Jo's Journey (6 page)

“We lost a horse, Emerson!”

“Get him back! I can't afford this nonsense!”

Nonsense!? A horse was dead and the man called it nonsense! Get Sassafras back? How could anyone be so stupid?

“Feel free to try, sir!” Joshua gave my shoulder another squeeze. “We gotta keep going,” he said to me. At his touch I let out the angry breath I'd been holding.

“I know.”

And so we continued, subdued by the pointless loss of a good horse. I felt stunned, as if I had been struck a physical blow, though I had escaped unhurt. It felt as though I had
swallowed a stone. My stomach twisted and knotted, then settled into a dull ache. The fact that I could still stand, walk, carry a load, and draw breath into my lungs filled me with a peculiar grief, a guilty sadness that I had survived and Sassafras had not. The space between my life saved and his life lost was but a few inches, and all day long I wept inside at this eerie thought, and thanked God for sparing me.

That night Bart was full of questions. We sat close to Joshua near one of several fires the group had built in a clearing. The men's faces glowed from the warmth of the firelight as they chatted and drank.

“Do you suppose God notices when men treat their animals bad?” Bart asked me quietly.

In the near dark, I shrugged, then stiffened, worried Joshua would hear us, afraid I would not be able to hold back the tears if both of them showed concern. But Joshua was regaling the Irish lads with the story of a mule train that had taken a wrong turn near Sacramento.

“Not you,” Bart added. “You didn't do nothin' wrong. Not one of us could have saved Sassafras. I mean Emerson.”

Mr. Emerson sat at the next fire over, holding forth about this and that and whatnot, as loud and obnoxious as ever.

“I hope the Good Lord has sense to notice those who care for beasts and those who don't,” Bart said.

A wave of horror washed over me again, as it had each time I thought about the moment when the rope flew from my hands and Sassafras tumbled to his death.

“Did you hear what them other men said?” Bart asked so softly that I had to lean close to catch his words.

“Which ones?”

“Them miners we passed going the other way at the river crossing.” A log snapped in the fire, spraying sparks heavenward.

“Yeah. I heard.”

It would have been hard not to hear what that lot had to say. They had finally made it to the diggings only to find they couldn't afford to stay. The cost of goods was so high
and the gold, according to them, so hard to find, that after all that effort just to get there, they had turned back and were advising everyone they met to do the same.

“Your lives and the lives of them animals ain't worth it,” one of the men had said.

To my surprise, six of the men in our group listened. Without bothering to take more than what they carried on their backs, they joined the others heading back to Lilloet.

“I was sorely tempted to go with them,” Bart confessed. “How about you?”

For a long time I stared at the flames. Yes, I longed to leave behind the death and ugliness in this harsh beautiful land. But I wasn't sure that the way to leave was to turn tail and run. Who was more foolish? Those who had given up? Or those of us who carried on?

“There's gold up there in the Cariboo,” I insisted, because I believed that much was true. But what I said next I now only half believed myself. “Somebody's gonna get it out of the ground—that somebody might as well be me. And you.”

Bart heaved a sigh and stretched his hands toward the flames. “I admire your optimism, Joe. You know, you're about the only reason I haven't turned back.”

I closed my eyes and buried my face in my hands when he said that. A piece of me felt just a little bit better because, as my pa always said, having a friend at your side helps ease the pain of whatever ails you. But another piece of me felt terribly guilty. If I hardly knew myself whether it was wise to carry on, how could I ask Bart to keep going? Or was I flattering myself to think I had any say in what Bart Ridley chose to do?

“It's late, boys,” Joshua said, turning from the others and clapping his hands together. “I'm turning in. See you bright and early.”

Bart followed him toward the tents, and the moment passed when I might have told Bart that he'd be better off back in California with Miss Emily Rose.

Each long hard day began early. We broke camp, loaded the horses, gulped mugs of black coffee and, if we were lucky, found a
few stale biscuits to dunk into the thick black brew. Men foolish enough to have bought new gumboots in Victoria had blistered feet so swollen and sore they hobbled like grandmothers. The rest of us, slightly better off in leather boots, nonetheless trudged along like their old husbands, bent under the weight of the packs we carried.

Each day also found the men a bit more irritable, until there was precious little friendly talk. The days passed one after the other in a grim procession as we settled into the grind of making and breaking camp, tending sore muscles and blistered feet, and convincing ourselves to keep going. The tension didn't ease until we finally reached the town of Williams Lake, some sixteen days after we left Lilloet.

“Looks like Heaven, don't it?” Bart declared when we led our remaining horses into town. “Mr. Emerson says we're gonna get us a square meal.”

Just the thought made my tummy rumble. My mouth watered all the way to the restaurant. When the plates of cabbage, fresh beef,
beans and pies were set before us, we attacked the food as if we might never eat again. Only once I slowed, and that was when I considered how ashamed my mother would be to see her daughter devouring a meal without thought of chewing. But I ignored her imagined scolding and tucked in with the best of them, not stopping until I'd gobbled down two platefuls of grub and slurped three cups of tea laced with milk and sugar. Heaven on Earth, indeed, and worth every penny of the three half-dollars Mr. Emerson forked over for each of us!

But the pleasure of a full belly didn't last long. The men were worried that our supplies wouldn't see us all the way to Antler Creek. Two of the horses limped from stone bruises, and Joshua wanted us to rest in Williams Lake for a few days to give them a chance to recover.

Mr. Emerson insisted that stopping could only mean poverty for all of us. His scowl was permanently stitched across his face, and everyone steered well clear of him whenever possible.

Of course, there was no way the two jovial men who banged their glasses down on our table could have known any of that.

“You folks coming or going?” one of them asked.

“Coming,” said Mr. Emerson, and we all laughed because we always talked about going off to the diggings. “Going, I mean—going to the diggings.”

“You won't know if you're coming or going if you head on up the trail. You ain't seen the bad part yet.”

I thought of poor Sassafras and doubted that. How much worse could a trail get?

The two men thought themselves hilarious. One slapped the other on the back so hard he nearly fell over.

Quietly, his voice cold and hard-edged, Mr. Emerson asked, “Perhaps you gentlemen could inform us of the trail conditions ahead?”

The men paid no attention to Mr. Emerson's query but regaled us with several extremely rude jokes.

Bang
!

The gunshot was so loud I clapped my hands over my ears. Mr. Emerson eased his pistol back into its holster and looked up. A neat black hole in the wood beam above us marked where the bullet had disappeared.

“I asked a question. I ain't got all day to wait for an answer.”

“Sir, you can't wait for your answer here—not if you're going to shoot that pistol in my dining establishment.”

Mr. Emerson raised his hand to the proprietor of the restaurant, a tall thin man with a glorious curling mustache. “Boys—git up. We got work to do.”

Bart and I stood as one and meekly followed Mr. Emerson outside.

“Be ready to leave early tomorrow,” he said with a curt nod toward the edge of town where we'd pitched our tent. He turned on his heel and strode into the closest saloon.

Unrolling our blankets on the ground seemed preferable to spending even a minute cooped up in a room with Mr. Emerson.

“Do you suppose them men were coming
or going?” Bart asked as I was about to lose myself to sleep.

Despite my weariness, I smiled. “I do believe they were coming from the diggings with their pockets full of gold.”

“I don't know about the gold, but I suspect they were going south because they ain't out of their minds like most folks in these parts.”

“You don't call their foolery madness?”

“Nope. I call it being happy. I ain't been happy in so long I can't hardly remember how it feels. But I know what it looks like.”

With that, Bart rolled away from me and I was staring at his back. I wanted to reach my hand across the space between us and touch his back the way one tries to soothe an animal in pain. Instead I turned the other way and stared at the bottom edge of the canvas side of the tent. I counted all the way to one thousand and forty-two before I finally lost track of what I was doing and fell sound asleep.

The next day Mr. Emerson was adamant that we push on. But late that morning when we found ourselves struggling to free Honey from where she lay belly deep in a swamp, I think we all regretted not having had a better rest at Williams Lake.

“You poor beast,” Joshua murmured, giving the sorrel mare a pat on the neck. “Let's give her a hand,” he said.

Nigel and Bill held ropes attached to either side of Honey's halter to hold her head up out of the water. Careful not to plunge into the deep spot where Honey had sunk, Joshua eased his way to her rump with another
rope in hand. Reaching down into the water behind her, he passed the rope over to Mr. Emerson, George and a fellow by the name of Louie on the far side.

The rest of us watched, swatting at the cursed insects swarming everywhere. They crawled over our skin and into our noses, eyes and ears. Some were flies so small you could scarcely see them, though their bites were almost as bad as those of the monstrous horseflies.

“Ready?” Joshua asked.

The men at the mare's head nodded. Mr. Emerson's eyes narrowed.

“One. Two. Three.”

The men heaved on the ropes and the exhausted horse, still fully loaded, struggled out of the deep hole and staggered forward to come to an unsteady halt just a few feet farther on.

The mare didn't even bother to shake herself but stood, head down, panting.

“Good girl,” Joshua said.

I raised my hand to shade my eyes from the sun. The swamp stretched in all directions
as far as we could see. The only way to get through this horrible place was to try to step from hump to hump of drier grass. But the humps were often small and unsteady, and unless one were quick and nimble, sliding off into the swamp was a regular occurrence. The going was painfully slow, made all the worse by the clouds of insects that buzzed, hummed and bit.

It was bad enough to drive a good man to drink. It was so bad that we lost a horse, which was unable to get up after he slid into the mud, despite three ropes and eight of us hauling on him to get him going again.

Joshua cut the horse's pack free and, without speaking, we divided up as much of the load as we could carry and continued on, not even looking back when the crack of a rifle signaled the end of the horse's life.

“I wouldn't have believed that anything could make me think the swamp looked good,” Bart said. After hiking up and around a steep hill thick with trees and down into a ravine on the other side, we had come to a dead stop at the end of a rickety log bridge.
The water was so high it licked at the bridge, splashed and spilled over the slick logs, white bubbles frothing and foaming as we stood and stared.

“We could stop here,” Louie said, though it was impossible to make camp on the narrow ledge beside the angry creek.

“Don't be a damned fool, Louie,” Mr. Emerson said. “Get on over the bridge.”

At that moment we heard a shout, and four men, bedraggled, bearded and carrying little more than their bedrolls on their backs, staggered out of the trees on the other side of the ravine.

“Hold up!” the first in line shouted at us over the roar of the raging torrent below.

It seemed that nothing could stop those men as they ran across the bridge.

“Turn back,” the first one urged as he moved past us. “Ain't nothin' there worth dying over.”

Bart took hold of my forearm and watched the four men pass us without even a backward glance. I knew he wanted to go with them. I could feel it in the way he gripped
my arm. The very idea that Bart might leave filled me with a dark dread.

Two men from our party turned and trotted after the retreating miners.

My mouth went dry and my heart raced, as if I were the one running back down the trail. If Bart turned now, would I stay or would I go?

“Bart,” I said, “we're almost there—” I choked back the pleading words that threatened to flood the space between us. Bart knew as well as anyone the risks as well as the rewards. He had to make his own decision, just as I had to make mine.

“Boys—help Joshua get these animals over the bridge.” For once I was glad to do as Mr. Emerson commanded. I turned away from Bart and back to the bridge, my heart skittering and jumping beneath my ribs.

Bridge. To call it a bridge was madness. To think horses could get across was insane. If Mr. Emerson thought it was such a fine idea, he should lead the animals over.

“With respect, maybe we should see if there's a better place to—”

“Who's paying your wages, Joshua?”

“Sir, these animals —”

“These animals will do what you tell them.”

Joshua's hand closed on the lead rope of one of our four remaining horses. He looked skyward and his lips moved in silent prayer.