“So, I was talking to some of the other hands back at the ranch,” I said, looking across the flickering flames of the campfire to Jonas. The man, looking for all the world like he’d just stepped out of an old west novel, had been sitting quietly, lost in his thoughts and eyes fixed on the fire, distant. He’d been unconsciously stroking the ends of his salt-and-pepper mustache and sipping occasionally at the cup of Jameson he held loosely in his other hand.
I wouldn’t say he was distracted; those piercing eyes never seemed to lose their keen focus, regardless of where he was or what he was doing. Preoccupied was probably the better word for it. I wasn’t surprised; Tommy had recently taken ill with pneumonia and had been laid up in a hospital bed for the better part of the last two weeks. They’d been friends since before I was born, and I knew Tommy’s failing health weighed heavily on Jonas’ mind.
He lifted his eyes from the flames and met mine. The hint of a grin touched on the corner of his mouth. “Oh yeah? And what did those clucking hens have to say this time?”
I smiled, fished a smoke from my pack, and offered one across to Jonas. He accepted it with a nod, lighting it with an old and battered zippo from his jacket pocket.
“Well, we were just sitting around after work last Friday, shooting the shit over a few beers about what you told me about Graves Stand. Apparently, I’m about the only one around here who didn’t know anything about that place,” I said with a chuckle.
“Well, you’re still pretty new around these parts, David. There’s probably a lot of things you haven’t bumped into yet,” he said, taking a drag from the cigarette and following it with a quick sip from the tin cup. “This place is old and has some shadowy corners if you care to look for them.”
I ducked my head in a nod. “Yeah, I suppose that’s true. One of the boys told me to ask you about some old, abandoned ghost town around here somewhere up in the hills. They said you had a story about it but wouldn’t say anything else. They said it was your story to tell, not theirs.”
Jonas fell silent for a moment, his eyes drifting back to the yellow light of the campfire, its embers rising between us in the chill autumn night air. I could tell he was mulling it over, probably deciding whether or not to indulge me with another story. He never was one for a lot of talk – a quiet sort who tended to listen more than speak. But we’d been out for a couple of days on horseback, making our way through the dense pines of the eastern forests that bordered the Double-K ranch. A few head of cattle had gone missing from the herd and the boss had put us to finding them. We hadn’t found them yet, and I suspected they’d eventually wander back on their own in any case. In the meantime, we’d done our bit and would be heading back in the morning. For now, we’d set camp for the night once we broke out of the tree line and were just enjoying the cool air, warm fire, and the quiet solitude. I figured it might be a good opportunity to hear more from Jonas about this place.
“Harper’s Hope,” he said ponderously, recalling an old memory. “Hell, I haven’t thought about that damned place in long while.”
In the distance, the mournful cry of a coyote drifted out of the dark on the light breeze that had picked up with the coming of nightfall. We both glanced over in that direction for a moment before he spoke again.
“You do know how to pick `em, David. Aside from Graves Stand, there’s probably nothing around here that unsettles me like that old burned-out place. Bad ground. Bad memories.” He lifted his eyes to mine again and the flickering light from the fire made dark shadows dance across his face ominously. “You sure you want to know about that old town? I told you about Graves Stand for your own safety, seeing as it’s something you’re like to run near from time to time. Harper’s Hope – well, you’d have to go looking for that place. Not likely to just trip across it accidentally.”
I nodded eagerly. “Well, yeah, if you’re willing to tell it.”
“No reason not to, I suppose; it’s not like it’s a big secret around these parts. Just don’t bother asking me where it is – I won’t be the one to tell you. I don’t need that weighing over me.”
He settled back a little in his seat. “Harper’s Hope was settled sometime back in the late eighteen hundreds by some families who’d come out west from New York. As the story goes, a group of them pooled their savings and purchased the deed to some old gold mine out in the hills.
“There were more than a few of them – something like a dozen families in all, and only a couple who had any idea how to make any sort of life away from the city. Lots of fools are driven past their limitations by the prospect of wealth, I suppose, even today.
“I’m not sure why they were so trusting that there would actually be a workable mine on the land they bought when they got there, but fortune is a funny lady. You can never tell exactly what you’ll get when you spin that wheel. For them, they arrived at their claim to find it exactly the way it was promised, including a few remaining structures from an older settlement that they were able to use as the foundation of their own.
“It turns out, not only was there a mine, but there was still gold running through it – a fair amount, too, from all accounts. The settlers had found their fortune and, within a couple years, a small town had grown around it. I’m not going to say it was an up-and-coming boom town or anything like that – it still wasn’t more than a handful of families and a few businesses that had sprouted up – but to those families that had founded Harper’s Hope, I’m sure it seemed that way. Their gamble had paid off big, or so they thought at the time.”
Jonas paused a moment, taking one last drag from his cigarette before flicking the butt into the fire. “That mine is an old one, David. I’m not sure anyone knows who dug it in the first place or when, and none of the families stopped to wonder why a person would be so keen on selling the deed to a gold mine that was still healthy and producing. That said, within the first few months, they’d depleted the open veins that were readily accessible close to the surface and began searching farther into the old tunnels. When they eventually reached the limits of the existing tunnels, they started digging their own. The farther they dug, the more gold they uncovered. As I understand it, the veins were wide, but shallow, and the ground seemed to offer up just enough of that shiny metal to keep tempting them deeper into the earth, away from the light of the sun. Maybe deeper than man was ever meant to go; who knows. For a few years, Harper’s Hope thrived, and the men continued to push deeper into the dark recesses beneath the hills.
“Then came the winter of 1899, and with it, the weather turned cold and fierce. The routes in and out of Harper’s Hope were cut off for a month or more. When the weather finally righted itself and the storms passed, the first traders arrived at the settlement to find it an empty husk, without a soul to be found. According to what they reported, it looked like someone had just come and scooped up all the families and left everything else in place.
“A hundred people, at least – all just…gone,” he said, shaking his head in muted disbelief. “Ain’t that some shit? Well, at first, there were some suspicions that maybe they’d been set upon by the Comanche, as they were known to be hostile to settlers and were probably the most feared tribe in the area at that time. But that didn’t hold water, especially since so many valuable resources were just left behind in the houses and stores. I’m not just talking about gold and weapons and stuff like that, either, but food and hides and other supplies that Comanche raiders would be interested in, especially in the middle of a winter they weren’t accustomed to in East Texas.
“Plus, it was pretty widely known that the Indian tribes native to that area gave it a wide berth for their own reasons. They didn’t want anything to do with it and had never given the settlers an ounce of trouble before. Hell, I don’t think that I’ve ever heard that they even came in contact with them the entire time they were here.”
Jonas gestured to me for another smoke, which I handed across without a thought. “What happened to them?” I asked, my brow twisted in a frown. “Where’d they all go?”
He shrugged as he lit the cigarette. “Don’t know. The US Marshals went out there to investigate what the traders had reported – there was no local law around here back then, so it fell to them to see if they could figure out what happened. They found Harper’s Hope exactly like the traders had described it – empty and quiet as a tomb. It must have been downright eerie, I’d wager.
“The only thing that they found giving any hint of what had happened was a diary that had belonged to the young wife of one of the miners – Mrs. Anabelle Hudson, I think was her name. She had written that the men had broken into a new, undiscovered section of natural cave during their digging the day before. Apparently, the entire town was all excited at the news, since she wrote that this new chamber was said to be richer than any of the veins they’d found since they first arrived. They said the walls glittered all over with exposed veins of gold. Admittedly, she was worrying at how deep they were mining now, of the risks that come with working that far underground, but she was looking forward to the day they could return to New York and live a comfortable life with what they’d pulled from the rocks.”
Jonas shook his head almost ruefully. “And then her next entry took an unsettling turn. She wrote that none of the miners that entered the tunnels the next day ever returned to the surface. The town was worried there may have been an accident – a cave-in or something like that – and a group of townsfolk gathered up and went into those black tunnels in search of their neighbors.”
He looked at me pointedly and took another drink, letting the silence hang in the air for a beat before adding, “None of them came back out either. It was like all that blackness hiding under the hills just swallowed them up, nice as you please.
“I read her diary once – you can still find the original at one of the Upshur County historical museums, though I reckon you can find it easier online these days. Some of her last entries were a fair bit unnerving, and you could start to sense the unease she felt as the days passed without any sign of the miners’ return.
“In her last entry, she wrote that one of the other wives had come banging on her door as soon as the sun was above the horizon one morning, scared half-to-death and ranting on about how she had heard her husband whispering to her through her windows, shuffling around outside their house all night. She’d called out to him, but she said it was like it wasn’t really him. Like whatever had made him the man she married had been taken away somehow, just leaving this emotionless thing that beckoned to her. She’d said she couldn’t understand why he didn’t just come in or why his voice sounded so strange when he called to her to come outside. She said it made her think of old, unclean things, lurking in the dark. It scared her enough that she’d barricaded herself inside her bedroom with his rifle until just before dawn, when he finally fell quiet and shuffled away into the night.”
Jonas paused a moment, sitting up straight and working out a kink in his back. He picked up the cup and drained the last bit from it, then refilled it and offered the bottle across to me. I held up a hand and shook my head.
He continued. “Well, when they went to talk to the other women about the strange occurrence, they discovered two of the other wives and their children had gone missing in the night, their doors standing open and houses empty. She’d written that their shoes and coats were still inside, which made it all the stranger, since they’d been experiencing an unusually cold winter and there was still frost on the ground.
The old cowboy shrugged and let out a long, weary sigh. “That was Annabelle’s last entry. After that, the town just…died. As no bodies were found to prove that anyone had come to harm, and the families still held the deed to the land and the mine, nobody else could legally come in and work that claim. The town’s been empty ever since. At some point, someone set fire to that whole damned place – burned it to the ground. Hell, that’s probably for the best, all things considered.
Jonas leaned back in his chair again. “If you grew up around these parts, you grew up with that story. Folks know about Harper’s Hope and its history, and most decide to keep clear of it.”
“Most?” I asked.
Jonas smiled a bit. “You’re a smart kid, David. Perceptive. I like that about you. Yeah, most. Some folks find the promise of an abandoned gold mine just waiting for someone to come and take advantage of it to be too much of a temptation. And temptation can drive people to do foolish things.
“When I was a young man, long before my Laura passed on, I had a couple of friends who had young families of their own. Times were tough back then, even for those who could find steady work, and one day they approached me asking if I had any interest in going in with them to explore the tunnels of that mine to see if there really was any gold left for the taking.
“If not for the fact that I’d just landed a job on this ranch with good pay and a promise of a future, I might have taken them up on it. As it was, I was too busy trying to prove my worth to the foreman and the other hands, and didn’t have time to go on some sort of half-assed treasure hunt. I tried to talk them out of it, told them it wasn’t a good idea to go messing with things that had such a dark history to them, but I knew there wasn’t really a chance I’d be able to. Joe and Casey were good men and hard workers; they were just trying to figure out a way to provide for their families during tough times – I don’t fault them for that. They were doing what any good man would do to protect their own.”
Jonas set down his empty cup and grabbed up his canteen, taking a long drink from the cool water. “It was two weeks later that Claire – that was Casey’s wife – came knocking on my door one evening, asking if I’d seen or heard from either of the men. She said they’d gathered up some tools and overnight provisions and headed out a week earlier but hadn’t come back yet. She’d tried to get hold of Joe’s wife, Paula, but hadn’t been able to reach her in a couple days.
He looked at me, his eyes piercing in the firelight. “Claire was born and raised in this area, not five miles down the road. Hell, I went to school with her brother and I’ve known her family most of my life. She’d heard all the same stories everyone else had about Harper’s Hope and I could see something like fear in her eyes. She had two small boys at home, and I think in that moment, she was already trying to come to grips with the likelihood that she was now a twenty-three-year-old widow.
Jonas paused a second, and I could see something like sadness or maybe regret behind his eyes. “I could tell she wanted to ask me to go out and try to find them, but I think she knew that it was unlikely that anyone from around here would risk going into those mines, especially if they a family of their own to worry about.
“So, she didn’t ask, and I didn’t offer.
“We never did see Paula or her kids again. Never any clue as to what happened to them – they just vanished one night without a trace, front door left wide open. The sheriff did a cursory investigation, but I think he knew it was a losing battle; nobody really believed she’d ever be found, I think.
“Claire packed up her children and left the very next morning after I spoke with her. She left everything behind that she couldn’t load into the bed of Joe’s truck and just ran. I can still see that look in her eyes, all these years later. She wasn’t afraid that she’d never see Joe again.
“I think she was afraid that she would.”