Blood Gold (12 page)

The mud wagon—the least expensive, sturdiest sort of carriage—was loaded with crates, and a similarly loaded wagon occupied by Captain Deerborn had settled into the wet earth right behind it. Beside me on the high driver's seat was a young man in a flop-brimmed hat who introduced himself as Johnny P. Dorman. He held a crowbar upright, like a weapon, and I gathered that he was there to help if the wheels got stuck between rocks.

Boyish and lean, he looked a good deal younger than I was. I had the beginnings of a beard, and seasons of working with horses and wagon wheels had given me a certain amount of muscle. Johnny was brown-haired and brown-eyed—he admitted to being a full sixteen years old, and it might have been true. Rugged travel and fitful weather made the young and not-so-young all look about the same age.

“Ever drive a team before, Johnny?” I asked. I sounded, to my own ears, rock-ribbed and about forty years old.

“Sure,” said Johnny with a studied toss of his head that told me he knew much less about horseflesh than I did.

We both laughed, nervous but instantly liking each other. For the moment we weren't going anywhere. Captain Deerborn went over an inventory, a broad book bound in leather.

“I was up at Dog Bar,” Johnny said while we waited for the captain to give the command to move. “But I couldn't find any color, so I came back down to earn the fare home to New Jersey.”

Only part of what he had just said—the reference to his home state—made any sense to me.
“Color?”

“That's what they call gold in the ground,” said Johnny with a touch of pride at his knowledge. “Or glimmering in the bed of a river—
color
, because it's pretty, after all.”

Captain Deerborn shut his book. “Hi ho, men!” he sang out, the common idiom for
Let's go!

I flicked the whip, just once to get the team's respect, and they leaned forward in their traces.

The wagon creaked, but we went nowhere.

Johnny leaped down, his feet squelching in the mud, and put his shoulder into the wagon as I lashed the air with the whip, putting my will into it. The lash gave out a satisfying crack.

This time the wheels lurched, the horses strained, and as Johnny flung himself back beside me we began to roll, the wagon rims huge with mud that began to fly through the air, all over Johnny, all over me.

But we were gaining speed.

CHAPTER 31

For a long while I drove well.

The roan settled into his harness fine once he had a sense of destination, the captain's equally heavily laden wagon rumbling along behind us.

Besides, while the route was new to me, the horses must have known it well, the main road east toward the foothills and gold. The team had that reserved, knowing angle to their ears. Horses may be unintelligent, but I believe they have deep memories.

“You've seen nuggets lying around like that?” I couldn't keep myself from asking after giving the question considerable thought. “In a streambed, glittering?”

“Dog Bar was filthy with the stuff,” Johnny said. He was full of gold lore, and he liked to talk. “A bar is an obstruction in a waterway,” he added, no doubt aware that he was dealing with a rank newcomer. “Gravel, mostly, or sand. Some of them are riddled with color.”

“Fortune did not smile on you?” I asked formally, trying to put the question as inoffensively as I could.

“Well, I got out of there alive,” he said thoughtfully. “I count that good fortune enough.”

It was hard to converse and handle the horses at the same time, and even harder to absorb the information I had received back at the hotel annex. I had to find Ezra soon.

I prayed that I was not already too late. But we were carried along by a spirited team of horses. With any luck we would arrive well ahead of Murray, who would no doubt have to wait in line for a ticket on one of the slow passenger coaches, try to hire one of the scarce riding horses—or be forced to walk. Most travelers, in fact, made their way on foot, mules carrying their provisions.

“But I know no one is likely to kill me,” Johnny was saying. “I had my skull read in San Francisco.”

Phrenology was the science—or subtle art—of reading an individual's character and even his future by feeling the irregularities of his cranium.

“Dr. Spence Crawford,” Johnny was saying, “studied my head in his office on Market Street. He said I was destined to keep it attached to my neck.”

I affect a certain skepticism regarding diviners of all sorts—card readers, water witchers, and even prophetic pigs. But at the same time I do suffer from the human frailty known as envy. As I had envied Ezra his attractiveness to men and women, and Ben his easygoing talent for entertaining an audience, now I envied Johnny his confidence regarding his future.

“Did you pick up any of the art?” I asked.

“The phrenological science? No,” said Johnny with a show of polite condescension. “That takes years of study.” He must have sensed my momentary disappointment, because he added, not wanting my feelings to be hurt, “Your head looks about like mine. I bet Dr. Crawford would predict neither one of us will be murdered.”

On level ground horses trot along prettily enough, the bridle jingling, singletrees attaching the harness to the carriage swinging easily. The reins for the wheelers—the horses closest to the wagon—run between your third and little finger, and it wasn't long before the leather chafed the skin there, rubbing it raw. It requires concentration and strength to drive horses along a road, although the truth is that on a flat or gently rising highway, the horses run easily.

It's anticipation that wearies the driver—watching for deep puddles in the road, or a boulder that has fallen from a nearby bank. Not to mention steadying the horses when a dog decides to hurry along beside, yapping.

But the big roan's character was proving reliable, after all. Clods of mud were flying as the team found a satisfying rhythm, and I kept the whip between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand, the butt secure by the heel of my thumb, like any coachman who knows what he's doing.

My demonstration of driving competence was enough to impress Johnny, who confided in me that his partners had died up at Dog Bar, where no one he knew had found much gold.

“Were they killed?” I had to ask.

“Killed or sick, it doesn't matter,” said Johnny, sadly.

It did matter to me. If California was a land where old scores were beginning to be settled violently—as I now suspected—I wanted to know.

But I let the matter rest, and at last Johnny offered, “The chairman of our gold mining enterprise dropped dead from overwork. The bylaws made our vice-chairman head of our enterprise, but he got sick, and my friend broke his leg, and it swelled up and killed him. The lawyer among us, who wrote up all our paperwork, got pneumonia. Those of us who didn't die quit for home.”

“Except for you,” I said.

Johnny shook his head, implying that he himself did not count for much.

“But I know an Irishman,” said Johnny, stirring himself to better spirits, “who has dry diggings up-current, past Spanish Bar. He worked ten thousand dollars out of the quartz rock.”

“Where is Spanish Bar?” I asked.

“Oh, you don't want to go there,” said Johnny. “There's no use—it's all staked, the claim filed, I heard. It's worked by a couple of gentlemen miners, a man named Andrew Foll-something and his friend Ezra Nevy.”

“Nevin,” I corrected.

As I explained that one of the well-spoken men was a former associate of mine, the already increasing respect I had earned from Johnny flowered into full admiration.

“Those two dandies,” he said, “have had one lucky strike after another!”

The wagon rolled along sweetly, each horse trotting without a care. I wished Ben could see me then—or Florence.

When we reached the foothills my troubles began.

CHAPTER 32

This was a countryside of oak trees and rocky outcroppings, hills and dry fields. Newspapers had praised the nugget-rich streams and the harvest-swollen vineyards, neither of which I had actually set eyes upon yet. But no journalist had expressed the naked reality I saw all around me. The land possessed a sweet wildness, and a rolling, far-off horizon that quickened the heart.

The horses labored up the low hills successfully, leaning forward in their harnesses, needing no more than a quiet click of my tongue and a gentle twitch of the multitudinous reins to remind them of their duty.

From the low summits of these ridges we could see distant mountains, dark peaks splashed with snow. They were more grand than any range of highland I had ever seen, and they stirred me to realize that I was in the midst of a great adventure, close to both wildness and riches.

I began to pen a letter to Elizabeth in my mind. In this imaginary epistle I offered the opinion that the men of the Golden West were rough, but confident; plainly dressed, but filled with a sense of purpose. Such phrases pleased me, well balanced and thoroughly reasoned—the prose of a worldly man. I looked forward to dipping a quill into an inkwell, and putting these thoughts on paper.

We began to go downslope from time to time. We would clop along to the modest crest of a hill, and then rattle downward, splashing through another shallow creek in the bosom of the hills. Even this change in topography did not alarm me, lost in my own thoughts.

But then we passed a wagon that had suffered a mishap, crates and mining equipment strewn all over the shoulder of the road. One of the stricken horses lay on its side, flanks heaving, still tangled in its harness. The faces of the passengers and driver were masks of anguish and frustration.

The wagon had gathered too much momentum on its way down a hill, and overrun its team—a well-known danger of such roads, and one my experience in no way equipped me to confront.

Captain Deerborn's inquiry carried through the early-afternoon sunlight from behind us, his voice asking if the disordered travelers needed any help.

“We'll be back in business in no time,” called the driver, an expert whip, by the look of him—blue trousers thrust into high calfskin boots, a broad-brimmed hat on his head. If such a prime hand had trouble with a wagon, I reasoned, I was in for a difficult afternoon.

Horses get ideas from other horses.

They don't talk to each other, it's true, but you don't want a horse to see a fellow creature in distress, or angry or sulky. The mood catches on, and my team had been close enough to the accident so that even the ones wearing blinders could peer around and get the general idea of equine catastrophe.

The roan began to pull to the left, right out in front of the occasional oncoming wagon. I had the leader reins between my fore and middle fingers, and drew on them enough to guide the horse back in line, but he turned one ear around as though to catch what I was telling Johnny.

“That big roan,” I was saying, “wants to dump us in the road.”

Just then we passed a squashed snake in the road, the worst thing a horse can see, aside from a snake that happens to be alive.

You hope horses aren't paying attention when they trot past a specimen like that. And none of the horses did see it, except Roan, and he shied badly, trotting stiffly, lifting his nose. A ridge of hair rose up along his spine.

I cluck-clucked and kept pressure on the reins, and soon we began to labor up a long hill. Johnny leaped down, and put a shoulder to the wagon. Even his little bit of strength helped, the horses sweating and beginning to breathe hard.

But when we came to the top of the hill, the long, wheel-rutted road swept down before us. The animals were breathing even more heavily as we crested the summit, and kept their even pace with effort as they met the downslope.

In no time at all we were going too fast, leaving Johnny far behind. The heavy wagon, creaking and rattling, began to gain momentum, pushing the horses ahead of its gradually accelerating mass.

My teeth rattled, every bone in my body shaken hard. Drivers had been known to be flung from a wagon as it barreled over a rough road. I tried to remember, without looking, where the brake happened to be.

Some wagons have a brake handle you pull on and pray, and others have a brake pedal worked by foot. This wagon had a well-worn pedal, I discovered at last, and I put my foot out for it and missed, the wagon rocking too hard. When I finally got my boot on the brake pedal, I stepped on it with my full weight.

It's important to take the slack out of the reins just before you apply the brake, and the horses usually put their ears back, anticipating by the sound of your boot settling on the pedal what you are about to do.

The horses slowed their pace—or tried to. The wheels gave a squeal.

The wagon did not slow down. I used my full strength, and depressed the pedal all the way, standing on it with every ounce of effort. The brakes smoked, friction against the wheel making them hot.

We were slowing down—that much was true. But if anything, we were losing speed far too quickly. Captain Deerborn's wagon rattled along behind, growing closer with each heartbeat.

I hauled on the reins, too hard at first, trying to guide the wagon to the edge of the road. The roan began to skirmish with his fellow horses, confused or annoyed. At the same time I made the low, gentle noise drivers make, a sound spelled
whoa
, but in truth a nearly mournful and strangely soothing syllable.

Johnny caught up with the wagon at the bottom of the hill. I was careful to give no clue, sitting there with the whip cocked in my fist, that—until moments before—I had been terrified.

“Good driving,” panted Johnny.

I nodded, trying to appear in command. I was thankful to be alive.

“Are you all right, Willie?” called Captain Deerborn. I gave a wave with my whip, and the mere shadow of the lash caused the horses to start forward.

“Up ahead a good way is Putah Slough,” said Johnny, when he had caught his breath. “That is the really dangerous part of the trip.”