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CHAPTER 21

      THE MEETING at the library community room seemed more like a social gathering than a business meeting.

      The people Pritchard and Macky Collins had invited came out of the slanting sunlight through the door that opened on Main Street next to the Chamber of Commerce office. They looked for friends, shook hands, loaded up on spudnuts and cups of black coffee. Some wore suits and neckties; most wore work clothes. There was a smattering of overall-clad farmers. They discussed the weather, the cotton crop, the bad market for cantaloupes, and they speculated on why Macky Collins and Len Pritchard had summoned them without telling them why. There were about thirty of them in all, including a few wives. They crowded the small room, which was soon filled with smoke. The early comers sat at the long table, the others on chairs along the walls. Latecomers stood leaning in the doorway.

      Rand had driven to Hood's place where he left his car and rode to the meeting with Noreen and Pritchard. Noreen brought her big coffee urn, and they stopped at the Thrift Grocery to pick up the coffee, paper cups and napkins. They bought five dozen potato-flour donuts at the greasy-smelling spudnuts store. They were among the first to arrive.

      Noreen made the coffee and laid out the rest of the things. She kept her purse containing the gold bars within reach. Pritchard was wearing a different rumpled suit, but now he sported cufflinks on a fresh white shirt. His thinning hair was combed back carefully, rather theatrically. Macky Collins had brought his wife to play Eleanor to his Franklin. The mayor was there, looking careworn, as befitted a man who was paid nothing for doing a thankless task. When he wasn't fighting the City Council, he was the town's most successful dentist.

      Joe Navarette sauntered in wearing a trim business suit with a good tie. He got his spudnuts and coffee and stood next to Rand, both of them trying to look like disinterested observers. Vandergaard showed up, aloof, obviously aware of the gravity of the moment.

      Rand watched Noreen. She seemed to be locked up within herself, alone in the midst of a crowd. He wondered if she was thinking about Nick. Or maybe, he thought cynically, she was just counting the house. She looked pale against the colors of her flowered print dress. Clearly, she had thought twice about that dress, weighed its gaudy print against her recent widowed state. Almost like an afterthought, there was a black ribbon pinned to her collar. Rand smiled at her encouragingly, and she nodded back, still looking appropriately sad.

      At a quarter past seven, Macky Collins tapped on a cup with a pencil and called the meeting to order. "I want to thank you all for coming," he said. "You're a very special group because I believe you've all got loose dollars you'd like to convert to more money."

      He waited for the ripple of halfhearted laughter to die away. "I'm not going to tell you the reason we called this meeting. This is really Len Pritchard's meeting, so I'm gonna turn it over to him."

      He sank into his chair with a self-satisfied expression. Pritchard stood up and showed the room his widest smile. He said, "I'll show you why we called you. Get 'em out, Noreen. She opened her purse and handed him the two bars of gold. They looked insignificant in his hands as he held them up. "These are gold, folks," he said. "I'm gonna pass 'em around, but please don't put them in your pockets, they'll tear a hole in them."

      Nobody laughed, but that didn't bother him. His face grew very serious. He handed the bars to people near him and they began passing them around, rubbing them and staring at them, comparing the color to their rings. One man bit a bar and studied the indentations his teeth made. "This the genuine article?" one of them asked.

      "Tell 'em, Ross," Pritchard said. Vandergaard stood up and spoke seriously. "I have tested the bars, and they are real gold. Almost pure gold. I have drilled them and weighed them, and they are gold through and through."

      Pritchard nodded and resumed his speech. "We've all heard about Spanish gold hid in the Organs. Well, this is what it looks like. This is some of it." There was a murmur from the people watching. "Nick Hood - our late friend, and Noreen's husband - found it a while before he was murdered. He found a cave full of this Spanish gold while he was prospecting in the mountains for gemstones and crystals. He brought home forty of these bars. I saw them with my own eyes."

      After pausing a moment, he said dramatically, "There's tons of this gold up there. Piles an' piles of it stacked up amid the bones of the Indian slaves that carried it. I called this Spanish gold, but it really ain't - it's Aztec gold, stolen by Cortez and then buried somewhere down in Mexico. Now, I can't say for sure, because nobody really knows, but I've been reading up on it and I think King Charles the Fifth of Spain sent Coronado to dig it up and carry it to Santa Fe where there was already a Spanish garrison. Maybe he got tangled up with the Apaches while he was in the Organ Mountains and had to hide the gold again, this time in a cave that he sealed over. But he never came back for the gold, or if he did, he didn't find it. So it just lay there for hundred of years . . . until Nick Hood found it."

      "Where's the rest of it at?" asked one of the men sitting at the table.

      "Heck, folks, that's why we're here. It's lost again!" Pritchard said flatly. "When Nick went back for more - he never could find it again! After a few hours up in those peaks everything gets jumbled up in your head. He could have been ten feet away from the cave, maybe, and not recognized it, or even seen it. He went back a dozen times hunting for it. He wore himself to a nub, but he failed. He'd brought home around two hundred pounds of gold - which is a pretty fair amount, when you think about it - but it was all stolen from him when he was shot to death on the way to El Paso. I'd taken those two bars we got here (the ones you're passing around) out of the box a couple of days before he got killed. Now it's all we got left.

      "And the rest of that gold is still out there, and poor Nick isn't around to find it. So if we can find it . . . it's all ours"

      Somebody asked, "Didn't he draw a map or anything?"

      "No, he didn't," Pritchard said.

      "You want us to invest our money to find the gold, right?" asked a dour looking man in overalls.

      "That's right. I'd be the first to tell you it's a gamble, but it's really big stakes. And if we get enough men and go about it in an intelligent way, I believe we can do it!"

      Pritchard unrolled a big map of the mountains on the table and some of the people seated along the walls came over and looked at it. One area of the mountains was crossed by a red pencil in squares, each about a thousand yards on a side.

      "We think the gold is hidden somewhere in this area, around Victorio Peak here. Anyway, this is where we'll start. And if we can't find it, we'll expand the search to nearby areas."

      Macky Collins stood up. "Let me do a little talking here," he said, and the lawyer, perspiring profusely, sat down. "It's no secret times are tough. Mrs. Hood and Len here, just like a lot of folks now, aren't exactly rollin' in cash. What they propose to do is sell shares in this endeavor. A well-financed effort with a hundred men, broke up into squad like the C.C.C. boys, ought to be able to find the cave in just a few weeks - maybe even sooner. A few men searching might take years, or never find the stuff at all."

      Collins grinned and put his hand on Pritchard shoulder. "Also you might have noticed, my friend and frequent political opponent, Mr. Pritchard here, is not a young chicken anymore. He wants a couple of years to enjoy his wealth before kicking off." There was a ripple of laughter, and Pritchard smiled. Collins said, "Len's formed a corporation and will issue stock. There will be about a million shares, of which he and Mrs. Hood will control fifty-eight percent, and they're offering forty-two percent of the stock to investors at fifty cents a share. That will give the investors working capital of $210,000 to hire men, and get this thing moving."

      There was a murmur of voices. He waited until they quieted down, then he said, "I'm in for five thousand dollars myself. What are you in for, Vandergaard?"

      The jeweler looked hesitant. "I guess I could invest a thousand dollars . . . ."

      "I'm just a poor peon public servant," Joe Navarette said. "Will you take a hundred?"

      "We'll take anything," Pritchard said.

      A thin-faced man said, "Hell, Len, you're askin' us to give money on the basis of just two gold bars."

      "It's all we got," Pritchard said. "That and our word that there was more that got stolen - and there's tons of it in the cave."

      A farmer wearing bib overalls spoke up. "I have a hard time believing Mr. Hood would have taken all the gold he had with him down to El Paso, for whatever reason." Navarette whispered to Rand that the farmer, Jack Pruit, owned four thousand acres of cotton, and was a millionaire.

      There were other questions about the gold and Pritchard answered as directly as he could. Rand had heard it all before. The room felt suffocating, and the spudnuts were heavy in Rand's stomach. Vandergaard stood up, clearing his throat. "I've been thinking, and I agree with Jack Pruit. It just doesn't seem right Nick Hood would take all the gold - and leave just those two samples."

      "You accusing us of some kind of fraud?" Pritchard asked belligerently. Seeing him now, Rand could understand why he'd be a courtroom star. Pritchard could turn on righteous indignation as easily as opening a faucet.

      But Vandergaard stood his ground. "I'm saying, Mr. Hood wouldn't have put all his golden eggs in one basket. Nobody would. That's all I'm saying."

      Pritchard turned to Noreen. "Could there be other bars stashed someplace around the house?"

      "I-I don't know," she said. "I never looked." Her face was damp with perspiration.

      "Well, we'll go look, then." Pritchard said. "We'll tear the place up if we have to."

      "I'd feel better about investing if I saw more gold," Pruit said. There was the sound of agreement from others in the room.

      "Then let's adjourn this meeting until tomorrow night, after we've had a chance to look. By then, the Sheriff here may find the gold that was in the car. Pritchard said, looking archly at Navarette. "I'll hang around for a few minutes in case anybody wants to contribute. All I need tonight is a pledge. I don't expect people to write checks until I get the stock certificates. And by the way, let me have back those the gold bars we passed around. They make good paperweights." He laughed. Any anger Prichard may have felt seemed to be set aside, and he obviously wanted the meeting to end on a friendly note. And his feeble joke pleased many people in the crowd who grinned and nodded to him as they left the library.

      One of the farmers handed him the two gold bars as he passed, and Prichard, in turn, handed them to Noreen. A half dozen people lingered to ask further questions, but most left quietly and went to their cars or started walking to their nearby homes.

      As Vandergaard left, Pritchard said, "Well, you sure threw a monkey wrench into things." Vandergaard gave no indication of hearing him.

      "What do you think?" Rand asked Navarette.

      "I think if I found tons of gold, I'd bring home more than just two hundred pounds of it," the sheriff said. "And I wouldn't keep it all in one place. I'm glad the matter was brought up."

      They hung around the stifling room until the people asking questions finally drifted out. Then they turned off the coffee and carried the coffee urn and the remaining spudnuts to the car. As he started the engine, Pritchard said, "Well, it could have been worse. They could of tarred and feathered us."

     


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