Renegade Man by Parris Afton Bonds Read Free Book Online Page A

slurping, sucking noises. Once he was under the surface, he was
captivated by the sheer beauty of the scenery. The water was incredibly clear.
Tiny plants pushed through the riverbed, their fronds swaying in the unseen
current. Underwater, the drone of the dredger was almost nonexistent. It was a
silent, eerily beautiful world.
    He went to work.
And it was work. Wearing sturdy gloves, he tediously but carefully sifted
through the half foot of gravel and sand that covered the bedrock. With the
dredger’s hose braced against his thigh, he tossed away the big rocks that were
too large for the nozzle. Sometimes, if you weren’t careful, the rocks
accumulated into a small mountain that could tumble down in an avalanche that
trapped you underwater.
    Wherever the two
layers of the riverbed met, there was always an increased chance of finding
gold. He knew what to look for—gold glowed, it didn’t glitter—and he knew where
to look. Crevices and irregular formations usually trapped the precious mineral
after a flood had moved it down from the mountain mother lodes. Since gold was
nine times heavier than water, heavier even than silt and most metals, gravity
usually caught it in riverbed pockets.
    He had selected
the Silver City area for prospecting, not out of nostalgia but because the Mesa
del Oro, a great alluvial fan many square miles in area and composed of gravel
and andesite, sloped down from the Animas Mountains and spread out through the Mimbres
Valley watershed. During his first exploratory trip back in March, he had
tested the sand and gravel and found them to be gold-bearing. But would there
be enough gold to provide a rich paystreak? It was a remote, but not
impossible, dream.
    He worked more
slowly around the bedrock. Little by little he began to come across flour gold,
possibly an indication of a paystreak—a broad streak of gold dust that had been
laid down by a previous flood. The elusive metal had captured his imagination
as a child on his infrequent trips to Pinos Altos. P.A., founded in 1859 by a
group of forty-niners drifting home from California, had been a
rough-and-tumble town inhabited by the likes of Judge Roy Bean. Now it was a
ghost town.
    Yesterday he had
found what seemed to be a significant amount of gold in the tailings. Now,
trying to be pragmatic, he backtracked to where the tail end of the streak
should be—a large, low area near the inside of the river’s bend, where the
water changed direction. One hundred pounds of lead at his waist kept him from
drifting downstream with the rapid current.
    Gold. The word
alone evoked images of wealth. The ancient rivers of gold. Immortal,
incorruptible gold. Man had been using it for over sixty-six centuries. It
permeated the dark world of the medieval alchemists, who labored for decades in
their laboratories, futilely seeking to transform base metals into nobler ones.
Yet gold fever had never diminished for dreamers like himself.
    Lest he be
doomed to the same disappointment as the medieval alchemists, Jonah kept his
eye out for valuable minerals other than gold: garnet, silver, tourmaline and
platinum, which was even heavier than gold and worth an even bigger fortune. He
sifted carefully through the sand and gravel. Then, suddenly, the nozzle’s
suctioning power diminished.
    Damn it, he
thought. The hose was clogged. He took the rubber hammer from his belt and
tapped along the length of hose. When the water intake didn’t increase, he knew
he was going to have to check the unit itself. Probably one of the sluice boxes
was backed up.
    Surfacing, he
pulled aside his regulator, pushed his mask atop his head and looked straight
into the direct brown eyes of his childhood sweetheart. He nearly replaced the
regulator over his nose and mouth in order to restore the simple but mandatory
process of breathing, something he’d suddenly forgotten how to do.
    Ritz—distant,
proud Ritz—had always had the power to do that to him. But over the years when
she had