*
Elvin was surprised to see tears in the eyes of the twins, but hecredited it to the unstable emotions of adolescence. Both of them hadacted with maturity when they faced the tiger; no adult could have donemore. Still they wept, even though the man was a stranger.
By eight o'clock the stirrings in the jungle had stopped. The men beganto relax. Waitresses from the Bid-a-Wee Cafe brought out doughnuts andcoffee and distributed them among the crowd.
There came, then, a new disturbance at the far end of Main Street, ashouting of tumultuous voices. A mob moved slowly into the center oftown, clinging to the sides of an antiquated dump truck.
"Gold! Gold! Gold!" It was like a chant shouted with ecstatic antiphony.The dump truck stopped and Elvin saw the unbelievable--gleaming heaps ofgold shoveled like gravel into the back of the vehicle. The driver stoodon the running board, weaving drunkenly.
"The whole damn' desert," he shouted. "All of it, as far as I couldsee--all pure gold!"
He took a shovel and scattered the nuggets and dust among the throng."Take all you like. Lots more where this came from!"
The mob stirred slowly at first, and then more and more violently, asthe men began to race for their cars. The vehicles were already crowdedclose together. Gears ground and fenders crumbled. The street becamehelplessly jammed with locked cars. Only a few on the fringe escaped.Angry arguments broke out, degenerating into fist fights. The peakviolence cooled a little after a few heads had been smashed, andgrudgingly the men turned to the task of freeing their cars.
Donald snatched Elvin's arm. "Stay here with Pop," he shouted above theclatter. "Dave and I are going back to the ranch. Mom may need us. Thedesert runs right up to the edge of our property, you know."
"Going to walk?"
"I think we can get the station wagon out. It's pretty far back."
Elvin and Pop Schermerhorn worked side by side helping untangle the massof vehicles. After an hour order had been more or less restored, and themob had thinned, since each of the freed cars had been driven off at topspeed to the desert bonanza.
For a moment the sky darkened. Elvin looked up. The jungle haddisappeared and a medieval castle, complete with knights, had taken itsplace. The mob shrank back in terror. So did the knights, although oneor two on the battlements ventured to send shafts into this new enemythat had appeared at the castle gates. But there was no time for realhostilities to develop, for the castle vanished and a 19th centuryfactory took its place. The factory survived less than thirty seconds,before it gave way to the bank and row of stores which had originallystood on the site.
For some reason the crowd began to cheer, as they would a victoriousfootball team. But the tumult died quickly, for the buildings werecovered with a slime of jungle vines, torn up by their roots, and a pairof snarling lions stood at bay on the sidewalk. After they had shot thelions, they found a cobra was coiled on the cashier's desk in the bankand an antelope was imprisoned in the dry goods store. They were stillclearing out miscellaneous wild life when reporters from the citynewspapers, apprised by the _San Benedicto News_ of the gold strike,descended upon the town. They were followed by a deluge of prospectors,arriving in anything that would move--bicycles and Cadillacs, Model T'sand Greyhound buses.
The mob poured into town first by the scores, and then by the thousands.Primarily male, their prevailing mood was explosive instability, aglassy-eyed greed flamed higher as each truckload of gold poured backinto town from the diggings. The four-man police force was helpless. Themajor telegraphed to Sacramento for the National Guard; in the interim,he deputized every townsman he could find, among them Elvin and PopSchermerhorn.
* * * * *
Elvin worked until he was exhausted, herding the mob into the streetsand through the town as rapidly as they would move; and still there wasno relief, and the number in the throng increased by the minute.Newsreel trucks, television units, press cars twisted among the vehiclesheading for the desert. Regularly, heavy duty trucks brought tons ofgold back from the diggings and deposited them at the bank until theaisles overflowed and the precious metal sifted through the windowsforming little pyramids in the street. By noon Treasury men flew in fromWashington. They circled the diggings and landed to inspect the qualityof the gold hoard at the bank.
Fifteen minutes later a rumor filtered among the deputies: the Treasurymen estimated that the San Benedicto strike would yield upwards of twoor three hundred thousand times the known gold supply of the world. Whenthe _San Benedicto News_ came out in mid-afternoon, it headlined thefirst shock of the economic disaster.
World currencies were collapsing; three nations were already bankrupt;international trade was grinding to a standstill, with no medium ofexchange; retail prices in the United States had started to skyrocket,in the wake of rising stock market quotations. And still the processionof dump trucks brought the tons of gold back from the desert. When thebank overflowed the dry goods store was commandeered as an emergencydepository, and later the Five-and-Ten and the sprawling basement ofMontgomery Ward's.
When the first contingent of National Guardsmen marched into SanBenedicto, it was obviously too small to police the mob. The pressestimated that a quarter of a million people were moving into the valleyevery hour. More Guard units were summoned and ultimately, at theGovernor's request, two regiments of the regular army were dispatched toSan Benedicto, along with a Tank Corps and ten thousand Marines fromCamp Pendleton.
It was nightfall before the deputies were relieved. Tired and dirty,Elvin and Pop Schermerhorn rode back to the ranch on a prospector'struck. From the lawn they looked across Schermerhorn's ploughed fieldsat the desert, teeming with mobs of men and bright in the glare ofcountless searchlights. Mrs. Schermerhorn met them on the porch. Sheclung to her husband's arms, trembling.
"I'm so glad you're back safely!" she whispered. "They've been movingcloser all day." She nodded toward the desert. "Like ants, trampling anddestroying everything that gets in their way."
Pop Schermerhorn clenched his fists. "If they'd broken in here, I'dhave--"
"If it hadn't been for the twins, I don't know what might have happened.They got their class over here, the whole tenth grade. All day longthey've been patrolling our fences, without even stopping long enough toeat. They're all out in the workshop now; they've made it a kind ofheadquarters."
* * * * *
The three of them went into the living room. Pop Schermerhorn and Elvindropped wearily on a couch, while Mrs. Schermerhorn poured stiff drinksfor both of them. The radio was playing, a smoothly sweet danceorchestra from San Francisco. But the music faded abruptly, and anexcited newscaster interrupted.
"It's been like this all day," Mrs. Schermerhorn said. She looked upnervously as the side door opened and the twins came in.
"We just wanted some more copper wire, Mom, for the thing we're making,"Donald said, but he hesitated when he heard the news broadcast. Bothtwins dropped silently on the arms of an overstuffed chair and listened.
The bulletin was brief; it reviewed the growing chaos among the foreignexchanges, the expanding list of bankruptcies. Two European nations,driven to internal disaster, had gone to war; already the big powerswere choosing sides, framing ultimatums. War seemed to be the oneuniversal panacea for all things. In New York stores had started toquote new dollar prices every hour, although purchases made in silverwere still relatively stable at the old value. The grating voiceconcluded, "The first estimates of today's yield from the San Benedictofield place it in the neighborhood of seventy-thousand tons; miningexperts predict that tomorrow the figure may be tripled." As the musiccame on again, Donald got up and snapped off the radio.
"The economy of the world's being wrecked, isn't it?" he asked. "By toomuch gold."
"I don't understand," Pop Schermerhorn answered, shaking his head."Gold's valuable; we need it; it makes us rich. But now, when we haveall we want--"
"The trouble is, it has no use," David said. "Governments buy it
andbury it. If gold becomes as plentiful as iron ore, we still can't domuch with it. You can't make skyscrapers or sewer pipes out of gold;it's too soft."
"The government ought to clear out the field and stop the mining,"Donald suggested. "That might help."
"Not as long as the world knows the gold is still here," Elvin answered.He studied the twins carefully; their comment on the economy seemedmature for tenth graders. Suddenly Elvin's weary mind began to piecetogether a vague kind of understanding, when he remembered thetransformation of the Bunsen burner to gold. Beyond his shadowycomprehension loomed the vista of a grandiose dream of how he could usethe situation for his own profit. It was intoxicating, like reaching outfor the stars and