Chapter 11
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Hirst-Chichagof Mine, Klag Bay, AK
Sam Worlson pressed down on the small board at the bottom of the sluice box, then slid it forward. The two hidden latches released with a satisfying click, and the weight of the smooth-sanded compartment dropped into his hands.
The nearby stamp mill was eerily silent—shut down for repairs.
The trail behind him was empty as far up as he could see.
All quiet down to the shore. The last of the dusk was fading, and it was Sam’s job to put the machine to bed for the night.
The sluice-box staircase drew water diverted from a stream higher up the hill.
The water would carry the ore gravel down the staircase while riffles in the bottom of each step captured the heavier gold, separating it from the sediment.
Tonight, the water would continue to flow down the staircase of sluice boxes, but the miners would not be there feeding new crushed ore from the stamp mill into the top until morning.
Sam stuck the end of the board into the cargo pocket of his pants and pressed what looked like a loose nail.
The precise miter between two strips of wood opened just enough of a gap to allow the payload of gold gravel to drop out.
The weight against his leg confirmed the device had worked.
A small wet circle appeared at the bottom of his pants pocket.
Sam splashed some water around the rest of the cloth to camouflage it.
He scanned the edge of the woods. His hand shook as he returned the board to the bottom of the sluice box. He fumbled it, but managed after a couple of tries to coax the two latches to click back into place.
Nervous sweat ran down the back of his neck. No one was around. All clear. He moved on down the hill, giving one last check to each level.
If he was caught and searched in the next few minutes, it would all be over.
He made a show of finishing his normal maintenance routine and walked back up the trail through the woods toward his bunkhouse.
He unwrapped the cookie he’d held back from lunch, savoring each bite, the crunchy dough dissolving into a sweet sticky mush.
Every Tuesday was cookie day in the mess hall, and Sam always slipped Gus the cook a little cash for enough extra to get him through the week.
A sharp sound echoed to his left—like the crack of a stick. The rushing water of the stream that fed the sluice was too loud for Sam to hear anyone following him. He waited anyway, then took a couple of deep slow breaths before entering the bunkhouse.
The other mine supervisors laughed boisterously inside. The glow of the kerosene lanterns through the windows lit the brush along the end of the trail.
Sam took one more long breath, slowly exhaled, then opened the door. “Hey, Bollard, hush up! You’re scarin the bears clear down to the stream.”
The men laughed, but put their cards down anyway and headed for their cots. It was late.
Sam set his gear down by the entrance, then went back outside toward the outhouse.
Once inside, he latched the door and pulled a small burlap bag out of his waistband, carefully moving the gold from his cargo pocket into the burlap.
He removed his boot, pulled the thick insole liner out, dropped the bag into a hollowed-out section of the heel, and replaced the insole.
Sam had to hand it to Joe Baxter—the construction of the false sluice-box bottom board was immaculate.
It had been easy enough for Sam to swap in when he was doing regular maintenance on the sluice chute.
Once it was installed, you could stare right at it and never see the small slot that allowed gold nuggets to drop smoothly into the hidden compartment.
It worked silently and steadily, high-grading the gold, skimming the largest nuggets from the top of the staircase while allowing the rest to be processed for the mining company.
The trick sluice box needed to be emptied every few days.
That was the riskiest part. Sam passed up a promotion to a higher-level supervisor job just so he could close down the operation at night.
Nobody worried about theft after the day’s haul had already been removed and nothing but water flowed down the chute.
It was the cleverest high-grading scheme Sam had ever heard of.
Collecting the gold was just the start, though. Sam would pass the bag of gold to Joe the next day during the radio-message meeting. Joe removed the gold from the island and converted it to cash.
Selling gold was problematic. Five years ago, to combat the Depression, President Roosevelt had signed an executive order that made it a criminal offense for U.S. citizens to own or trade gold anywhere in the world.
To get around that, Joe and a third guy—a guy Sam had never met—had worked out a scheme. They set up a fake mining company, staked a small placer-mining claim on a piece of worthless land near Sitka, and the third guy pretended to mine it.
Joe passed the gold Sam gave him to the third guy, who then sold it at the assay office in Sitka, claiming it came from their fake mine. He deposited the proceeds in a company bank account, so none of them would be carrying around any suspicious amounts of cash.
They planned to split the money equally three ways someday.
Sam was working in faith on that one. His name wasn’t on the bank account, and he didn’t know the third guy.
Still, he had leverage, and he’d kept track of the amount of gold he’d swiped, so he knew pretty accurately what he’d be owed when the time came to cash out.
The setup made the money they earned look completely legit.
It also made it critical that they have access to the high-grade gold.
The normal hard-rock ore that was dug up by the miners was crushed in the stamp mill, sorted in the sluice boxes, mixed with mercury, then melted down and made into bars.
They needed their gold to look like it was placer-mined, which meant they needed large raw nuggets from just after the crushed ore tailings were dumped into the sluice.
Sam never fancied himself a criminal. He’d been brought up in a law enforcement family and taught right from wrong.
He’d even worked as a deputy for a while.
But when he got to Alaska and found his wages barely paid his living expenses at the commissary, he was left with almost no money to send home to his wife, and that was causing a lot of stress in his marriage.
Wages were mostly paid in company scrip, which could be used only at the company-owned store.
Joe was smart and persuasive. He knew Sam was the only one with the access he needed to pull off the sluice-box trick.
When he had approached Sam with his plan, he convinced Sam that skimming from the mining company wasn’t exactly stealing.
The way Joe told it, it was the company stealing hard labor from the men.
Joe’s take made sense. Sam and the other men were putting in the work, after all.
The company had no right to keep all the profits, did they?
All but one kerosene lantern had been extinguished by the time Sam got back to the bunkhouse.
The sound of men snoring filled the small log structure.
He unlaced his boots, then braced each foot in the rack beside the door, carefully slipping out of the boots as he paced his breath to match the ticking of the wall clock.
The last embers glowed through the cutouts in the iron door of the woodstove. He added a fresh log, then walked to his bunk, his stocking feet gliding smoothly over the wood floor.