The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (53 page)

We paid for the cradle and left, and in the morning we tried it on a new ravine where there was very good water trickling down. The way it worked was this: the cradle was an open oblong box about three feet long and half as wide; it was nine inches deep at the upper end and sloped down shallower with the lower end left open. Over the top half fitted another box, a kind of hopper with a bottom of perforated iron—holes half an inch wide and an inch apart—and beneath this was a canvas apron, which was supposed to catch most of the gold. The whole apparatus was placed on a rocker not unlike a child’s cradle. When one threw dirt in the hopper, another rocked the cradle, while a third poured in water, using a half-gallon dipper. The water dissolved the dirt, which fell through the holes into the sloping apron and finally into the upper half of the cradle. They had what they called a “riffle bar,” an inch or so high, placed crossways at the center, so that what gold left the apron stuck in the top of the cradle, being heavy, as the dirt and stones washed on out.

We spent over an hour getting it set up right in the best place. Then Mr. Kissel began to dig, Mr. Coe shoveled in dirt, and I poured water while my father rocked. It wasn’t hard work at all; my father said he preferred it to the rotary motion of panning, which made his head swim.

After two hours we made an inspection and had perhaps half an ounce of dust. This was disappointing, but it wasn’t certain
we had a good place, so we killed another hour moving farther up, skipping two ravines because a bunch of Chinamen were working a cradle in the first one and some people had a Long Tom going in the second. We ate lunch—sandwiches of pickled pork, as sour as crab apple, biscuits and dried apples—then got back on the job. My father said this ravine looked good; he smelled gold. And he was right for once. It wasn’t a strike, but it was rich pay dirt, so good we made three signs and staked out a claim, placing them on upright sticks. Then we really buckled down. By twilight, we’d cradled two leather pouches full of dust—what we figured would run better than four ounces—sixty-four dollars—besides what we had got in the morning.

Mr. Coe expressed the general feeling when he said, “This thing gets in one’s blood. Money for nothing; I wouldn’t have missed it for a king’s ransom. It’s precisely what we live for—the incomparable boon of not being bored.”

There was a discussion whether we should leave a guard overnight, on account of claim-jumpers, but we hadn’t brought blankets or a poncho and it was two miles back to camp. So we stuck our signs in firmer, hid the cradle up in the trees on a hill, covering it over with brush, and went home. The women were hopped up about the gold, specially the prospect of laying in a really fat supply of food. The Kissel children looked white and thin, and Mrs. Kissel said she intended to buy a cow if we struck it rich. Then she thought she might get a proper frock, made out of printed cotton, for Po-Povi.

“Don’t you feel the need of anything for yourself, ma’am?” asked Mr. Coe, who always thought she was slighting herself over this thing and that. For instance, he claimed she never took her share of the food.

“Laws, no. I’m too ugly to be improved by adornment.”

“As one of my countrymen has remarked, the quality of beauty exists largely in the eye of the beholder. I think I can speak for us all when I say that you don’t seem ugly to the members of this party.”

Without a doubt, this was the most personal remark we’d heard Mr. Coe make to anybody—that kind of statement doesn’t come easy to an Englishman—and he seemed embarrassed, once he’d got it out.

“In that case,” she said, smiling around, “maybe I’d better just say I’ve got everything I want.”

To break the ice a little, and show off his knowledge, my father began a gusty discourse on the number of times the word “beauty” occurred in famous poems, and we had supper.

Full of push, we turned out early, having buried our gold at the foot of a tree, and shoved off toward the ravine. But a lot of these ravines look alike, and when we got to what we thought was ours, we didn’t see the claim signs anywhere.

“I’m
positive
this is our digging,” said my father. “Yet we must be wrong; there’s no other answer.”

We inspected the next two, and sure enough, we found the signs three hundred yards or so away. But something was mixed up; it just didn’t
look
right. And when we went up the hill to uncover our cradle, it was missing. Neither were there signs that it had
been
there. And in the low part of the ravine, we could find no telltale marks of digging, no holes, no rock piles, no muddy spots where a washer had stood.

Facing the others, my father looked grave. “There’s been some hanky-panky here. Back we go to the other place.”

When we arrived, a party of rascally-looking men were already digging, using two or three pans and a cradle. I recognized one of them; the night before he had come by our camp after supper and asked for a drink of water. And somebody, I forget who—my father, likely—had bragged about our take-out of that day.

We marched on up the hill and went to where we had hid our cradle. The hiding place was there, bushes scattered apart, but the cradle was gone. So we walked down into the ravine, as those villains knocked off to watch. Not a sound, no movement, just a tensed-up waiting by both sides. I didn’t care for it. We were outnumbered; there must have been eight or nine of them. Then I
saw the leader, a squatty, black-haired Frenchman known as Le Chat, which they said meant The Cat, who had been pointed out to us in town as being the worst bully and villain in all the Feather River diggings. He had on very foppish clothes for a roughneck, made out of silk, with a filthy brocaded vest, and he wore a rapier in a fancy scabbard, besides two pistols stuck in his belt. His expression was both sly and amused watching us walk up. The others had stopped all work, and now one of them laughed shortly, then spat in the stream.

This Frenchman was some kind of quality gone bad. They said he came from a high family in France, but was the black sheep. Three or four here with him were French; they had come over in his ship, so the talk went, but had run into trouble of some kind; I heard it whispered he’d turned pirate. Whether or not, they didn’t arrive at Sacramento in the same ship they left with. People said this was a Spanishman, plain as daylight, very high in the bow and stern.

The Cat wasn’t the only quality around here. We met a man named Kelly who was writing a book about the diggings; he’d put in the following paragraph, and let my father copy it out:

“By the end of the week another pack-mule company came in, and several fresh hands from the coast, all the latter of the amateur or dandy class of diggers, in kid gloves and patent leather boots, with flash accoutrements and fancy implements, their polished picks with mahogany handles, and shiny shovels, resembling that presentation class of tools given to lords, baronets, and members of Parliament, to lay a first stone, or turn the first sod on a new line of railway. It was good fun to see those ‘gents’ nibbling at the useless soil, and then endeavoring to work their pans, with outstretched hands, lest they should slobber their ducks. Subsequently I used to meet members of that school wending back to the coast from the various diggings, ‘damning the infernal gold,’ and ‘cutting the beastly diggins’ in disgust.”

When we reached this band of ruffians, my father brushed by to inspect the cradle.

“It’s ours, all right.” he called back to Mr. Kissel and Mr. Coe. “I recognize it from the nick on the left side of the hopper. Our claim, too, of course.”

None of the men moved a muscle; all waited for the Frenchman. He had a kind of accent that I won’t try to imitate, being no hand at that sort of thing.

“Ah, so,” he said, “we have a complaint here, yes?”

In view of the unholy company that now dropped their tools and began to move in, I thought my father spoke up very bravely:

“You might construe it so—this is our cradle and our claim. And I’ll ask you to take your helpers and move to another spot.”

Coming forward, the Frenchman widened his smile. He had his black hair pulled into a queue behind, like a pirate, all right, and he walked with such easy, flowing motions I began to see where he had got his name.

“Perhaps I have misunderstand. How could this be, your cradle and claim? You see”—he made a pointing-out gesture with his hand—“we use them. Plainly.”

“You stole them,” said Mr. Kissel in his simple style. “We’ll take them back.”

I was scared. There was something chilling about this fellow. He was dangerous, and looked especially so right now.

“What was the word you use, my oafish friend?”

Right here, Mr. Coe spoke up, and I think he shocked everybody, including me.

“See here, my good ass, you’re nothing but a common thief, you know. I make it a practice not to damn whole races out of hand, even Frogs, but I draw the line at you. In the phrase of our frontier cousins, vamoose. Skedaddle. Drift.
Comprenez?”

The Frenchman looked as if he’d been slapped. He went absolutely white, and stepped back a pace before he recovered. And in this brief time my father and Mr. Kissel took hold of the cradle, as if they were planning to start work.

In the next few seconds so many things happened they were kind of hazy. The Frenchman screamed something, in his own
language, and two men stepped up behind Mr. Kissel. And when my father slipped between them, a fellow wearing an orange sock-cap and blue pantaloons struck him heavily in the face. He went down, Mr. Kissel whirled round very fast for a man of his size, and the other scoundrel swung a pistol barrel heavily against his head. He tottered and reeled, sinking to his knees, not quite unconscious despite the force of the blow.

Then Mr. Coe sang out sharply; I hardly recognized his voice, it was so brisk.

“Hold on there! Enough!”

I saw he had one of those frayed-out white gloves in his right hand. Now, he stepped forward and swung it across the Frenchman’s face with a smart whack. It stopped everybody dead in their tracks. My father sat up, looking on, and Mr. Kissel shook his head to clear it, watching the little scene being played out by an Englishman and a Frenchman in this rough American ravine.

The Frenchman’s voice was velvet-soft.

“You understand what you do, English swine?”

“Your choice,” said Mr. Coe carelessly, drawing on his glove.

“A de Tourville does not play at swords with rabble. I regret, but I must shoot you instead.” And he pulled one of the pistols from his belt.

Taking a heavy gold ring from the little finger of his left hand, Mr. Coe tossed it to Le Chat, who inspected it with great curiosity, said “Ah?” and tossed it back.

“The English have always taken an indulgent view of the bar sinister,” Mr. Coe said, “hence my generous offer. By the way, I knew your cousin, the legitimate one. Kindly communicate with Doctor McPheeters,” indicating my father, “should your courage rise to the occasion.”

“Englishman,” said Le Chat, “write your letters home, prepare your testament. You have signed your death paper.”

Humming, with the best of good cheer, as if he was on the way to a festival, Mr. Coe turned aside and we followed him back toward camp.

The news spread through the Marysville diggings within a few hours; it was amazing to see how fast people heard. The common feeling was glee that Le Chat had been called to account, for once, and mixed in was pity for Mr. Coe, who was known as a gentle, good and harmless man, but no fit choice to fight a duel.

Everybody waited for the signal, and sure enough, just before supper, one of the Frenchman’s band, a sallow, nervous man who might have been a servant once, approached our campfire with his hat in his hand.

“Par-
don,”
he said, and held out a note, which my father read aloud, after fixing on his spectacles. “ ‘If it suits, tomorrow at noon,
épée
, no bandages,
à outrance
, at the glade by what is known as Hawkins’ Oak.’ ”

We knew the place, about a mile away toward town, a green, pasturey dell with a huge gnarled tree in the middle, from one of whose branches a man named Hawkins once was hung for stealing cattle and stirring up Indians.

“Dear me,” said Mr. Coe. “I’ll have to borrow a sword. One moment,” he called to the messenger, and he scribbled a few lines on the back of the note. “There must be no argument whatever about the claim. The winner’s a gentleman of property, the loser’s a deceased thief. A simple establishment of caste.”

All of a sudden, my father exploded.

“It won’t do. We won’t have it,” he told Mr. Coe. “We’ve been talking this over, and we can’t permit you to take any such idiotic risk for a few ounces of gold and a couple of boards knocked
together.” He laid his arm on Mr. Coe’s shoulder. “Believe me, we’re touched. But”—he went on briskly—“it simply won’t do. With no disrespect to your physical prowess, I see this duel as a case of legalized murder. You aren’t the type, Coe, and we have no intention whatever of losing so valuable a friend. So “—snatching up his hat—“I’ll just step into town and straighten this mess out. There’s no official law around here, but the decent citizens are in the majority, I hope.”

“Never mind, doctor,” said Mr. Coe. “It’s no use, none at all. I seriously doubt if there’s any danger. That sort of villain’s usually nothing but brag and bounce. I think it highly unlikely that he’ll show up at all. Take the note back,” he said, repeating it in French, and the messenger scuttled out of the firelight, very evidently delighted to get away.

We made a gloomy supper of it, all but Mr. Coe, who was somewhat more cheerful than usual. But the rest of us were low in our minds, with Mrs. Kissel and Jennie and even Po-Povi sniffling a little now and then, and it took me a poison long time to get to sleep. Way off in the late hours—it must have been midnight—I heard whispering in the Kissel tent, and presently Mr. Kissel crept out, all dressed.

This is curious, I said, and I watched him carefully. He went over to the woodpile and picked up his ax, then hefted it to see that the helve was fastened tightly to the head—it had come off the week before, barely missing Deuteronomy, who was playing on the ground nearby.