The Moor - Laurie R. King [120]
After breakfast Baring-Gould went off to write some letters and take a rest, and Holmes handed me the yellow envelope. The author of this telegram had taken Holmes' concern for circumspection to heart, and the wording of his message was cautious indeed:
PRIMARY SUBJECT KNOWN TO US REGARDING ACTIVITIES INVOLVING SALE OF REAL PROPERTIES FOLLOWING UNVERIFIABLE MISREPRESENTATION OF MINERALS CONTAINED THEREIN. SUGGEST FURTHER ENQUIRIES COLORADO NEVADA SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. SECOND SUBJECT UNKNOWN HERE. APOLOGIES FOR EXPORT TAINTED GOODS. LETTER FOLLOWS.
HARRISON
"Ketteridge is known for fraudulently selling land, claiming it had 'minerals'—I assume gold—when it did not," I interpreted the paper in my hand. "Harrison is with the Alaska police?"
"The Mounties, actually. The Canadians were largely responsible for policing the Territories during the gold rush. I would say by the tone of his apology and the fact that he has been following Ketteridge's career, he knows the man to have been guilty of gold fraud but could not pin it on him." He paused and looked up, gazing through me more than at me. "What was it Ketteridge said about his childhood? He let slip some description about the land, when he was talking to you at Baskerville Hall."
"Red stone," I said. "Something about the hills where he grew up having tors, only they were dry and red."
The far-off look on his face told of a search of that prodigious memory of his, as full of jumble as a lumber room. After a few minutes he suddenly came across the bit of lumber he had been seeking, and his eyes gleamed with satisfaction.
"San Diego," he said. "Late 1860s, perhaps 1870."
"Sorry?" I prompted when he said no more. His gaze focussed.
"There was a gold rush in the red hills outside San Diego, California, in the late 1860s. It was an actual discovery, but as was the case with most such finds, it was soon overwhelmed by the influx of swindlers, claim jumpers, and speculators."
"And Ketteridge's accent comes from the southern part of California. But he couldn't have had anything to do with that; he's barely your age."
"Fifty-seven, unless he lied about being twenty-one when the Klondike rush began. No, he is too young, but he may have learnt the techniques as a child—at his father's knee, perhaps, or merely seeing the activities around him as he was growing up. I shall look forward to receiving Harrison's following letter, which may allow us to pin the man down with his crimes where the police forces of two other countries have failed."
It was only then that the full picture of what we were facing, mad as it seemed, hit me: the very real possibility of a gold rush on Dartmoor. The mediaeval tin seekers with their prodding and digging and dark, shallow tunnels in the earth would be nothing to the catastrophe set off by the whisper of that spellbinding word, gold. It would be over in weeks, of course, as soon as the blasted hillsides gave forth nothing heavier than tin and the diverted streams washed away everything but flecks of base metals from the flumes, but the devastation wrought by tens of thousands of hobnailed boots and spades and sticks of dynamite, the ruin they would leave behind across the ravaged face of the moor—it did not bear thinking.
I shook my head, more to clear it than in denial. "Surely we wouldn't see an actual gold rush here. It's…preposterous."
"You think the English immune to gold fever?"
"We've got to stop it."
"I wonder," said Holmes contemplatively, and stopped.
"About the possibility of a gold rush?" I prodded.
"No, that is clearly possible. Rather, I was reflecting on the care with which they have set up the elaborate mechanism of rumours. The hound and the carriage may be both a diversion while they are salting the ground as well as an essential part of the plot itself. A deeper layer of deception, as it were, to encourage potential speculators to reason along the lines of, 'A: The rich American gold baron has been buying up land