Blood Gold (7 page)

“They are rascals and rapscallions,” he said with an air of cheerful meditation. “But good-hearted young people, nonetheless.”

“I have no reason to doubt it,” I said. Politeness forced me to exaggerate my faith in his family's character, but I found myself liking this man and his kin despite myself.

“I would stay out of their way, though, Willie—if I were you,” said Mr. Barrymore. “Don't ask too many questions.”

“I beg your pardon,” I responded with more than a little spirit. I don't care to be threatened.

He put a hand out to my arm, with every show of good nature. “What father can tell his children not to sin, and be certain they'll follow his counsel?”

Something likable about Mr. Barrymore, some warmth in his nature, continued to keep me from being completely annoyed by him—or intimidated. He was a heavily clawed, shaggy beast who, without ceasing to be a predator, was capable of real friendliness.

“If I were you,” cautioned the white-haired family man with a chuckle, “I'd stay out of their way.”

In the forthcoming days I met every manner of person.

Men reading volumes of Lord Byron or tuning a violin, men gambling at cards, and some men temporarily paralyzed with hard drink. But my mind kept traveling back to the Barrymores. I found them fascinating, for reasons I could not have named.

I spied the dark-whiskered man with the long, naked Bowie knife, but I did not see the thief again.

Not yet.

CHAPTER 17

A touch of coolness had slipped into my friendship with Ben.

We shared a brief sip of Dutch tonic from the pewter flask from time to time, as a defense against illness, but I decided to conserve the liquor, not certain what plagues we might face in the future. Perhaps this touch of abstemiousness annoyed Ben. He was still keen to tell me the names of sea life—porpoises, sharks, and a broad, smooth-skinned creature he said was a ray-fish. But Ben was full of ideas—whether to search for the ore by hand, or find some profitable occupation, one that would earn the wealth that had been discovered by others.

I still tried to maintain that my major interest in voyaging to California was to find the man who had wronged Elizabeth. It was no longer entirely true. Hour by hour I was beginning to succumb as well, gold fever simmering in my heart. I was as eager as any man to set foot in San Francisco, and find a land or river route up into the Sierra foothills where, even now, men from around the world were digging fortunes right out of the ground.

Perhaps I was a little envious at the easy way in which Ben found an audience, reciting sonnets and scenes from Shakespeare. Educated and unlettered men alike enjoyed hearing a bit of high culture, and Ben was satisfied to respond—and he was good at it, giving the words just the right color. You could listen to Ben for hours and never get tired.

On the other hand, I could read a man his own death warrant and make it sound dull.

The ship's beef was so tough—and so close to being rotten—that men protested at being served their first portion, certain that some joke was being offered at their expense. Even when we realized that this leathery, rancid fiber was to be standard fare during the voyage, we ate the stuff with a semblance of humor. My fellow voyagers became clever at ruses that improved the food, such as sinking a slice of bread in a weak mixture of rum and water, and waiting as the weevils abandoned the bread only to drown.

It was possible for a steamer to navigate all the way to San Francisco in well under two weeks—there was talk of ten-day voyages, and even shorter passages. Our voyage, however, was punctuated by a delay off the coast of Mexico. A wood boat out of Mazatlan was scheduled to meet us, but the vessel did not arrive for many hours, while the seas around us grew ugly, laced with froth. Waves crashed over the prow as the side wheel churned to keep us in place. When the wood boat arrived, it was too dangerous for the bargelike craft to approach until late that night, when, in the darkness, the heavy seas subsided.

Early morning saw ship's boys gathering gnarled fragments of fuel wood from the deck. Within hours, our first burial at sea took place, within sight of the low hills of the Mexican mainland. A law clerk from New York, this cholera victim was given a solemn burial, the captain officiating.

No one dared to utter the name of the illness, no doubt praying that some heart ailment or chronic dropsy was to blame for this fatality.

One night a voice was lifted in song, the hymn about the Rock of Ages.

It was Aaron Sweetland, singing again, his strength nearly fully returned.

People from all over the world were pouring into California, by all accounts, and I was not certain that I would be equal to the adventure. In a world of brawn and energy, I was not sure that the habits of steadiness that I had learned repairing harnesses and flintlocks would serve me well on the Golden Shore.

The two weeks passed. I believed at times that this span of days would never end. Each day was the same, identical twenty-four hours, the same daylight and nighttime repeating over and over, land a faint ghost way off to the east as we steamed north, cinders raining down on us from the smokestack. Only the weather altered, very slightly, fading from robust tropical sun to something less ardent, sunlight slipping from cloud to cloud.

Perhaps I expected some ceremony, or an announcement from the captain.

The wind had been growing colder, but the sun was still pleasantly warm as we steamed along a coast of distant cliffs and trees. Men had been whispering, checking and rechecking their mining equipment, shovels brought out and then packed again with the picks and hoes and other tools the shipping companies had sold at a premium.

One minute we were churning north.

The next the vessel was heading eastward, the side wheel churning, bits of charcoal falling all the more thickly from the smokestack. We made our way into the waters of a large inlet, tall hills to the north, and a low, sandy shore to the south. Men crowded the starboard rail, already laden with their traveling bags.

Ben turned to find me in the pack of people against the rail, his eyes ablaze with excitement.

We had reached the Golden Gate and we were moment by moment closer to San Francisco.

PART TWO

BLOOD

CHAPTER 18

A year or two before, this city had been a sleepy outpost, a Franciscan mission and a sparse village with a view of empty bay and distant hills. Since the days of the conquistadors, California had been a remote Spanish territory, and then, with Mexican independence in the 1820s, a peaceful province of vast rancheros and poppy fields belonging to Mexico.

Now San Francisco's harbor was a crowded tangle of sailing ships, two or three hundred vessels. The skeletons of naked masts and spars resembled a wintry wood. No sailors worked these ships and, save for the creaking grind of hull against hull, nearly all were dead quiet.

“They are all abandoned,” said a ship's boy, spitting tobacco juice over the side. “Their crews are off striking it rich.”

A small steamer, spewing sulfuric smoke, towed us toward the dock, bits of coal grit raining down on us from the diminutive pilot boat. I realized that this was where the
California
had received the since-repainted scratches along her hull, forcing her way through the abandoned fleet.

The wharf was a bustling maze of coffee sacks and wooden crates. I had a glimpse through the crowd the gangway disgorged onto the docks of Mr. Gill and Mr. Sweetland, Aaron carrying one arm in a dirty yellow sling and smiling, Mr. Kerr and Mr. Cowden half buried under baggage.

Then we were lost in the flood of new arrivals. A longshoreman looked right through me—I was invisible. I tried to give him a look right back, unsteady on my legs because of our voyage. A man in a top hat, the first such headgear I had seen in a long while, introduced himself as a hotel agent, and said he could supply “accommodations of every variety.”

Neither Ben nor I spoke to the gentleman, not because we were discourteous, but because we were momentarily stunned at the scene. The top-hatted gent abandoned us with a tip of his hat, and his business offer was repeated to one disembarking passenger after another.

I was so accustomed to the dependable, if crowded, nature of shipboard life that the stewing noise of the street bewildered me. I put out a hand to steady my frame on Ben's shoulder. The buildings along the street were brick, with balconies overlooking a scene hectic with men in a hurry, calling out to each other, clutching papers or valises, no one simply walking along, every individual in a rush. Even the men who labored under loads of sea trunks, helping passengers who had come to an agreement with a hotel agent, went quickly, bent under their loads.

I made an effort to appear unimpressed, making our way down the middle of the street, each of us carrying one end of our sea-trunk. But this wasn't an easygoing sort of town, and it was hard to appear carefree holding up one end of a steamer trunk.

A violent crash froze us.

CHAPTER 19

One wagon collided with another, so close to us that a splinter hit Ben's hat and stuck there.

The iron wheels locked, and the wooden fellies—the rims just under the iron—broke with a load crack. Spokes popped out, both wagons instantly crippled, and both Ben and I were surrounded by bits of wagon spokes and shouting men.

I had spent long hours in the carriage shop on Harrison Street shaping such ash or white oak spokes with a drawshave. I used to help quench the wheels, heating the iron rim and lowering it sizzling and spitting into water. I used to paint the fine red lines on the spokes and polish the brass lamps on either side of the driver's seat. I helped fit the best Norway iron onto the hub collars, and in every way came to love carriages and wagons.

I hated to see the sudden wreck that chance had made of two serviceable, if inelegant, mud wagons. Both wagon drivers set their brakes, by habit, brakes being only partially useful in such a situation, and climbed down into the street. Each driver had assistants, boys in oversized, floppy caps, with dirty, hard-looking hands, evidently traveling to help load freight. These helpers leaped down to the muddy street, their fists bunched and ready for a fight.

Both drivers were equipped with whips. Wagon spokes lay strewn about, and the mules shied nervously, lifting up their hooves and gingerly putting them down the way animals do when they want to run away but are forced to stay put. But the moment of greatest tension seemed about to pass without a blow being struck.

Without a word of command, the assistants eased the two wagons apart as one of the mules laid back his ears and took a chomp out of a sleeve. Observers laughed, and I had the hopeful intuition that everything was going to be all right.

It was not the first time I had been badly mistaken.

The two drivers had plenty of help, men gathering spokes, assistants heaving the wheel rims over to the buildings, where several chairs lined up along the street allowed a few gentlemen a view of the ongoing tumult. One of the drivers, a big man with a bald head and a flowing blond beard, declared, “I don't like to see a drunken poltroon handle a team of mules in a city street.”

Poltroon
is the basest sort of coward, and I could not see how lack of courage had anything at all to do with the mishap. The remark had been made as though to the surrounding, cigar-smoking observers.

But the words were just loud enough so the opposing driver—a tall, clean-shaven man—could not keep from hearing them.

The tall driver's jaw worked angrily at the tobacco in his mouth. He continued examining his mules, and checking over the harness, bending down to observe the singletree under the wagon. Cordial voices called out for the two drivers to calm down and get the wrecks out of the street. A burly man with a gray beard and a businessman's gray frock coat strode down out of a shop and said, “Let's hurry up and get these wagons out of the way.”

I stepped in to lend a hand with one of the wagons, which were badly balanced on their three wheels and beginning to teeter. Ben joined in with the attempts to keep the adjoining wagon from falling over. There was still one mule in a troubled mood. The angry animal showed its teeth again, and lunged at the gray-coated businessman. The mule's harness jangled, and the white teeth snapped together with an instant corona of mule sweat and spit. The gray-clad man wheeled his arms as he retreated, staggering, bystanders breaking his fall.

But we were too many, too close together, and two men tumbled backward, puddles splashing. I was one of them.

I landed hard on my rear end.

I sat there feeling embarrassed, but aware that no one was taking any special notice of me. I was about to hoist my body up off the street, when a well-polished boot struck my ribs, and a large body tumbled on top of me.

The breath was shocked right out of my body, an elbow in my chest.

“God damn it,” said a strong male voice, his chin right beside my ear.

He picked himself up.

“God damn it,” he repeated, looking down at his trouser knees, which were wet, and gazing critically at a streak of street spatter along one sleeve.

He was a neatly mustached, square-jawed man in a black frock coat and a top hat, which had been knocked forward onto his forehead by his collision with me. He removed his hat, examined its shiny black brim, and resettled it on his head.

He was far more concerned with his hat than with me, but as he adjusted his clothing he exposed a pistol tucked into his waistcoat pocket. This was the sort of small pistol with a large bore most people keep at home in a rosewood case.

Ben gave me his hand and helped me to my feet.

“Are you hurt, my friend?” the gentleman asked warmly.

I said that of course I was not hurt, not wanting to have anything to do with this armed stranger.

“You're bleeding,” Ben confided to me.