Fool's Gold (3 page)

He swallowed and said, “I'm not sure what it was that particular time. Probably he was just talking up some daredevil stunt he wanted to do. Like going down Cliff Road on our skateboards, maybe. Ty likes to do dangerous stuff.”

“Dangerous,” Murph muttered. “Dangerous hardly describes Cliff Road on a skateboard. Suicidal is more like it.” But after Rudy assured him that they weren't going to do the Cliff Road thing he finally changed the subject and quit asking questions. And a little later, when the food was all gone, Rudy said good-bye and thanked Murph and went home—with a lot on his mind.

There were several things he'd been planning to work on that morning, but for some reason he wound up flaked out on the shady side of the veranda. In the big woven rope hammock he sipped a Pepsi and thought about Murph and what he'd guessed, which was pretty amazing, and what he apparently hadn't guessed, or at least not yet.

What Murph had been right about was that he, Rudy, had a big problem and that it had something to do with Barney. But what he didn't know was that the whole Barnaby Crookshank-Rudy Drummond partnership—or connection, or brotherhood, or whatever you want to call it—was, just possibly, about to end. And if it did end it would be because Rudy
was
about to chicken out on something that was really important to Barney. Because Rudy was not about to spend the summer prospecting for gold in the abandoned hard-rock mine called Pritchard's Hole.

Rudy put one hand up across his face and bit his lip to shut in something that could have been a lot like a moan. He didn't think any sound had actually escaped, but Ophelia, who had come back from escorting the M and M's to the baby-sitter, suddenly got up on her hind legs and snuffled nervously in his ear. Rudy patted her and pushed her down and went on trying to cope with the feeling that someone had just dropped a bowling ball on his midsection, and that a dark tunnel with a tiny flickering light seemed to be imprinted on the inside of his eyelids.

Quickly opening his eyes, he tried looking at something else. Anything to blot out the tunnel thing. At the sunlight filtering through the leafy limbs of the dogwood tree, or Murph Woodbury's rusty roof, or down at Ophelia, who was stretched out beside the hammock looking up at him anxiously. But none of it helped. The stomach pain went on and so did the ache in his throat, which felt as if it had squeezed shut to hold back something that was pushing to get out.

Stop it,
he told himself.
Stop it. Stop it.
Over and over again until the pain and the crazy panic began to fade slowly away. Rudy sighed. Obviously he had a screw loose when it came to certain things and lately it seemed to be getting worse. Of course, he never had been what you might call fearless when it came to physical-type heroics. But in the past when he started losing it he'd usually managed to put on a good front by joking around or something. But in recent years there had been times when something would happen and all of a sudden he'd hit the panic button in pretty spectacular ways.

Like a couple of years ago when Mrs. Hopper's cocker spaniel had her puppies under the house and she'd insisted that Rudy crawl under to get them out. Or even that time just last December when he'd crawled into the storage area under the stairs to hide some Christmas presents and Moira had locked him in. That kind of silly harmless thing was all it took and suddenly he was in the midst of a full-fledged case of the screaming meemies. And he did mean
screaming.
And now, to make matters a lot worse, in just the last couple of months, the nightmares had started—about the same time Barney and Ty had begun talking up the gold-mining scheme.

It had all started sometime in April when Barney and Rudy arrived at school and Ty was waiting out front for them. After he looked all around as if he thought someone might be trying to spy on them, he started in about this old man he'd met in his dad's real estate office.

“This real old dude named Rooney came in my dad's office yesterday,” he whispered, “because he owns some land that he wants to sell. But Dad was busy at the time, so the old guy started talking to me. I was terminally bored at first, but then, when I got the drift of what he was saying, I really began to listen. See, this dude lived in Pyramid Hill when he was young and worked at a mine. Pritchard's Hole, he called it. And he says that he knows for a fact that there's a rich vein of gold in that mine that no one ever knew about except him. And he's dead sure it's still there.”

Barney had been enthusiastic right away, but Rudy… Well, from the very first moment Rudy hated the idea a lot. He couldn't say why exactly, but he was pretty sure it was all related to the same problem that caused him to hit the panic button about ridiculous things like the crawl space under a house, or the storage closet in his own home. But whatever it was, or wasn't related to, he had known immediately that nothing—not even the sure and certain promise of a million dollars in gold—could make him go down into the old Pritchard mine.

Pritchard's Hole! Murph had told him all about it. The story was that it had been called the Hole by miners who worked there because the owner, Old Man Pritchard, was so stingy he wouldn't put in enough supports to make it into even a halfway safe place to work. So it had always basically been just a big hole in the ground, even back during the years when it was a productive mine. Rudy had seen the boarded-up entrance before, a hodgepodge of rotting wooden posts and planks set into a steep rocky cliff-face out beyond the Catholic cemetery. Picturing that entrance made him shudder and there was no way he was ever going to set foot inside it.

But, of course, that wasn't what he'd told Barney and Ty. All he said to them was that it couldn't be true about the gold because if it were, lots of other people would know about it and all kinds of prospectors would have been looking for it ages ago.

But Ty had an answer for that too. “But nobody else ever knew about it,” he said. “Rooney kept it a secret because he was doing some ‘high grading.' High grading?” he repeated, like he didn't think Rudy knew what that meant. “You ever hear of high grading?”

“Sure,” Rudy said. He hadn't lived in the gold country all his life for nothing. “That's when a miner sneaks some gold out of a mine where he's a hired worker and keeps it for himself instead of turning it over to the owner.”

“Yeah,” Ty said. “So this Rooney dude had been sneaking out these big nuggets and he'd already high graded enough stuff to buy himself some land, when he got in a fight at a saloon and almost killed this other dude. So he went to prison and when he got out he didn't dare come back to Pyramid because this dude he'd drilled was out to get him.”

“So why doesn't he try to get the gold himself,” Rudy asked, “if he's so sure it's still down there?”

“Beats me,” Ty said. “Except he's pretty old and crippled. And, of course, he couldn't just go out and hire somebody to get it for him, because, if you want to get technical, it doesn't legally belong to him. All he wanted was to have my dad sell his land and he'd forget about the whole thing, but then, when we got to talking, he decided to let me in on the secret if I'd promise to send him fifty percent or something like that. He even drew me this map that shows exactly where the vein is.”

“So we have to send him fifty percent?” Barney asked.

Ty shrugged. “Or something like that. How's he going to know how much we find?”

So then Rudy asked to see the map, but Ty wouldn't show it to him. “Nobody sees the map unless they're in on the project one hundred percent. So—are you in or out, Drummond?”

“I don't know.” It all sounded pretty unbelievable, not to mention illegal and dangerous. He reminded Barney about what had been pounded into them by parents and teachers ever since they were born—that nothing in the world was more dangerous than fooling around in an old mine. The whole area around Pyramid Hill was riddled with old mines and every kid who had ever grown up in the gold country knew how dangerous they were. It was the truth, too, not just another adult superstition like don't cross your eyes or they'll stay that way, and don't watch too much TV or your brain will rot. Old mines were full of snakes and spiders, shafts that went straight down forever, flooded passageways, crumbling walls, hidden crevices, and endless, endless…

It was starting up again—the pain in his stomach and the feeling that he was about to start screaming—but this time he was able to stop it before it really took over, by using the “think about something else” method. Something great—the greater the better. This time what he thought about was Barney.

B
ARNEY. THE FIRST
time Rudy met Barney was in the kindergarten room at Pyramid Elementary. It wasn't the first day of school, because when the school year started Barney had been away on the rodeo circuit with his parents. By the time he came into the classroom with his grandmother, all the other kids were already feeling like old hands. Mrs. Peters, the teacher, introduced Barney to the class and talked about how glad they all were to meet him, but when Belle Crookshank left, Mrs. Peters went into the hall with her. That left Barney standing all alone up by the chalkboard. Right away the other kids sort of gathered around staring at him to see if he was going to cry—like a lot of them had on their first day.

But Barney didn't cry. He just stood there with his chin out and with a bunch of his dark-blond hair hanging down over one eye. He didn't look exactly happy, but you got the feeling that he wouldn't have cried if all the kids in the room had suddenly turned into three-headed monsters.

Thinking about monsters gave Rudy an idea. He put his arms straight out in front of him, made a crazy face, and started staggering around the room stiff-legged, bumping into people. When everybody stopped staring at Barney to stare at Rudy he stumbled up to Barney and said, “Hi. I'm Rudy the zombie. Come on, let's zombie.” At first Barney just grinned and ducked his head, but by the time the teacher came back into the room everybody was staggering around being zombies, including Barney.

From then on Barney and Rudy played together at school and on weekends and before long Rudy was practically living at the Crooked Bar Ranch.

Maybe Barney and Rudy became good friends so quickly because they were both a little bit lonely. Barney because his parents were away so much of the time, and Rudy because Natasha married Art Mumford right around then and Rudy never felt particularly welcome at home when his stepfather was there. So for about nine years he and Barney had been like brothers, except better because some brothers don't particularly appreciate each other and he and Barney always had.

Of course, Rudy was a long way from being the only Barnaby Crookshank appreciator. Starting from almost his second day in kindergarten Barney was always one of the most popular kids at Pyramid Elementary—being popular was something that Barney never worked at. He was great at every kind of sport, so he always got chosen first for all the teams. And he probably got chosen for other kinds of things because of his looks. Barney had always looked a lot like his father, the rodeo star who was so good-looking that he was known on the circuit as “The Handsome Cowboy.” And of course, it didn't hurt Barney's reputation that everyone knew he'd been helping his grandfather at the ranch since he was practically in diapers and at the age of five could have been almost a champion cowboy himself.

One of the things Rudy particularly liked about Barney was how he didn't talk about himself a lot like some popular kids do. In fact, Barney never talked more than necessary about anything, a trait he probably inherited from his grandfather, who was a world-class conservationist when it came to the spoken word. Also, Rudy had always appreciated how Barney never put people down—not even nerds and little kids—like some popular dudes do.

And as for how Barney felt about Rudy—well, for one thing, he'd always seemed to think that Rudy was a major laugh riot. Nobody appreciated Rudy's crazy sense of humor as much as Barney did. For instance, Barney really got a kick out of the “Romeo Rudy” thing. Juliet, of course, was Stephanie Freeman, a girl who'd been in the same class with Rudy and Barney since about second grade.

Even way back then Stephanie was a knockout, with short curly hair and long curly eyelashes and a totally mind-blowing frown. She had a great smile, too, but she didn't use it very often, particularly when Rudy was around. Her first day at Pyramid happened to be around Valentine's Day, and Rudy had started following her around with a really zonked-out expression on his face, trying to give her a big paper heart he'd made. The rest of the class was used to Rudy and they all thought it was pretty funny—but Stephanie obviously thought he was crazy, which made it all the funnier. After that the whole thing just kept growing.

One time in the cafeteria when they were in third or fourth grade Rudy noticed that no one was eating their raw veggies. So he collected a bunch of celery stalks and carrot sticks and made a kind of bouquet out of them. He got everyone's attention when he went around collecting veggies and especially when he snitched Julie Harmon's hair ribbon to tie the whole thing together. Then, with everyone watching—except for Stephanie, who was determinedly looking the other way—he did a fixing himself up act, slicking down his hair and polishing his shoes on the backs of his pant legs and straightening an imaginary tie. Then he marched down the aisle, went down on one knee with a big flourish and tried to give the bouquet to Stephanie. Everyone cracked up, particularly when she hit him with her lunch pail.

When Rudy did something like that Barney would always say, “How do you have the nerve to do crazy stuff like that?” as soon as he could stop laughing enough to say anything. And Rudy would say something like, “I don't know. Born weird, I guess. You know, kind of…” And he'd do a wildman bit, bugging his eyes and panting, with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.