrick’s memory.’ Jeff smiled. ‘I’ll settle for that.’

  ‘I will too, and Patrick would be pleased to know we got some of his gold.’

  Jeff considered for a moment and then laughed.

  ‘If we really want to honor his memory, we can tell tales for whiskey about the huge gold nugget that got lost in the river.’

  Nathan nodded and so, smiling, the two friends headed off the bridge to their mounts.

  As they rode away from the river towards Snake Pass, Nathan looked up at the stars, as he had done on their first night of their mission to find the nugget.

  This time he didn’t imagine that every star was a speck of gold.

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