Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

The Case of the Piss-Poor Gold by Lee Goldberg

Fans of the Monk TV series and followers of Lee Goldberg’s tie-in novels about the obsessive compulsive San Francisco P.I. are in for a treat. Mr. Goldberg’s winter 2009 book in the Monk series, Mr. Monk in Trouble, contains this stand-alone short story. It stars not TV’s Adrian Monk but an ancestor of his, Old West assayer Artemis Monk, who shares some of Adrian’s obsessions, but has to cope with them amid the filth of an 1855 mining town.

Trouble, California, 1855

A dream killed my husband Hank Guthrie before his twenty-fifth year.

We’d been working this barren patch of dirt in Kansas, trying to make it into a farm and having no luck at it, when he read about all the gold that was sprinkled on the ground out west in California.

The newspapers said the riverbeds there were lined with gold and that anybody with two good arms, a shovel, and a tin pan could earn at least a hundred dollars a day without breaking a sweat. It sounded too good to be true, but that didn’t stop every poor farmer from catching gold fever anyway.

My Hank was one of them.

I tried to talk sense to him, but his mind was set on abandoning the farm, packing up what little we had, and heading to California.

I could hardly blame him for wanting to go.

When you’re killing yourself trying to grow a crop in a land as ornery, dry, and infertile as my old granny, you want to believe there’s an easier way.

I knew California couldn’t be the paradise of gold that the newspapers made it out to be, but I figured we couldn’t be any worse off than we already were. Besides, I was raised to obey my husband no matter how thickheaded, foolhardy, and stubborn he might be.

So in 1852 we teamed up with four other families and went west. Along the way, we lost nearly all of our cattle and had to toss our stove, our dishes, my momma’s candlesticks, and just about every possession we had to lighten our load. Those losses were nothing compared to the human toll. Half of our party died of cholera.

The way west was littered with valuables, graves, and animal carcasses from Kansas to California. More than once during those long, brutal months I wondered what wealth could await us that could match what we’d all lost.

I took it as a bad omen of what was to come. If that wasn’t enough of a sign, the first California mining camp we rolled into was named Trouble.

I’d have preferred to stop in a place called Opportunity, Happiness, or Serenity, but I suppose it could have been worse. The place could have been called Futility, Misery, or Death, all of which would have been a more accurate description of what awaited us.

It certainly wasn’t a pretty place. The main street was a mire of mud, sawdust, rocks, and horse droppings with an occasional wood plank or two flung atop it to make crossing less of a slog.

Everything looked like it was erected in a hurry by people with little regard for outward appearance, skill in construction, or any thought of permanence.

Most of the structures were one story, with log walls and sawed-timber storefronts with tall, flat cornices of varying heights. There was also a smattering of shacks, log cabins, and tents of all kinds, some crudely cobbled together out of boughs and old calico shirts. The hotel was a lopsided, two-story building with a sagging veranda. There was a wood-plank sidewalk on each side of the street and plenty of hitching posts.

I didn’t see a church, but that didn’t mean one of those tents didn’t contain a preacher or two. In my experience, preachers and gamblers always showed up where there was whiskey and money around.

The men on the street looked like they’d all just crawled out of their graves. They were covered in dirt. It was caked to their tattered wool shirts and patched britches, it dusted their mangy beards and ragged hats, and it clung to their hair, which was slicked back with wagon-wheel grease and caught everything.

If there were womenfolk around, they were either in hiding or hadn’t emerged from their graves yet. Seeing the menfolk, I couldn’t blame them for keeping out of sight.

The only evidence of prosperity that I could see was the existence of the camp itself, and as ugly as it was, it was a strong indicator. Trouble wouldn’t have been there at all, or expanding, if there wasn’t gold to support it.

Hank and I might have passed right through, and probably should have, but he couldn’t wait to stick his pan in a river. He found some flakes of gold in that first pan of gravel and was so excited about it that he staked himself a claim right away, convinced that we were sitting on our mother lode.

We weren’t.

When that patch didn’t pan out, we worked our way up and down that river, never straying far from Trouble, staking new claims, hoping we were just one pan away from striking it rich.

We didn’t know much about geology but we’d learned that gold was easiest to find in gravel bars where the river widened and bent or where it once did. Gold being heavier than other minerals, the flakes and nuggets would settle in, sometimes near the surface, and sometimes down deep.

The gold wasn’t hard to recognize. There was the color, of course, and the soft way it felt when you bit a nugget in your teeth — not that we found many nuggets.

The gold was there, that was for sure, but getting enough of it out of the ground to make a living was back-breaking, soul-bleeding work that was much harder than farming. But gold fever kept men like Hank going in a way that farming never could. There were too many people striking it rich all around us for him to ever stop believing that it could happen to him. The fever blinded him to the pain, futility, poverty, and hardship.

I didn’t have the fever. But I had a marriage and a man that I loved. Keeping them both healthy and strong was what kept me going.

We lived in a tent so we could move wherever the gold was. I kept house, cooked our meals, and sometimes patched and sewed up clothes for some of the other prospectors in exchange for necessities, while Hank worked our claim.

A man had to pan half an ounce to an ounce of gold a day, about sixteen dollars’ worth of color, if he wanted to survive and set a little aside for the lean days.

But we rarely panned more than six dollars a day worth of color, roughly six pinches of gold dust, and with molasses at one dollar a bottle and flour going for fifty cents a pound, we could barely keep ourselves fed.

Most of the time, our bag of flour was worth more than our pouch of gold.

I tried to convince Hank to give up on prospecting and try something else. We argued about it for most of that first year until I finally just gave up and resolved to do my best to support him, no matter how wrong-headed I thought he was. That was what I’d been taught a good wife was supposed to do.

Two years of panning in the cold river water, day in and day out, bowed Hank’s back and swelled his joints. It got so bad that he couldn’t stand and could barely breathe. And even then, with all those ailments, his biggest ache was the desire to pan for more gold.

They say it was rheumatic fever that killed him, but I know better.

It was the dream of gold that did him in.

His death left me alone, but not without assets. I had our claim, our tent, and his tools, but they weren’t worth a sack of potatoes. What I had that was worth something was my body.

Women were scarce in Trouble, so the instant Hank was buried, I became as rare and valuable a commodity in those parts as gold.

There were a couple of ways I could mine that value.

I could marry a wealthy man, of which there were few, most of whom were living in their San Francisco mansions while others toiled for them in the mines.

Or I could become involved with many less-prosperous men, of which there were multitudes, most of whom were willing to pay a pinch or two of gold to enjoy a woman’s affection for a short time.

Women who engaged in that sort of barter were called sporting women and lived in rooms behind the saloons. They were generally held in higher regard than such women back East, perhaps because the population in Trouble was made up mostly of lonely men in desperate need of their services. That might also explain why vices that weren’t tolerated back home were taken so casually in the mining camps, whether it was drinking, gambling, whoring, or murder.

A few of the sporting women did all right, made enough money to support themselves until they could find a man with plenty of gold, and low moral standards, to marry and move on. But it seemed to me that most of the women died young, taken by syphilis, abortions, or suicide by laudanum.

I tried to survive instead by sewing and laundering for the miners. But there weren’t many men willing to part with their hard-earned gold dust on something as frivolous as clean clothes that were just going to get dirty again the next day. They felt their gold was better spent on whiskey, food, and sporting women.

However, there was one peculiar and extraordinary man who valued cleanliness and order above all else.

I’m talking, of course, about Artemis Monk, Trouble’s only assayer.

I’ve heard it said that assaying — analyzing stones and such and determining the mineral content — is the third oldest profession, after doctors and sporting women.

Every prospector and miner came to Monk with their rocks so that he could determine how much gold was in them, the quality of the gold, and estimate the potential yield of their claims. That made him easily the second or third most important man in Trouble.

There was either something very unusual about the geology of Trouble, or unique to Monk’s calculations, because the various minerals in the samples he analyzed always showed up in even amounts. He attributed it to the “immutable balance of nature,” but if that was so, the rest of the world was unbalanced.

As odd as that was, the fact remained that Monk always turned out to be right in his estimates of the worth of a claim, and anybody who ever questioned his conclusions eventually found that out for themselves the hard way.

But even if you never had business with Monk, you certainly knew who he was. Monk stood out. He was the only clean-shaven man in the camp, his hair was neatly trimmed, and he bathed every day, which in itself was astonishing. He always wore the same thing — a derby hat with a domed crown and a flat, round brim, a long-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the collar, a sleeveless vest with four pockets and four buttons, wool pants, and fine black boots.

His clothes were always clean. I know, because I was the one who cleaned them, not that I ever found a speck of dirt or the tiniest stain on them. He brought me his clothes neatly folded. They looked as if they’d never been unfolded, much less worn, but I figured if he wanted me to wash clean clothes, so be it. I was in no position to turn down work.

Monk seemed very pleased with my laundering and came back to my tent by the river almost every morning. I never saw him on a horse or even near one. He seemed repulsed by the animals. He got where he was going on foot or by railroad.

One day when he showed up at my tent I was gone and my tent was empty, so he searched the town for me. He found me outside of one of the saloons with my trunk at my side.

I was trying to swallow down my misgivings and enter the sporting life. It must have been obvious to him what was going through my mind.

“You can’t do this,” he said.

“I don’t have any choice, Mr. Monk. It’s the only thing of value that I have to sell.”

“You are excellent at laundering,” he said. “Nobody here has ever done it better.”

“I can’t survive doing that.”

“But I need you,” Monk said.

“And I need food, a warm place to sleep, and a roof over my head.”

“Done,” he said.

I turned to look at him. “What do you mean?”

“I’ll hire you,” Monk said. “You can live in the spare room in my office.”

I eyed him warily. “What do you expect in return, Mr. Monk?”

“Not what you are prepared to give in there, Mrs. Guthrie,” he said, tipping his head towards the saloon. “I need an assistant to keep my life clean and orderly. It’s becoming too much for me to handle alone and still do my work.”

We settled on a price, one that would sustain me and allow me to set a little aside so that I could someday return to Kansas.

He accepted my terms so quickly that I wondered if I’d set my price too low. But I was grateful for the opportunity and I moved in that day.

It was a purely chaste arrangement, though I’m sure nobody believed that.

I didn’t care what they thought. All that mattered to me was that I wouldn’t have to become a sporting woman, at least not yet.

I soon discovered that keeping his life clean and orderly involved far more than simple housekeeping and that his skills, and service to the community, extended beyond detecting minerals in rocks.

Artemis Monk solved crimes.

The commerce in Trouble relied almost exclusively on gold dust, which people carried around in leather pokes tied to their belts. A pinch was worth about a dollar and just about everybody, from the clerk at the general store to the sporting women, had a set of scales.

It was usually the seller who did the pinching, and it was common for them to engage in some trickery to gain a few extra grains of gold in the transaction.

Most of the bartenders, shopkeepers, barbers, and sporting women in town kept their nails long, the better to capture dust in a pinch, and in their spare time, rolled rough pebbles between their thumbs and index fingers to create indentations in their skin to trap more dust.

The shopkeeper at the general store went a step further. He was known for his abundant, and slickly greased, head of hair, which he smoothed before every transaction and then raked his fingers through afterwards as the customer was leaving. According to Monk, that was because the gold stuck to his greased fingers during the pinch and was wiped off in his hair afterwards. Each night the shopkeeper washed his hair into a gold pan and made more than most prospectors did squatting beside a river.

But I suppose it all evened out in the end, since many prospectors and miners were known to salt their gold with pyrite and brass filings to give their poke a little more volume.

Monk didn’t bother himself with those petty crimes, but he did catch plenty of the more ingenious thieves.

I remember one situation in particular, because it happened in the first few weeks that I was working for him and because it also happened to be the first murder I’d seen him solve.

It was a warm morning in September and I was indexing samples and updating his assay ledgers in the front office of his large, perfectly square cabin.

Monk kept a representative sample of the rocks that were brought in for him to test. He placed the sample in a jar and labeled it with the date it was tested and index numbers that corresponded to entries in a ledger he kept of the various claims, their locations, and the owners. The ledger also contained the results of his assays. It was part of my job to maintain those records.

The shelves in the front office were neatly organized with sample jars, reference books, maps, and various rock specimens. His prospecting tools were carefully organized according to size, shape, and function. The tools rested on pegs in the wall specifically fitted for the individual implements.

The cabin was divided into four equal sections — the front office, which doubled as our kitchen and communal living area, the laboratory, Monk’s room, and my room.

Monk spent most of his time in the laboratory, where he worked at an enormous desk that he somehow managed to keep dust-free, even though he regularly worked with rocks and dirt. The shelves were filled with the specialized tools, chemicals, crucibles, microscopes, and balances required for his trade.

The rear of his laboratory was reserved for the crushing of rock samples into dust, which he would then fire in the two-deck clay furnace in the back as part of some complicated process I don’t pretend to understand. All I know is that when it was done, and the pulverized rocks had been melted, poured into cupels, cooled and cleaned and chemicals added, he could separate the gold from everything else and tell you how rich or poor your claim was likely to be.

Monk was in his lab when a young prospector walked into the front office. I immediately stopped him at the door and led him back outside to the porch.

“I need to see Mr. Monk,” he said.

“You can’t come in here like that,” I said.

“Like what?”

I could tell he was a greenhorn, fresh off the boat, train, or trail and eager to make it rich in the gold country. He had the same feverish look in his eye that my Hank, and hundreds of other men, had. But it was more than that.

His wool shirt was still a recognizable shade of red, his trousers weren’t patched, but both were covered with dirt. He had the blistered hands and stumbling gait of someone unaccustomed to working with a shovel and pick, or the long hours squatting in the cold river, swishing gravel around in a pan. He was thin from lack of good food and possibly a touch of land scurvy too. His whiskers were mangy but not yet obscuring his youthful features, and his hair was long but not yet wild and matted.

“You’re too dirty,” I said. “Mr. Monk only allows people inside who are freshly washed and dressed in their clean Sunday best.”

“This ain’t no church, and I don’t want to marry him. I just want him to look at my rocks.”

“What is your name, sir?”

“Nate Klebbin,” he said.

“You can give me your samples, Mr. Klebbin, and I will take them in to Mr. Monk. You may wait here on the porch if you like,” I said, motioning to the guest bench. “Or I can fetch you in the saloon when Mr. Monk is finished.”

“I’ll wait here.” He handed me his sack of rocks and took a seat on the bench.

I went inside and carried the sack to Monk, who greeted me at the doorway of his laboratory.

“You have a new client,” I said.

“I know,” Monk said. “I could smell him from a hundred yards away.”

“You say that about everybody except me.”

“Because nobody except you in this town bathes and wears fresh clothes each day,” Monk said. “And many of them regularly sit astride filthy beasts.”

“You mean horses.”

“That’s what I said.” Monk took the bag from me and retreated to his laboratory, closing the door behind him.

“I’d ride a horse if I could afford one,” I said.

Monk never rode horses and believed they should be prohibited from the streets. If he had his way, everybody would have to hitch up their horses in a corral outside of town and clean up after them.

He emerged again a few hours later, a bewildered look on his face.

“Is there an animal being slaughtered on our front porch?”

Monk was referring to Nate Klebbin, who’d fallen asleep the instant after he sat down on the bench and had been snoring loudly ever since.

“That’s the fellow who brought in the sample for you,” I said. “He’s sleeping on the porch.”

“It sounds like he’s being murdered, and yet it smells like he died two weeks ago.”

“I’m sure he’ll be flattered to hear that,” I said.

Monk opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, where Klebbin was snoring away. “Mr. Klebbin?”

The man was too deep asleep to be stirred by the mere mention of his name. So Monk reached back into the cabin, grabbed the broom, and poked Klebbin in the side with the handle.

Klebbin jerked awake. “What are you poking me for?”

“I’m Artemis Monk, the assayer. I’ve finished studying your sample.”

Klebbin sat up straight, his eyes flashing with excitement. “Did you find color?”

“I did,” Monk said.

“A lot of it?”

“Enough to indicate the possibility of much more to be had with hard labor,” Monk said.

“Yee-haw!” Klebbin said.

“I wouldn’t yee or haw just yet,” Monk said. “Where is your claim?”

Klebbin reached into his shirt for a folded sheet of sweat-stained paper, which he held out to Monk. “It’s right here.”

Monk took a step back as if he was being offered a dead rat. “I mean, where is your parcel located?”

“In a gulch west of Juniper Creek,” Klebbin said. “I bought it from Clem Janklow. You know him?”

Monk knew Clem, and so did everybody else in town. Clem was a prospector who scraped by but never struck it rich and what gold he did find he quickly spent at the saloon. He was always broke and perpetually drunk and relieved his prodigious bladder wherever, and whenever, the urge struck him.

This, of course, disgusted and infuriated Monk, who demanded that Sheriff Wheeler lock Clem up or throw him out of town. But Wheeler was reluctant to do either.

“If I lock him up, then he’ll just piss all over my jail,” Wheeler said. “And if I drove out everybody who pisses in the street, the town would be deserted. Besides, Clem can’t help it. He’s got a kidney ailment.”

“The ailment is whiskey,” Monk said.

But Clem claimed it was more than that, but that he couldn’t afford the medicine that would lessen his need for alcohol and relieve his kidney problem. Monk talked to Dr. Sloan, who confirmed Clem’s account and recommended an elixir known as Greeley’s Cure, which was used to treat syphilis, alcoholism, opium addiction, and digestive troubles.

So Monk made a deal with Clem. He’d pay for the medicine himself if Clem agreed to stay out of the saloon and not to relieve himself on the streets.

Since then, Clem hadn’t relieved himself once in public and stayed away from the saloon. The bottles of Greeley’s Cure cost Monk several dollars a day, but he figured it was a small price to pay to save a man’s life and keep the community clean.

Now Monk’s face was turning beet red with anger.

“Why did Clem sell you his claim if it was still producing gold, Mr. Klebbin?”

“Clem told me he’s too sick and feeble to work it anymore but it ain’t played out yet,” Klebbin said. “He’s got some kind of kidney problem from too much rot-gut whiskey. It’s got so bad, he’s pissing day and night all over the place out there. You wouldn’t believe the stink, but I don’t mind if there’s gold.”

Monk shivered. “You’ve been swindled, Mr. Klebbin, and so have I.”

“But you found gold in them rocks, didn’t you?” Klebbin said.

“Indeed I did,” Monk said. “Stay here while I get the sheriff.”

Monk marched away and I hurried after him to Main Street. He kept his head down, watching the planks as he stepped on them.

“I don’t understand the trouble, Mr. Monk. Everything Clem told Mr. Klebbin is true.”

“That’s what makes it so infuriating,” Monk said. “The audacity of the crime.”

Monk stopped and pointed to a warped plank. I bent down and marked a big “X” on it with a piece of chalk so that the wood could be replaced later. I carried the chalk with me at all times for exactly that purpose.

He took another step and pointed to another plank. This one was cracked.

“I thought you were in a hurry,” I said.

“I am,” Monk said. “But I’m not going to kill myself getting there.”

“You can’t die from stepping on a warped board,” I said.

“You can trip and break your neck. Or you could get a splinter in your toe that becomes infected. Next thing you know, Dr. Sloan is chopping off your leg to prevent gangrene, but he’s too late. You’re already dead.”

I marked the plank and we were hurrying along again when a man rode in, dismounted, and hitched his horse to the post a few yards ahead of us.

He was a cowhand, not a prospector. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, a calico shirt, a beaten-down charro jacket adorned with silver-threaded brocade, and a pair of chaps. His boots were muddy and his clothes were dusty and stained with splotches of tar.

The cowboy spit some tobacco into the street and stepped up to the sidewalk in front of the saloon, slapping dust off of himself with his hat.

“You can sweep that right up again with that hat of yours,” Monk said. “We like to keep our town clean.”

The cowboy turned to look at Monk. “What did you say to me?”

“And when you’re done sweeping up your dust, you can pick up that disgusting gob of tobacco you left in our street.”

The cowboy smiled, flashing his yellow teeth, and scratched at some welts on his chest. There was a murderous glint in his eyes. But he was wearing a gun belt and Monk was not, which may have been the only thing that saved Monk from getting gunned down.

“I’m walking into that saloon and having myself a drink, mister. Maybe you and the pretty lady would like to join me.”

“Not with those muddy boots on you’re not,” Monk said. “People eat and drink in there. Why don’t you take them off and leave them by the door?”

“I got to get me some of whatever you’ve been drinking,” the cowboy laughed and went inside.

Monk was about to go in after him when the horse passed gas and let loose some droppings. He screamed and ran back the way we’d come, careful to step on the same boards that he had before.

I caught up with Monk around the corner on Second Street, out of sight of the horse and the droppings. He was breathing with a handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

“How are we going to get to the sheriff now?” he said.

“Easy,” I said. “We walk down the sidewalk to his office.”

“We can’t with that in the street.”

“Unless you walk right behind that horse, there’s no danger of stepping in the droppings.”

“It’s still there,” Monk said. “You can see it and you can smell it.”

“So close your eyes and plug your nose.”

“I’ll die of asphyxiation,” Monk said. “If my skin doesn’t rot off first.”

“Why would your skin rot off?”

“Did you see what’s in the street?” Monk said. “What I need is my own telegraph, in my cabin, connected directly to the sheriff’s office.”

“I’m sure he’d love that,” I said. “But since it may take some time to build a telegraph line, I’d better go fetch Sheriff Wheeler myself.”

I started back towards Main Street but, as it turned out, I didn’t have to go far. The sheriff was riding by on horseback with his deputy, Parley Weaver. I ran into the street and flagged him down.

The sheriff drew up beside me. He had a bountiful moustache that looked like he’d skinned a raccoon and hung the pelt from his nose. I’d heard he’d been a gunfighter before he settled in Trouble in search of a peaceable life. Most sheriffs had the same story.

Deputy Weaver was reed thin and lazy, but moved as fast as a jack rabbit when food, drink, or the attentions of a sporting woman were involved.

“What’s the problem, Mrs. Guthrie?” Wheeler asked me.

“It’s Mr. Monk, Sheriff,” I said.

“You need to arrest Clem Janklow,” Monk yelled from where he stood, a safe distance away from the sheriff, Deputy Weaver, and their horses.

Wheeler groaned. “I got bigger problems than Clem’s pissing, Monk. There’s been a murder. Somebody killed Bart Spicer and stole his poke.”

“Did it happen at his mine?” Monk asked.

“As a matter of fact, it did,” the sheriff said. “I’m on my way out there now.”

“Why are you going there when the murderer is right here in town?”

The sheriff raised his eyebrows. “He is?”

“He’s having a drink in Bogg’s Saloon,” Monk said. “Now can we please go find Clem Janklow?”

The sheriff and his deputy looked perplexed, and I suppose that I did, too. Wheeler asked the question the three of us were thinking.

“How can you be sure that Spicer’s killer is sitting in Bogg’s Saloon when you didn’t even know that Spicer was dead until I told you?”

“Was Spicer killed with a mine timber?” Monk asked impatiently.

“Someone dropped a timber on his head while he was sleeping,” Deputy Weaver said. “How’d you know that? Did somebody tell you?”

“The murderer did,” Monk said.

“He was bragging about what he done?” Weaver asked.

“He didn’t say a word about it,” Monk said. “He didn’t have to. He was wearing his confession.”

“What’s this feller’s name?” Wheeler asked.

“I don’t know,” Monk said. “He just rode into town and messed the whole place up.”

Wheeler groaned. “How did he do that?”

“He spit tobacco in the street, brushed dirt onto the sidewalk, walked into the saloon with muddy boots, and his horse did the rest.”

“Because of that, you think he’s also got to be a murderer,” Wheeler said.

“I can prove it,” Monk said.

If it had been anybody else but Artemis Monk who’d said that, the sheriff would have ignored him and rode on to Spicer’s mine. But Monk wasn’t anybody else.

The sheriff turned to his deputy. “Go over to Bogg’s and invite the cowboy to join us.”

Weaver rode away. Sheriff Wheeler got off his horse and tied him to a hitching post.

“We’re wasting time, Sheriff,” Monk said. “Clem might be getting away.”

“He’s not going anywhere, Monk. And even if he was, he wouldn’t be hard to track,” Wheeler said, then turned to me. “How are you, Mrs. Guthrie?”

“I’m getting along fine, Sheriff.”

“Monk hasn’t driven you crazy yet?”

“No, sir,” I said, mindful of who paid my wages and gave me room and board.

“It’s early yet,” the sheriff said just as Weaver approached with the cowpoke at his side.

“This here’s Bud Lolly,” Weaver said.

Lolly smiled when he saw Monk and me. “You again? Is there a law in this town against spitting?”

“Not yet, but I’m working on it,” Monk said.

“Believe me, he is,” the sheriff said. “But we do have a law here against murder.”

“I ain’t killed nobody,” Lolly said.

Monk took a handkerchief from his pocket, squatted down, and removed some mud from Lolly’s boot. We all stared at him as he did it.

“You want to shine my boots, mister, I’ll be glad to take ‘em off for you,” Lolly said.

“This dirt is from Bart Spicer’s property,” Monk said. “I recognize the hue, which is indicative of the unusually high silica content.”

“I ain’t never heard of no Bart Spicer,” Lolly said. “And even if I did, you can’t know where I’ve been from the mud on my boot.”

“Actually, he can,” I said. “Mr. Monk is the town assayer. He knows his dirt.”

“The geology and metallurgical content of every piece of property is unique, and so is the gold that comes out of it,” Monk said. “This mud definitely came from Bart’s claim. I can match it to the sample I kept of Bart’s rocks. I’m sure if I saw the gold dust in your poke, I’d recognize the color of that, too.”

“That don’t prove nothing,” Lolly said. “I might have walked across his land without even knowing it. And there’s lots of gold dust being passed around in these parts. I got no idea where my gold was before it ended up in my pouch.”

“He’s got a point,” Wheeler said. “I can’t hang a man because he’s got mud on his boots and gold in his poke.”

Monk looked Lolly in the eye. “Do you swear that you’ve never been in Bart Spicer’s mine?”

“I’ve never been in nobody’s mine,” Lolly said. “I’m a cowhand, not a gold digger. I earn an honest wage.”

“That’s not what your clothes say.”

“What are you talking about?” Lolly said.

“Mines are held up with bracing timbers that are covered in bark and splinters. They’re prickly as a cactus and coated with coal tar,” Monk said. “So if you’ve never been in a mine, or picked up a bracing timber, maybe you could tell us how you got those splinters in your chest and that tar on your shirt?”

He couldn’t. Lolly hesitated for a moment, then went for his gun. But he wasn’t as fast as Wheeler, who had his gun out and aimed before Lolly’s hand even reached his holster.

“Go ahead, Lolly, it’ll save the town the trouble of hanging you,” Wheeler said.

Lolly raised his hands and glared hatefully at Monk. “I should’ve followed my gut and killed you when we met. But I don’t shoot unarmed men.”

“You just smash in their skulls while they’re sleeping and steal their gold,” I said. “That’s much more noble.”

“Parley, take Lolly back to the office and lock him up,” the sheriff said.

Deputy Weaver took Lolly’s gun and aimed it at him. “Let’s go. You walk in front of me. No funny stuff or I’ll shoot you full of holes.”

“What about the mess his horse made in the street?” Monk asked the sheriff.

“Parley,” Wheeler said, getting his deputy’s attention. “Have Lolly pick up his horse’s droppings on the way.”

“Yes, sir,” Weaver said. “Where are you gonna be, Sheriff?”

Wheeler glanced at Monk. “Hot on the trail of that rascal Clem Janklow.”

We found Clem Janklow a few minutes later sitting on a bench outside of the general store, surrounded by bags of supplies. His bloodshot eyes peeked out from a face full of mangy whiskers and wild hair and he reeked from days of sweating in the hot sun in clothes that hadn’t been washed in weeks, if not months. The once-red wool shirt had faded to a ghastly purple and was caked in a fine layer of dirt. His ragged pants hung from his shoulders from frayed suspenders, the leggings tucked into his mud-caked boots.

He was slurping up sardines from a tin, with his fingers, bits of fish sticking to his prickly beard. When miners struck it rich, they were quick to spend the gold on canned oysters, olives, turtle soup, and other delicacies and, thus fortified, move on to champagne, whiskey, and sporting girls.

“You’re under arrest, Clem,” Monk said.

“You can’t arrest anybody, Monk,” the sheriff said. “That’s my job.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” Clem said. “I’m a law-abiding citizen.”

“You swindled me out of a hundred dollars, and I don’t know how much you took from Nate Klebbin.”

“I’ve never taken a plug nickel from you, Mr. Monk, and I sold my claim to Klebbin fair and square.”

“Did you see Dr. Sloan for another dose of Greeley’s Bichloride Tonic Cure while you were in town today?” Monk asked.

“I don’t need it no more,” Clem said. “I’m feeling much better and I thank you dearly for it, Mr. Monk.”

“Because without me you couldn’t have pulled off your fraud,” Monk said. “You relieved yourself all over town, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to stand it and that Dr. Sloan would prescribe Greeley’s Cure for you.”

“It cures your taste for whiskey and calms your kidneys, that’s why the doc said I had to have it,” Clem said. “But I couldn’t afford my own salvation, which is why I’m indebted to you for your kindness.”

The sheriff sighed. “If there’s a crime here, Monk, I don’t see it.”

“Do you know what Greeley’s Bichloride Tonic Cure is made of, Sheriff?” Monk asked.

“Nope,” Wheeler said.

I didn’t, either.

“It’s a mix of sodium chloride, glycerin, strychnine, cinchona, and gold chloride, among other things,” Monk said. “The tonic, paired with injections, is commonly used in the treatment of various addictions. You have to drink a dram of it every two hours for a month.”

“I don’t see your point,” Wheeler said.

I didn’t, either.

“The gold in the tonic and the injections passes right through your body,” Monk said. “Clem’s been out there relieving himself all over his property for weeks, infusing it with gold, so he could sell it to the first greenhorn who came along. And he forced me into bankrolling his crime.”

“How did he force you into it?” Wheeler asked.

“If I didn’t pay for his medicine, he’d continue his drinking and indiscriminate urinating,” Monk said. “He knew I couldn’t take that. But it was all a clever scheme to sell his nearly worthless claim.”

Now that Monk had explained it, I saw the past events in an entirely different light and knew that he was absolutely right.

Clem licked his oily fingers. “I had no idea my pissing was salting my claim and you can’t prove that isn’t so.”

“He’s convinced me,” Wheeler said. “You’re going to return the supplies you haven’t already consumed and give Mr. Klebbin all of his money back and let him keep your claim for nothing if he wants it. And then you’re going to repay Monk by getting the hell out of town and never coming back. Because if I see your face in Trouble again, I’ll put a bullet in it.”

“You can’t do that,” Clem said.

“I’m the law,” Wheeler said. “Maybe you’ve been too drunk to notice, but we don’t have any judges or courts here. So if I was you, Clem, I’d skedaddle before I change my mind and decide to shoot you right now.”

Clem gathered up his bags and shuffled back into the general store without another word.

Wheeler turned to Monk. “Satisfied?”

“This all could have been avoided if we had a law against relieving yourself in public,” Monk said. “And spitting.”

“What does spitting have to do with it?”

“That’s how it all starts,” Monk said. “You get away with that and, before you know it, you’re letting go of your sphincters willy-nilly, robbing trains, and killing old ladies.”

“I see,” Wheeler said. “So if we outlawed spitting, we could eventually put an end to all the indecent and criminal behavior in the West.”

“It couldn’t hurt,” Monk said. “What have we got to lose by trying?”

“I’d lose plenty,” Wheeler said. “I’d be out of a job.”

“So you’re arguing that we should allow crime to continue so you can earn a living?”

“Not all of it. Maybe just spitting.” Wheeler winked at me and walked away.

Monk sighed wearily. “I’m going to spend the rest of the day washing my hands. While I do that, you can rent two rooms for us at the hotel.”

“What for?”

“Because after I burn down my cabin we’re going to need a place to live while the new one is being built.”

“Mr. Monk, be reasonable,” I said. “You can’t burn down your home just because you brought in some rocks that were pissed on.”

Monk stared at me. “Can you think of a better reason?”

Copyright © 2009 by Lee Goldberg. Copyright © 2009 Monk © USA Cable Entertainment, LLC. All rights reserved.