Jubilee Trail (85 page)

“I’ve never been so all right in my life,” said John. “Or so tired, or so muddy and unshaven, or so damn happy. And I never saw you look so beautiful.”

He lifted the yellow pottery cup and drank to her, and she saw in his eyes that she did look beautiful to him, though she knew that right now she would not have looked beautiful to anybody else. She knew how she always was at the end of a day’s work, her hair in strings and her dress rumpled and splatterings of liquor making her smell as if somebody had wiped up the bar with her. But it did not matter, not now. She asked him, “John, have I spent my last day at the bar?”

He laughed and squeezed her waist again. “You’re mighty right you have. Tomorrow morning I’m going over to see the alcalde and ask him how soon he can marry us. And after that—” he grinned at her— “Garnet, I have such news!”

She had never known John to talk with so much excitement. “It must be good news,” she said, “or you wouldn’t look like that.”

“Oh yes, good. Tremendous. Earth-shaking. I’ll tell you all about it. Give me a few minutes to catch my breath.” As he poured another drink of whiskey he asked, “Why did Florinda call me a pig and say I didn’t deserve this?”

“Because you are a pig and you don’t deserve it,” Garnet retorted. “John, what made you take so long to come back?”

John’s green eyes were sparkling with mischief. “I couldn’t get here any sooner. Nothing but you would have brought me here now.”

“Why didn’t you send me a letter?”

“I’ve been where I couldn’t. That’s the great news, Garnet, but it’ll take more than a minute to tell it. So let me rest and get something to eat. I’ve been in the saddle since dawn. When I tell you, you’ll forgive me.”

“She’d forgive you,” said Florinda’s voice nearby, “if you told her you had killed six Diggers and eaten them. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’ve all been having the vapors on your account. Speaking of eating, you can start.”

She set a dish of beans in front of him. The Brute was calling the boys, who had been taking care of the horses outside. He told them to come in and get supper, and he would finish unloading the packs and would put the horses into the corral. Pablo and Vicente sat down on the floor joyfully and began to gobble. John was so hungry that he was gobbling too, without waiting to talk any more.

But at last both he and the boys had had enough. Pablo and Vicente rolled up in their blankets on the porch. Garnet told Mickey to go to sleep too. John apologized for being so hungry that he had even forgotten to wash his hands before eating, but said he would like to do so now. He and the Brute went out to get some water from the barrel on the back porch, and while John scrubbed, Garnet and Florinda washed the dishes. Florinda said, “It does me good to look at you and John. He’s really wild about you, Garnet.”

Garnet laughed. John was wild about her, she could see that. Also she was glad to see how much Florinda liked him. Garnet had observed long before now that the measure of Florinda’s real liking for any man was the degree of her impoliteness toward him. When Florinda told a man he was a dim-witted damn fool, it was a term of comradeship. Garnet remembered that in all Florinda’s association with Bartlett and Penrose, she had never heard her speak to either of them without putting Mr. in front of his name.

At length, when John and the Brute had come in, Florinda set out coffee and wine and whiskey on the table. She said affably,

“Johnny, you can be frank with the Brute and me. I heard you tell Garnet you had some news. If it’s just for her, say so and we’ll leave.”

“No, it’s for all of you,” said John. “Come and sit down. I’ve got something to show you.”

They gathered at the table. John reached into his pocket and brought out a bundle wrapped in a red handkerchief. He untied the handkerchief and showed them a small leather bag closed with a drawstring, the sort of bag men often used for carrying tobacco.

“Now what,” said Florinda, “is so exciting about that?”

With a grin, John handed the little bag to Garnet. As she took it she gave a start. “Why, how heavy it is!” she exclaimed.

John did not enlighten her. He watched her with interest. Garnet squeezed the bag. It yielded to her fingers, for though there was something in it, the contents were not packed solid. The bag felt as if it were loosely filled with sand. But no sand was as heavy as this. She looked up at John questioningly.

John was in a mood to be dramatic. It was not like him. He was standing now, as though he were about to make a speech, and this was not like him either. His stubbled face was aglow with something resembling mischief, but it was not quite mischief. It was triumph and expectancy. He looked, she thought, like an adoring father on Christmas morning, about to show his children some present so wonderful that they could never have dreamed of having it for their very own. Still questioning, she started to undo the leather drawstring of the bag, but John said,

“No, no—let the others handle it first.”

Garnet gave the bag to the Brute, who exclaimed, “Why, it
is
heavy!” as though he had not believed it could be as heavy as she had said. He too felt the bag, and looked up at John, puzzled by John’s unusual behavior. Florinda said,

“Let me feel it. What’s so remarkable about it? Hell for breakfast, it weighs a ton!”

Still grinning, John held out his hand for the bag and she gave it to him. He drew toward him a dish that stood on the table. Loosening the drawstring, he emptied the bag into the dish. Whatever was in the bag, it tumbled into the dish with a clatter like rain on the roof. The three of them bent forward to look at it. But they were still puzzled, for what they saw was something new and baffling.

The stuff lay there in a pile: tiny grains and flakes, and some bigger grains like gravel. The pile was flickering in the lamplight. Some bits of it were dull, as though they were dirty, but most of them were bright enough to catch the light. As John moved his fingers through it, like a child playing with sand on the seashore, the pile rattled on the dish with a faint ringing sound. Garnet put her fingers into it too, and stirred it up; the Brute picked up a few grains and examined them; and Florinda, who had put on her mitts again after washing the dishes, took them off now and rubbed the grains between her fingertips. Suddenly she gave an unbelieving little laugh, and said,

“Why John, if it wasn’t so impossible, I’d think—” She stopped, because what she thought was so plainly impossible. The Brute said,

“John, I must be up early tomorrow to get away. Stop being mysterious.”

Garnet said, “John, for heaven’s sake, what is it?”

John smiled at them all. “It’s what Florinda thinks it is,” he answered.

“But what do you think, Florinda?” Garnet demanded, and John laughed and said,

“Florinda always did understand my mental processes better than either of you others, because my head is so much like her own. Tell them what it is, Florinda.”

Florinda was still pinching the little grains between her fingers. She lifted amazed, awestruck eyes, and said bashfully, as though she was afraid of being laughed at,

“Why—if it wasn’t so absolutely idiotic—I’d think these—I’d think they were tiny little specks of gold.”

“Gold?” repeated Garnet and the Brute.

“Gold,” said John.

W
HEN THEY HAD EXCLAIMED
, and examined the gold-dust again, and asked him where it came from and what he was going to do with it, they finally settled back and gave John a chance to answer. John sat down too. He looked around at them, and said slowly,

“Listen, all of you. You know me pretty well. Has any of you ever, once, known me to go off into a bluster of excitement over anything? Have you known me to get rattled and tell an exaggerated yarn?”

They shook their heads.

“All right,” said John. “Then you’ll believe me now. What I’m saying is true, but it’s almost past belief. It’s so astounding that most people in San Francisco still don’t believe it. They are hearing this story and laughing at it. A few men have gone to see for themselves, as I did. But the sane and sensible citizens who are making good livings as carpenters and printers and storekeepers, they are still shaking their heads and saying isn’t it ridiculous the nonsense some folks will swallow whole. But I went to see, and I saw it, and I came back here to get Garnet and take her up to see it for herself.”

His earnestness was impressive. They were listening, straining forward, hardly moving. John went on.

“In that wild country where I’ve been, you can see flakes of gold shining in the creek-beds. You can dip up a handful of sand, and there are grains of gold like these, shining all through the sand. There are veins of gold in the rocks. You can chip it out with a knife. There are little lumps of gold lying on the ground among the grass and pebbles. And that country—” he paused an instant, looking around at their wide incredulous eyes, at their lips trembling with unspoken protests—“that country doesn’t belong to anybody. The gold has been there since the world was made, and until right now nobody has ever seen it but a few Diggers who didn’t know what it was and had no use for it. It’s there, waiting for any of us to go there and get it.”

He stopped, but nobody said anything. Generally, Garnet and Florinda and the Brute were not silent people. But this tale was almost stunning. They had nothing to say.

So John continued.

“Tomorrow I’m going to see the alcalde to ask him how soon he can marry Garnet and me. Then we’ll load our horses and go up there. It won’t be easy living this summer, but it won’t be too bad—we’ll stop on the way to get a tent and supplies, and by the time we get there the rains ought to be over. We’ll go right up and start before the word gets around, because it will get around and more and more people will come to believe it. By midsummer the gold-fields will be full. But we’ll get there early, and before the rains start again we’ll be rich.” He reached for Garnet’s hand and pressed it happily. “We’ll be rich!” he repeated.

And then suddenly, Garnet found that something was happening to her. For the first few minutes she had been like the others, too startled to be aware of anything except a dazed surprise. But now she was beginning to feel again. And what she felt was a lump of cold fear down in the middle of her. She did not know why it was. But until she could understand it better she did not want John to know about it, so when he gave her hand a hard happy pressure, she returned it and asked,

“But how—who—what made them find this place?”

“I’ll tell you about that too,” John said. With his familiar cool chuckle, he added, “It’s a story with a moral.”

“Yes, tell us!” Florinda said eagerly. It was plain that Florinda was not disturbed by the news. She was hearing John with a joyous wonder, as though the world was good and every line he spoke made it better.

“You know where Sutter’s Fort is, Nikolai,” said John, and he explained to the girls, “Part of Sutter’s land is the old Russian Fort Ross, where Nikolai used to live. Sutter is a Swiss, a naturalized Californian. He has built up a big enterprise—vast land-holdings, ten or twelve thousand head of cattle and even more sheep, thousands of horses and mules and hogs, and a farm where they say he raised about twenty thousand bushels of wheat last year. Besides all this he has a tannery and a flour-mill and the Lord knows what else. He employs a lot of American laborers, and he has several hundred tame Diggers and other Indians who are slaves of his in all but name. There are several smaller ranchos near his, mostly owned by Americans, and a number of stores on his property where the people of that district do their trading.

“Sutter uses a lot of lumber, and he needed a sawmill. The best place thereabouts for a sawmill was on a stream called the American River, in a part of the country that didn’t belong to him. But it didn’t belong to anybody else either, unless we count the wild Diggers who roam around there sometimes catching grasshoppers for dinner. Sutter sent out some laborers to build the sawmill, eight or ten white men and about a dozen tame Diggers, and they got to work.

“The men had dug a ditch for the tailrace of the sawmill, and had turned a flow of water into the ditch to deepen it.”

“What’s a tailrace?” asked Garnet.

“The mill was to be operated by water power,” John explained. “The main flow of water that turns the wheel of a sawmill is called the millrace. The part of the millrace below the wheel, where the spent water runs off, is called the tailrace.”

She nodded. “I see. So the men had dug a ditch for the tailrace, and had turned water into it to make it deeper.”

“That’s right. They left the water to run all night and work for them while they were asleep. In the morning the boss of the gang, a man named Marshall, walked down there to see how much work the water had done during the night. The sun was coming up, and Marshall saw something shiny under the water at the bottom of the ditch. Maybe he thought one of the workmen had dropped a coin from his pocket, or a watch-fob. Maybe he didn’t think anything. But he reached in and picked it up.”

“And it was
gold
,” said Florinda. She hardly spoke the line; she breathed it out reverently, in a voice that was almost a whisper.

Garnet was not so thrilled. She was puzzled at herself. She did not know what she was afraid of. But she did not want John to guess that she was afraid of anything he was saying, so she asked,

“When did this happen, John?”

“One day last January. I wish I’d been there.”

“I wish I had too,” said Florinda. She sighed happily, as though the air were full of perfume. The Brute said,

“You told us the story had a moral, John. What’s the moral?”

John answered with amusement. “I couldn’t help thinking of it when I saw all that gold lying around. You all know who the first white men were who came into this country. The Spanish conquistadores. They came looking for gold. Oh the dreams they had and the yarns they believed, palaces full of treasure, the seven golden cities of Cibola, the people who lived in castles with golden towers, all there waiting to be plundered. Those Spanish lords were great gentlemen. They would never have humbled their spirits with work. A gentleman who had worked could never hold up his head again. The only right and proper way for them to get gold was to murder the people who had already worked for it and to steal what they had. They rode up here. But they couldn’t find the golden cities. They couldn’t find anything to steal. So they went home and said this was a worthless country nobody would want.” John laughed again. “And all the time, everything they believed was true. There was gold enough here to fit their most fantastic dreams. Here it was, more gold than those thieving killers had ever seen in one place in their lives, and they never found it. But the first men who ever in the history of the world went up there to do a plain ordinary job of work, they found it.”