The Moor - Laurie R. King [116]
"It must have been a wild night for him, with nothing to eat but cold beans spooned from the tin, the roof of his tent blowing about and leaking in a number of places—his sleeping roll, which I abandoned, weighed as much as all the other things combined.
"And then, at some time during the evening, just after the height of the storm when the soil was at its most sodden, something made him leave the tent and venture down to the river, slopping through the wet ground more than half a mile to a place where the river is bordered by a narrow strip of primeval oak forest similar to Wistman's Wood."
"Black Tor Copse," I said, having read my guidebook and my map.
He nodded. "There it was he met his death, in a stretch of rough but open terrain. Pieces of his broken hand torch lay between the rocks, and the blood that seeped down had been only lightly diluted by rain."
"The storm blew through by midnight in Postbridge."
"And slightly earlier to the north. He lay there for an hour or more, and after the rain had ended and begun to seep off the surface of the peat, his body was carried a mile or so down the river and hidden in an abandoned mine. His assailants then went back for the tent and his possessions, dragging and carrying them a lesser distance to the adit that I came across on my last tour of the area."
"Ah. Too fastidious to share the watching place with a corpse," I suggested.
"It would also indicate that they are not finished with the adit, whether they are proposing to use it for storing things or for watching from, or simply as a shelter out of the rain."
"And yet you removed the rucksack."
"It had been thrown far to the back in the collapsing portion of the shaft used for their rubbish tip, with the sleeping roll thrown on top. I thought it unlikely they would brave the unsavoury elements to retrieve it, so I simply rearranged the sleeping roll to look as it had before, and took the other possessions out from under it."
I decided against closer enquiry concerning the type of rubbish in the tip; I also vowed to have my overcoat cleaned at the earliest opportunity.
"I found the adit first, and after I left there I continued downriver, where I found the signs of what I first took to be shelling from the range just north of there, as if the guns had overshot their mark. It had been roughly concealed, by spade work and a redistribution of leaves, and I imagine that in another month, with the last leaf-fall, it will be invisible.
"A short distance farther on, however, in a piece of broken ground that was once a tin works, I was interested to find the ground more freshly disturbed, with signs of digging still clear to be seen. On closer examination, I found pipes."
"Pipes?" I said, as there flashed before me the bizarre image of a collection of meerschaums and briars planted stem-first into a hill.
"Empty steel piping, two inches in diameter and approximately two feet long. There were twenty of them altogether, arranged about four feet apart from one another, sunk into the ground and covered carefully with a cap to keep the inside clear of debris."
"Not filled with pieces of gold and a charge of black powder?"
"Not yet." His eyes gleamed briefly. "I believe that the technique is to prepare the hole by drilling or shoveling down into soft ground and inserting a length of hollow pipe. One then takes a similar length of a smaller diameter of thin-walled, soft pipe which has had a good number of holes drilled or punched into it and then been loosely packed with the charge and the gold, probably an ounce or so mixed into a spadeful of river sand. The smaller of the pipes is then dropped—gently —into the larger, after which the outer pipe is withdrawn, and the wires on the detonators fastened onto a master wire running to the detonator plunger."
"And, boom. Clean up the pipes and wires, and you have gold flakes in your streambed."
"Farther down the river," he continued, "I found the mine where Pethering's body had lain.