Part 1
Every man in Virginia City paid for his flour with a pinch of gold dust, and Gwen Pryce weighed more of it than any banker.
It was the fall of 1864, in Virginia City, Montana Territory, a roaring new gold camp of ten thousand people strung for miles along Alder Gulch. There were almost no coins in the camp, and no paper money anyone trusted. Men paid for everything in dust. A pinch for a drink. A spoonful for a pair of boots. Every store and saloon had a set of brass gold scales on the counter, and gold dust was worth about eighteen dollars an ounce.
Gwen was fifty-six. She and her husband Owen kept the Pryce Brothers General Store on Wallace Street, though there had never been any brothers. They were Welsh, from Swansea, and Owen thought the name sounded prosperous.
Owen sold the goods. Gwen weighed the dust.
She had a gift for it. Everyone said so.
She could look at a man's poke of dust poured out on the scale pan and tell him which gulch it came from. Alder Gulch dust was coarse and bright. Bannack dust was finer, flakier. Dust from the bars on the Stinking Water was pale, almost greenish. She could tell when a man had mixed in black sand to make the weight, and blow it off the pan with one breath. She could tell when a careless saloon keeper had swept up sawdust with his gold.
She had learned it as a girl, in Swansea, where the whole town lived on copper. Her father had been a sampler at the great copper works on the River Tawe. He had come home every night with green stains on his hands, and he had taught his only daughter what he knew, because he had no son. How to weigh. How to look. How to test.
Under the counter, in a stoppered brown bottle, Gwen kept a little nitric acid. Aqua fortis, her father had called it. Strong water.
She had never needed it in Virginia City. Not yet.
The stranger came into the store on the ninth of October.
He was a tall, handsome, easy man of about forty, in a fine black coat and a silk waistcoat, with a gold watch and a gentleman's soft white hands. He said his name was Mr. Sterling Ashby, of St. Louis, and he was buying freight teams and wagons for a big new venture in the spring.
He bought a great deal. Flour and bacon and coffee by the hundredweight. Blankets. A new saddle. Two dozen shovels. And he paid for it all in gold dust, out of a heavy buckskin poke, which he poured out on the scale pan with a little flourish.
"Weigh it out, Mrs. Pryce," he said, smiling. "I'm told you're the best in the gulch."
Gwen weighed it.
The scale said eleven ounces. Nearly two hundred dollars.
She looked at the dust in the pan. It was bright. Coarse. Alder Gulch dust, by the look of it. But there was something about it she did not like. A little too bright, perhaps, in places. A little too even in the color.
She looked up. Mr. Ashby was smiling at her.
"Is something wrong, ma'am?"
"No, sir," said Gwen, after a moment. "Nothing at all."
She poured the dust into the store's poke and wrote out the bill.
That night, after the store was closed, she took out the dust again and poured a little of it on a sheet of white paper under the lamp. She turned it over with the point of a pin. She looked at it through Owen's reading glass.
Most of it was gold. She was sure of that. But here and there, among the bright grains, there were others. Brighter. Sharper-edged. Like tiny filings.
She told Owen in the morning.
Owen laughed.
"Gwen, cariad, the man's a gentleman," he said. "He's buying freight teams. He's spent two hundred dollars here and a thousand dollars in the camp. Half the merchants on Wallace Street want his custom." He patted her hand. "You're tired. You've been staring at dust too long."
Mr. Ashby kept buying.
He bought from every store in Virginia City that week. He bought a span of mules from Ike Rasmussen, the freighter, for three hundred dollars in dust. He bought drinks for the house at every saloon on Wallace Street. He was the most popular man in Alder Gulch.
And Gwen noticed something.
Every man who took his dust weighed it on his own scales, and found it full weight, and was glad. But none of them looked at it the way she did. And none of them knew that a filing of brass weighs very nearly as much as a grain of gold, and shines very nearly as bright, under a lamp, on a brass scale pan, when a handsome man is smiling at you and buying the house a drink.
On the fifteenth of October, Ike Rasmussen came into the store, laughing, to buy tobacco with some of the dust from his mules.
"Good as the bank," he said, pouring it on Gwen's scale. "Best deal I ever made. That Ashby's a prince." He grinned at her. "Owen says you think there's brass in it. A storekeeper's wife ought to stick to weighing flour, Mrs. Pryce."
Gwen looked down at the dust in her scale pan. Bright. Sharp-edged.
And then she heard the stage coach outside, and someone in the street calling that Mr. Ashby had bought a seat on it, and was leaving for Salt Lake City in an hour.
Gwen Pryce reached under the counter for the brown bottle.