Immersed in his performance of Shakespeare’s hunchback king, a famous actor fractured his femur. This may be the origin of the expression “break a leg.”

—Galen’s Anatomy

Chapter 19

Spend any time in the mountains and you’re likely to find that rivers have their own way of speaking. Jenny had passed many a morning with the Arrow, laughing and shouting and shooting the proverbial.

But the Longshank was a glacier-fed river, and glacier-fed rivers tend to keep to themselves. Their valleys were formed in the age of ice, plowed straight and plowed long by the slow creep of cold. They have wide-open spaces, deep as the bend of a cauldron, and they’re littered with boulders and till. You can’t joke or jostle a river like this; you have to respect it. You must learn to be quiet, and careful, and cautious. Glacier-fed rivers have a tendency to look pretty staid. Yet their motives are fathomless and their currents run strong.

Jenny could sense she was dealing with new territory and she was unsure how to handle it. The ridges along the Longshank were deeply scarred from the scrape of bergs. Cataracts of rainwater cannoned off the steep of the far side. The path ran through acres of scree shed from the mountains. It was a place for watching your step.

“I don’t like this,” muttered Pandora, her attention directed toward the lean ligaments of the schoolmaster. “He’s only after the gold.”

“So are we,” countered Jenny. “But I know what you mean.” She watched Mr. Grimsby pick and toe his way over a pile of rocks. “The trick is keeping him ahead of us. Once we get to Gam Saan, we’ll meet back up with Kam and Lok. He’ll have trouble taking four of us all at once.”

And if worse comes to worst, thought Jenny, I can ask Lok to sit on him.

Pandora had something else nagging at her pate. “Do you think Silent Jack was involved in laying the stones at the tailrace?”

“How do you mean?”

“He was Doc Magee’s partner,” said Pandora. “He might have helped with creating the skeleton map.”

“I don’t think he and Magee were on speaking terms,” replied Jenny.

“That’s a fair point,” mused Pandora.

“Did Jack tell you how long he had been living in Troy?”

“A couple of years,” answered Pandora. “He came back from working on the coast.”

“Well, then, that’s another thing,” said Jenny. “Whoever planned this malarkey must have done it ages ago, when the skeleton first arrived in Magee’s office. You can’t plant a clue after the fact.”

“Jack could have been lying,” retorted her friend. “Maybe he was in Troy before he left for the coast, chiseling out the triangles.”

“I suppose,” said Jenny. “Still, it would be a strange thing for a man who spits on the Rush to do. He said he hated greedy men.”

“Are you speaking about Silent Jack?” called the schoolmaster.

“Pea shoots,” sputtered Jenny. The two girls had spent so long amongst themselves that they had forgotten how to keep their voices low.

“I knew him, Miss Burns,” said the schoolmaster. “A fellow of infinite gripes. He was not someone I would care to meet in a darkened theater.”

“You were here during the Rush?” asked Jenny.

“Yes.”

Mr. Grimsby had been moseying around with the toughs and the roughs? Counting cards at the Last Chance Saloon? Squiring the likes of Gentle Annie through the streets of Eden? No, thought Jenny, he couldn’t be telling the truth. A man like him would have been eaten alive.

“I see you don’t believe me, Miss Burns.”

“You bet your best horse I don’t,” said Jenny.

Mr. Grimsby rubbed his left leg and sighed. “Would you permit me to sit for a few minutes? I can tell you of my experiences.”

As the rain had yet to begin, Jenny was willing to allow this liberty. The schoolmaster sitting was a safer prospect than he was walking. Besides, she was aching for a taste of ham.

Light as new down, Mr. Grimsby alit on a piece of glacial scrap and studied his scratches. Scenting dried blood, a swarm of sandflies darted in for the kill. Jenny and Pandora found seats a good way away from the river—and the flies—and waited.

“Well?” demanded Jenny.

“My apologies,” said the schoolmaster, brushing the grit from his fingers and raising his square lump of a skull. “What would you like to know?”

“How did you get here?” asked Jenny.

“No doubt Eden’s gossips have informed you that I was part of a troupe of jobbing actors,” answered Mr. Grimsby. “When the bottom fell out of business in the old country, we decided to tour the ports of the new world.”

“But not Eden?”

“No,” said the schoolmaster. “Eden was too small. We mainly hugged the shore.”

“Then how did you get here?” repeated Jenny.

“I know,” said Pandora. “He followed the Rush.”

Mr. Grimsby nodded sadly.

“As you say, Miss Quinn, I followed the Rush. The troupe made little money. I thought I might have better financial luck elsewhere.”

“Mr. Grimsby! The big miner in town!” teased Jenny. “I reckon you panned yourself some gold, bought a pair of hand-tooled boots, and took to wooing the women.”

“No,” said the schoolmaster. “I failed at my mining ventures. But I am sure you were already aware of that fact.”

Jenny had a twinge of shame. She doubted it was easy being a small bloke in a large territory. And Mr. Grimsby’s presence had a way of irritating one’s nerve endings. It wouldn’t have been easy for him to defend a claim.

“So what did you do after?” asked Jenny. “There wasn’t a school in the Rush.”

“I washed dishes,” said the schoolmaster. “I swept floors. I ferried messages. I’ve probably journeyed through this valley a full score or more.”

Mr. Grimsby twisted his gooseneck toward the river. There was a rueful tilt to his jaw and a faraway gleam in his eye. Perhaps he was remembering a rare day when life wasn’t a trial, and a thin-chested man could enjoy the feel of the sun on his back.

“You must have been glad when the schoolhouse opened,” said Jenny, taken aback by her own tact.

“Yes,” said Mr. Grimsby. “I was able to read books again.”

“Is that what you would do with the money from the nugget?” demanded Pandora. “Buy lots of books?”

Apart from her exclamations over the triangle code, Jenny’s friend had been doing her best to avoid speaking. It’s a commendable action—when you’ve got nothing good to say to a man, you’re wise to ignore him.

But Pandora was also a practical girl with practical suspicions. In her mind, Mr. Grimsby was up to something. And the only way she knew how to fathom his true intentions was to ask him point-blank.

“I won’t have any money from the nugget,” corrected the schoolmaster. “You and Miss Burns will. However, if you are inquiring what I would do with a fortune, I would probably answer: Sail the seas. Fly to worlds I know not of.”

This was so close in poesy to Jenny’s fevered dreams that she was tempted to tell him just that. Pandora’s bristling decided her against it.

“We’d better not linger,” said Jenny. “The weather won’t wait.”

“I want my lunch,” said Pandora.

“Sure, sure,” said Jenny. She picked up a sliver of stone and hacked off a piece of ham for Pandora. Then she did the same for herself.

And then—for no other reason than instinct—she cut off a third piece and laid it on a rock halfway between Pandora and the schoolmaster.

“There,” called Jenny. “You get some, too.”

She retreated toward safety and watched. Stiff as a corpse in his coffin, Mr. Grimsby rose to his feet.

“Miss Burns.”

“Yes?”

“I would like to apologize for my behavior in the schoolroom.”

“You called her horrible names,” reminded Pandora.

“Yes,” said the schoolmaster. “I called Miss Burns names. It may have taken me a reversal of fortune to learn it, but I now know I was wrong. You must judge a man by the truth of his actions or not at all.”

“And?” demanded Pandora.

“I behaved shabbily toward you and your friend, and I am ashamed.”

Jenny tasted the sugar of justice on her tongue and smiled. Sure, it was still possible that Mr. Grimsby was conniving at some sort of ruse. But it was equal odds that he was in earnest. And as far as Jenny was concerned, those were good enough chances these days. “Well, Mr. Grimsby, I’m right glad to hear that.”

Now, then, in the course of this tale, you may have noticed a fair amount of prose on poppies and butterflies. Well, here’s where the valentine ends. Because if you’ve never seen a valley that’s been ruined by gold mining, you’ve got a hard shock in store.

Wide and flat are the banks of the Longshank, and many were the men who squatted on it. All the way down the river, Jenny spied dozens of worn-out wooden contraptions resembling hollow shoes. These were the rocker boxes, where a sieve at the top of the heel and a series of ridges running toward the toe allowed a miner to separate the gold flakes from dirt.

From these cradles grew the Long Toms—troughs of ten, twenty, thirty feet or more. And from the Long Toms grew the greed. Gallons of pure stream were forced into ditches, punched into rocks, and ferried toward sluice boxes. By the time the water reached the river, it was brown with silt and crud.

As the trio progressed through the valley, Jenny was also appalled to see that miners had tried hosing the cliffs. Whole sections of hillside had been stripped clean of their skins, exposing raw vein and muscle to the cold, bitter winds. Every which way, the mountains had been tortured.

“Depressing, is it not?” commented Mr. Grimsby.

“It ought to be against the law!”

“That’s an interesting judgment coming from someone who seeks a gold nugget.”

A challenge given is a challenge taken with a girl like Jenny Burns. “I wasn’t the one who went fossicking for it. I’m simply searching for the leftovers.”

“But you wouldn’t be able to search for leftovers if you lived somewhere else,” noted Mr. Grimsby. “Didn’t your father come to Eden to mine gold?”

“And what if he did?” challenged Jenny. “You think kids are to blame for the choices their parents make? That’s like saying trees are to blame for the soil they grow in.”

The schoolmaster paused and twirled. “But that is quite brilliant, Miss Burns. Why didn’t you display this attention to logic when you were skulking at the back of my classroom?”

Jenny scowled. “Mr. Grimsby, I’ve decided against you trimming dags. I going to put you on gutting carcasses.”

The schoolmaster took a hasty step back. “Of course. I apologize for my reprimand.” Grasping for a change of subject, he found one in the sight of an abandoned hut. “And I will grant you that the Rush had its positive points. A great many fair and wayward characters peopled the scene.”

“Like who?” challenged Pandora.

“Like whom,” said Mr. Grimsby, unable to help himself. “Like the man who lived in that abode.” In the split of a second, his shoulders dropped and his knees bent. His jowls softened and sagged. He wrapped his left arm around a circle of nothing. “Name is Potbelly Pat, how do ye do?” The schoolmaster wallowed to one side and wobbled to another. “I’m the youngest son of the youngest son of the King of Poltree, and the fifteenth child of a fairy queen.” He threw open his interior and belched.

“He’s gone off his chump,” whispered Pandora.

“I think he’s exercising his dramatic muscles,” replied Jenny.

“Go on with you then, ask me a question,” said Mr. Grimsby, still with the lilt.

“Okay,” said Jenny, willing to humor him for a moment. “Why did you decide to be a miner, Pat?”

“Well, I was nibbling my way through a four-poster bed when I said to myself, ‘Pat,’ said I, ‘you’ll eat yourself out of house and home.’ So over I came to Eden, where food was plentiful. That’s how I lost my roof. I ate it one morning for breakfast.” The schoolmaster belched again, loud enough to startle the swifts.

“You know, Pandora,” muttered Jenny, “maybe I spoke too soon. . . .”

With a brisk twitch of his sartorius and a switch of his stance, Mr. Grimsby became a fiddly young man. He adjusted the position of an invisible chair, brushed a crumb off its surface, and took a seat in midair. His left ankle came to rest on his right knee and his hands flew up to grasp a needle and thread. Deftly he stabbed at the cloth that lay in his lap.

“I do not know, do not know, do not know what to do,” said the schoolmaster, stitching a line through the sky. “I am Tailor Tip, oh poor Tailor Tip, how little I see and how little I find.”

“And why are you here, Tip?” asked Jenny. Ignoring the question of his sanity, Mr. Grimsby was pretty good at impressions. She was beginning to enjoy herself.

“Oh, Tip, poor Tip,” said the schoolmaster. “I was sent by my father. Too simple for home, too frightened of speech. My mother cried and told me to remember my handkerchief.” Quick flashed the needle through the cloth. “But I lost it in the rain . . .”

A drop of water—a real one, this time—landed on Mr. Grimsby’s nose.

“. . . and know not where to find it,” wept the schoolmaster.

“There, there,” said Jenny. “No need to cry.”

Faster than a slip in the hay, the schoolmaster’s foot came crashing to the ground. Needle and thread were thrown to the wind. Mr. Grimsby drew a deep breath and rammed his fists on his hips. “I don’t cry. I am a man known as Ox!”

“No first name?” joked Jenny.

“Ox,” bellowed Mr. Grimsby. “You see this hide?” He banged the flat of his fists together and began to pull his hands, slower than slow, away from each other. “I stretch this hide,” gasped the schoolmaster, “until it is very, very, very wiiiiidddde.” Red in the cheeks and breathless to boot, he continued to pull until his arms were horizontal with the ground. “And. Now. I. Die.” The schoolmaster released the imaginary band and fell to the ground.

There was nothing for it but to applaud, which is what Jenny did. She was amazed that her former teacher—that weak-spirited man who sneered at children and punished thought—could hold such reservoirs of silliness. What did it mean when a person contradicted his past?

Jenny was dazed, but Pandora was not. She promptly stuck out her tongue.

“Our play is done,” said the schoolmaster, getting to his feet. “And it appears the rain has returned.”

Jenny shook herself three times to resettle her wits and nodded.

“How far do you think it is to Gam Saan?”

“Less than half a mile,” said Mr. Grimsby, flicking lumps of clay off his trousers. “You’ll spy shelter by the red roofs. The color is the result of the iron in the metal.”

Incredible, thought Jenny. Without so much as the flick of an eyelid, he was back to being the same dull bloke as before.

“I think you’re completely nutty,” said Pandora.

The schoolmaster repeated his courtier’s bow. “Thank you, Miss Quinn. I take that as a compliment.” He turned up what remained of the collar on his coat. “We should hurry. It will be chilly at Gold Mountain, and we’ll be without the comfort of bed and company.”

“Yes, well,” said Jenny, shifting uneasily in her boots, “you might be surprised.”