The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (56 page)

“I don’t know anything underneath the sun that can bust up a friendly relationship like suspicions over gold,” said Uncle Ned. “Let’s split daily.”

My father agreed, in a few thousand words, touching on some famous friendships of the past, including two men named Demon and Pissiest, and others, and suggested it be fifty-fifty, since it was their site and their sluice boxes, though we had the most hands.

So we left it.

In the next few days, Mr. Coe failed to show up and we kept plugging away at the sluice. We took out about three hundred dollars and then, drat the luck, she began running out. It was discouraging. It seemed we couldn’t hit on a region that produced any real pay dirt, and Uncle Ned, who his last name was Reeves, said they’d had the same luck time after time, only worse.

My father began to look glum, because we weren’t more than holding our own, with these high prices hereabouts, and Mr. Kissel’s face suggested that he thought the farm was purely a mirage, now.

But we kept on—they had things organized so well that Todd and I weren’t needed all the time, so we wandered off once in a while and played. Everybody said it might be good for us.

This morning we walked through a very heavily wooded place, shooting slingshots and watching out for animals, and pushed into a region of rocky hills and canyons, where there was a dry creek bed with shaly, steep sides. It was interesting. We loafed along, throwing rocks and shooting the slingshot, and coming around a bend, we almost stumbled over a big pile of rattlesnakes. They
were coiled all around each other, lying there in the sun, repulsive and slimy. Must have been as many as a dozen or more, wrapped together like eels in a barrel. But they unkinked pretty fast when we began shooting, and disappeared behind a rock and into the black ground somewhere, out of sight.

We went on, but used caution, now, because when you find a place like a creek bed where snakes like to bake, you’re apt to run into any number more.

The sun rose high overhead, and we thought we ought to start back to camp. But we sat down a second to rest up and fix my slingshot, which had become unraveled from the forks. It was pleasant here, no lessons to learn, no chores around the house, not even any dirt shoveling for a change, and we made a bargain that we’d never go back to school, ever. If they started to put us back, we’d run off and go to sea, knowing considerable about the water from living on the rivers. Then I said I’d like to see my mother sometime. He fell silent at this, and I felt bad I’d said it, because I knew he was thinking about his folks.

I stared at the opposite side of the creek bed, where the sun was brightest, and spoke up: “That’s funny.”

“What?”

“Those glints in the wall. It almost looks like—” I got up and went over. “Holy, jumping Jerusalem!” My head spun around so I got almost faint, out of excitement.

There were crevices there that had hunks of gold, solid gold, in them, as big as marbles. They were all up and down as far as you could see, in streaks that ran slantwise from nearly the top to the bottom.

“I never seen anything like it,” the boy said. “What do you suppose we ought to do?”

“We’d better fetch the others as fast as we can, before somebody comes along and grabs it. You go, and I’ll stand guard. Here, take these hunks, tell them to drop all holds.”

I was so nervous, I could hardly get the words out.

As soon as he left, running as hard as he could, I examined the
bed in both directions, to see how far the vein went. There was gold plain to the naked eye on around the next bend, thirty yards or so, and no telling how much more farther on. It was a wild and woolly section of country, nothing that the average miner might be attracted to. That is, there were no promising ravines or gullies, and the total absence of water would discourage you from trying anyway. It was desert, and pretty far out, too. Still, you never could tell.

My heart was bumping around again, knocking up against my liver and my lungs, I was in such a sweat to get staked out. I hadn’t any pencil, no chalk, nothing. There wasn’t even a piece of slate to scratch on bark with.

So, to keep busy, I tried gouging out nuggets with the handle of my slingshot. I got two or three, but it was mighty slow going. What I needed was a metal thing like a spoon or a knife, and I’d mislaid my knife, confound the luck.

It should take an hour before Todd got back. By and by, worn out for the moment, I sat down to think things over, and then I heard something, clumpety-clump, a whole scattering of beats, off to the left, toward the high mountains. And when I ran over, keeping down, to peer through some weeds at the top, sure enough, it was a party of horsemen, five altogether, ugly and rough-looking, too.

I was so sick, I wanted to cry.

“Hold up!” I heard the first one cry, reining in with a jerk. “Have a look in the creek bed for water, Phelps. The horses is lathered up to the busting point.”

My palms were so wet I could hardly hang onto the rocks. I believe if I’d had a gun, I’d a shot him.

The others hauled in their mounts, raising a cloud of dust, and the second man, the one called Phelps, said, “There ain’t any water over this entire stretch. You could drill to China and raise nothing but sweat for your pains.”

“Let’s push on,” said another. “It couldn’t be over three or four miles at the outside.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” said the first man. “Horses don’t grow on trees, and I laid out fifty dollars for this one.”

“You mean
some
body did,” one of them said, and everybody but the first man laughed. He looked sore for a second, then yanked his horse’s head around with an oath, and they clattered off.

I hung on, feeling dizzy. It was about the closest call I could remember, and the most luck we’d had in a long time.

Half an hour later I heard another commotion, downstream, and this time it was my father and the others. They were half running and half walking, beat out but all a-twitter. The raggedy tails of my father’s black coat streamed away behind, and he held his hat on with one hand while carrying a light pick in the other. Mr. Kissel had an armful of tools, and so did Uncle Ned.

“My boy,” cried my father when he saw me, “is it true? Is it Golconda? Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings—”

He was all but babbling in his excitement, and his voice sounded odd-pitched, high and thin.

“For God’s sake,” I said—something my mother would have boxed my ears for—“cut out the yammering and get some claim signs up.”

“To be sure. Correct in every detail. But be calm, stay calm and collected. You have a tendency to fly off the handle in a crisis. Always remember—”

I didn’t pay any attention. I never saw anybody so unstrung. But when Uncle Ned and Mr. Kissel laid into the signs, he quieted down and began to make sense again.

You could hardly blame him. This was what he had quit his practice for, upset his family, dodged his creditors, and toiled away over three thousand miles of wilderness, filled with misery and danger. This, we hoped, was the end of the rainbow, and in about five minutes we meant to open the pot of gold.

We laid into work with whatever tools we had, and in no time at all had a small heap of particles and chunks. The gold in these was almost pure; they hadn’t any black look, but were dull-yellow, very easy on the eyes. But we wanted to be certain, because we didn’t care to waste a lot of toil over fool’s gold—iron pyrites—or something of the kind, so Uncle Ned took his testing kit and gave it a check. We all crowded around to watch, and nobody said a word. There wasn’t any sound except for the rattle of his implements, when something slipped, you know, and a pebble rolling down the bank once in a while.

He had one of these portable assay kits—a tin box with a lamp, a blowpipe, and bottles of acid—that he carried strapped on his back, and said it was worth all the books about gold ever written.

He gave it three tests, the first by the blowpipe. Said he got it from a regular professor that had been in the diggings last summer and struck it rich but turned to guzzling and ended up a bum before they ran him off for being a nuisance, begging. Gold had an “affinity” for oxygen, the professor had said, according to Uncle Ned, while copper, iron, and lead do something called oxidize pretty fast and sink into bone ash when heated. On the other hand, gold and silver, under strong heat, stay on the surface.

Using the blowpipe and a piece of charcoal with a little bone ash bedded in it, he got her going and this metal of ours came through with flags flying.

“We’ll give her a quicksilver test and polish off with acid, so hold your breath,” he stated.

Then he roasted some of the stuff and pulverized the particles and what he said “triturated” it with quicksilver, which clung to the metal in an amalgam as fast as you could wink.

“So far so good,” he said, and we all shifted our positions, letting down a little.

Then he took a weak mixture of nitric and muriatic acids and the metal dissolved right off the bat. In a strong mixture, nothing happened.

“Boys,” he said, getting up and slapping his hat against his jeans, “we’ve got a strike. She came through noble, and probably in a pure state, or I miss my guess. Silver would have dissolved in the strong nitric, and we ruled out all others with the blowpipe.
Yoo-hoo
—
eee!”

Everybody shook hands around, and congratulated me on my hawk eyes, just as I’d told my mother that day before we left; then we lit in.

Todd and I used tablespoons; they were equally as good as picks, better for this work, which people around the diggings called “crevicing.”

We estimated we took out about eight hundred and fifty dollars that first day, and we hadn’t got started yet. It was about the best fun I ever had, and as I told Todd, it was better than getting up early and running old man Burkhardt’s trot lines, because this way you didn’t have to clean any fish and there wasn’t any chance of getting caught, either.

Well, we fetched the women and moved our camp up as close as we could where there was water, and didn’t breathe a word to a soul. We left a message with neighbors for Mr. Coe, with another on a bill at the old campsite, and one of us went down every day, looking for him.

Within a week, most of the gold you could see in the ledges was dug out, and we had made, we figured, around forty-eight hundred dollars. It wasn’t any fortune, but it was a good stake, and everybody was happy. We were dividing, now, one third to Uncle Ned and two thirds to us, and it was the most money any of us had
seen in a long time, or maybe ever. And we weren’t through yet.

In the middle of the second week we had well over seven thousand dollars, so we cashed it in with the most honest assayer in Marysville, who only skinned us a few hundred dollars, so Uncle Ned said.

And the next evening at camp we heard a halloo from a ravine below us, and when we ran out to see what the matter was, it was Mr. Coe. He’d bought a horse, a bony one, twenty or thirty years old, sold him by those cheats in Sacramento for a gaudy sum, and he reported that he’d had a mixed-up time trying to locate us. We should have known. In spite of his other good points, he couldn’t have found his way from one side of the river to another without a compass. He was the poorest hand that way you ever saw, and the cheerfulest

“Yes,” he said when he’d been introduced and heard our news, “I must have followed the wrong trail up. Note was very explicit, too. But then, where I wasted most of my time was finding the
first
camp. The one down toward Marysville.”

“But, Coe,” said my father gently, “you couldn’t have—that one’s right off the road. A child could find it blindfolded.”

“Seems odd, doesn’t it? I rode right over it, you know. Thinking of something else, I suppose.”

He had more than a dozen letters for us; they’d all been marked “Hold” and were waiting at San Francisco. The Kissels had a good many from family and neighbors, and Mr. Coe remarked wryly, in response to a question of my father, that yes, he’d got his, too.

We must have read everything over ten times. My father read me my mother’s letters, and we both swabbed out our eyes now and then, but my father said it was a joyous occasion, because now we had money, and knew how to make more, so that soon, very soon, likely, we could begin to think about home.

He read, “ ‘Mary has her third tooth. Hannah is in Natchez for three weeks, visiting cousins at Cherokee, and I enclose her best souvenirs. She has been paid court by the Gregsons’ oldest boy, an empty-headed lout with no prospects of resource within himself
and fewer prospects of inheritance, and so I sent her packing. Alas, I fear that she herself, aside from her youth and beauty, is no longer regarded as a “good catch.” ’ ”

He quit reading here and fell to coughing, but presently, by skipping here and there, he got everything out. My mother was making do on her small income from New Orleans, Banker Parsons was pacified for the moment, after an anxious time when he learned we were missing—he had declared briefly his intention of posting a wanted circular but had been talked out of it by friends—and my mother was even making a small payment every month on our debts.

The only real bad news, which seemed to affect me more than my father, was that Sam died. He was a very young goat to go that way, but I understood it better when they said he’d died of undigestion. When I heard that, I wasn’t surprised any more, and in fact, you might say he had lived to a ripe old age, if you consider what he ate. In this present case, the farmer had had the foolishness to leave a new harrow within range of his rope, and Sam naturally ate off some of the teeth. The peculiar part was that the farmer insisted on concentrating on his harrow and refused to take any responsibility for the goat.

My father said never mind, he’d make it up somehow. Said he’d get me a pet that it didn’t matter what he ate. “I’ve heard that the python, or anaconda, can swallow anything mechanically capable of passing its jaws. The bodily acids dissolve it in time. There was a case in one of the papers which had to do with a stuffed moose, engorged by error, and it worked out fine. That may be just the ticket.”