Wendell climbed back into his SUV and started the engine. The air conditioning immediately began to pour out frigid air. Wendell shuddered and shut it off. He had set his plan in motion but it was a plan born in desperation and he was more afraid of failing than at any other time in his life.
He already felt guilty but Guilty suddenly took on a new meaning. His thoughts were confusing. If he was caught doing something wrong, Guilty would result in a long jail term and social humiliation worse than anything he could ever imagine. He was headed off to South Carolina ostensibly to find a White Knight. He shuddered again. That was a very bad choice of words, though he didn’t understand why. His entire body shook as he tried to block images from his mind.
Finally he regained enough composure to shift his SUV into gear.
Chapter 6
The Gold Hole in 1939
The camp was a crude affair made mostly of rough sawn pine that had been milled on the mainland and shipped over to Topsail Island on a motorized, steam powered barge. The most extravagant building on the island was a small, single room shack, about sixteen feet square. It had one door and two window openings that lacked glass but could be closed off with wooden shutters to keep out some of the bugs and bad weather. In the center sat a table and four chairs. Two walls of the room were lined with iron bunk beds. The angle iron bed frames supported flat strips of flexible steel, secured by short springs at their ends. One row of slats ran the length of the bed and another row ran the width, allowing the bed to sink where body weight was heaviest. The mattresses were made of canvass stuffed with straw. The executive living quarters were less than luxurious.
Usually, the shack accommodated a single person, Amos Reeves. He was a partner in the venture but he was also the lead man on site. He had worked mines his entire life and was familiar with both tunnel and open pit mining. Water was always a problem in mining and Amos Reeves was as good as any man at controlling it.
The workers had a long, narrow bunkhouse with hard wooden beds made of rough sawn pine. Some beds had mattresses, others did not.
The roofs of all the buildings were made of wooden shakes nailed to horizontal slats. Despite their crude appearance they kept the interiors surprisingly dry. In the main cabin, the roof was perfect but in the bunkhouse it leaked in a few, isolated places. The floors of all the buildings were pine plank, perpetually covered with a thin layer of sand the men dragged in on their boots. Occasionally the floors got swept. Most of the sand fell down between the cracks in the floorboards. When it rained, any water that leaked through the roof leaked out the floor cracks before it had a chance to puddle. No one bothered to fix the roof.
The third and final building was the cookhouse. It contained a large, iron cooking stove and shelves for flour, salt, beans, lard and coffee. Potatoes and carrots filled bushel baskets which lined the floor against the walls.
Outside stood a large tripod and a massive iron cooking pot that hung from a chain over an open fire. The meals lacked variety. Anything and everything went into the cook pot and always emerged as stew. The fact that a boat arrived delivering a pig, or a fisherman landed with a catch of fresh fish, made little difference to the cook. The meat or fish was added to the pot that was never totally empty and never cleaned.
Amos Reeves had previously worked with the man who owned the metal detecting machine as a manager and lead hand. He had seen the metal detector in operation and believed in its reliability. He was not surprised when he had been offered a share in the partnership, provided he agreed to act as the principal overseer on the project. In the past, he had made a good deal of money with the same sort of deal.
Amos visited the site, made a list of equipment and supplies he felt would be necessary and established the logistics of the supply line to the island. He hired a versatile crew, capable of erecting the crude accommodations and then working the salvage operation.
When the camp was complete, a barge arrived carrying a steam shovel. It was the only piece of heavy equipment on the site. Unloading it was completed only with a great deal of difficulty. Even at high tide the barge could not float far enough onto the beach and unloading the cumbersome machine onto the soft sand beach had taken nerves of steel. A makeshift ramp had been required but it had to be constructed and the machine unloaded before the next tide. The men worked feverishly to complete the task. If the shovel happened to sink on one side, as it inched down the ramp onto the wet sandy beach, there would have been a real chance it might tip over. If that happened, chances were good that it would never be righted. Every man in the crew was holding his breath as the shovel tilted off the barge and onto the timbers that formed the ramp. Finally the machine crabbed its way onto firm soil. Then it had been driven, its iron tracks tearing up or crushing anything in its way, to the site of the excavation at a speed of half a mile an hour.
The bucket of the machine faced forward and was controlled by steel cables that required constant greasing. Clearing away the stumps from logging operations took over a week. The machine did the digging but the stumps were hauled away with mule teams. Excavation began forty feet away from the pickets that marked the spot where the radioactive metal detector had discovered deposits of iron and precious metals. At first, digging in the soft sand was easy and the operation went smoothly. But as the steam shovel continued to dig, the sand in front of the machine constantly caved in. The machine was forced to back out and build a series of terraces in order to dig without falling into the pit. As it dug deeper the men stabilized the roadway with timbers cut from pines on the mainland so that the machine could drive down inside the pit. That plan failed at a depth of about six feet. Below that, sea water infiltrated the hole, and the vibration of the machine caused the water to bubble up through the sand, beneath the steel tracks. The last time the shovel came out of the hole it had taken a dozen mules and every rope and pulley the men could scrounge, just to get it back on dry sand.
When the steam shovel was safely parked, the men began construction of a cofferdam. The dam was built like a huge steel pipe, twenty feet in diameter. It was constructed of panels of plate steel roughly eight feet long and three feet high. The panel was fed lengthwise through a system of rollers just over three feet long that warped the plate in an even curve. The bent sections were assembled by riveting the panels together and beefing up the joints with steel straps. The assembly eventually formed a three foot high circle, twenty feet in diameter. When the iron ring was completed, one crew climbed inside it and worked with shovels and buckets, excavating another two feet. Meanwhile the rest of the crew worked outside the pipe, pounding on its rim with sledge hammers, gradually forcing the twenty foot diameter ring down in the soupy soil. When they had caused it to sink deep enough, the iron workers installed another three foot high layer of steel plate around the upper edge, completing the joint with a neat row of rivets.
Soon there was too much water in the bottom of the pit for men to work, digging by hand. A pump, capable of pumping both water and sand was employed to excavate inside the cofferdam. Meanwhile, a dozen men swung sledge hammers, pounding the rim down until they had sunk it to grade level. Each time they achieved sinking the damn three feet, the iron workers took over and installed another three foot section and the operation repeated itself.
The crews worked under the blazing Carolina sun, plagued by the constant high humidity. In the evenings, discomfort caused by heat was replaced by the irritation of millions of mosquitoes creating their own brand of discomfort. When it rained, work came to a standstill and could not begin again until the ground dried out and the water was pumped out of the pit. The men had little to do but lie on their bunks or play cards. Amos could not stop the men from gambling but managed to establish table limits so that the poorer players would not lose their entire pay.
Despite the grueling work and rough conditions, few men quit. It was the end of the Dirty Thirties and prospects for other jobs were rare to non-existent.
The pump was undersized and could not cast the discharge as far away from the pit as was desirable. As the sand and water were pumped out of the coffer