He neared the cantina where he’d left his companions just as a roar of voices rumbled out from inside the place. He surmised the fight had just reached its close—if so, it had been a long and probably fierce one. Bare-knuckle fights that dragged on this long indicated evenly matched opponents, and those were the fights that left men with broken noses and bleeding ears and bruised eyes swelling shut.
Jedd went inside, determined to sit down and get off his throbbing ankle for a while, and to regather with his friends and bring this long day to a close. Before he found a place to perch, though, he saw a bloodied hand being hoisted upward over in the fighting ring, another hand gripping its wrist. The victor being presented and declared to the applause of the rough and mostly drunken crowd.
It was a black man’s hand, and even though his view of the winner’s face was blocked by the crowd, Jedd instantly was sure that was Rollie Slott up there, another win beneath his belt.
But it couldn’t be Rollie. Rollie was far away, back in Knoxville with his brother, Ollie, tending to his aging mother and dreaming of one day having something better than bruised knuckles and pounded flesh to show for himself. The thought of all the distance between him and the world he’d come from, not to mention the distance between a man’s real life and the one he longed to have, made Jedd feel vaguely homesick and alone.
Then he thought: What if it really is Rollie up there? He and Ollie talked of their wish to go to California if circumstances ever allowed it—in other words, if their old mother passed on. What if she had passed on, and they had set out at once across the country? As slow as the Sadler group had moved, the Slott brothers could have passed by them unseen at any number of points along the way. Maybe Rollie and Ollie had made it as far, at least, as Santa Fe.
Jedd moved up closer, shifting about until he could see the face of the black man who had just won the bout.
It was not Rollie. This was a stranger, darker-skinned and far more battered than Rollie. He also lacked Rollie’s smooth, supple musculature; this man’s muscles were knotty and corded, bulging at places against the underside of his torso skin like potatoes trying to push their way out of the sack that held them.
That wistful sadness heightened inside Jedd. It would have been a fine thing to have run across an old face from home, here so far away, where everything was different.
“That was quite a fight,” said Ben Scarlett behind Jedd. Jedd turned his head and flashed a quick grin at the now-drunken man. Ben’s was an old face from home, just as he’d been thinking about, but in this instance Ben Scarlett just didn’t count.
“I figured that out for myself when I came back in,” Jedd said. “I was out of here for a good spell of time, and if they were pounding away at it that whole time, I knew it had to be a real knuckle-buster.”
“You used to fight, didn’t you, Jedd?”
“I did. Eight, nine years back. It’s a rough road to travel, Ben. It has its moments, when it’s your hand being hoisted up in the air at the end…but there’s plenty of the other kind of moments, too. And it leaves you aching all the time. Even after the fight is long over and you’ve healed up. There’s always pain remaining.”
“I know about that. About pain remaining.”
“You used to fight?”
“Nah. That ain’t the kind of pain I’m talking about. There’s more than one kind, you know. And more than one kind that can remain with you even after you think all the healing’s done. That’s what makes me drink, you see? Because of the pain that always remains.”
“Does the drinking wash it away?”
“Just numbs it. That’s all. Numbs it.”
Jedd realized then how little he knew of Ben Scarlett’s life story. The Ben he’d known had already been a drunkard when Jedd first met him after moving to Tennessee from North Carolina. But there had to be more to him than that. There was a time in Ben’s life before the liquor took over, and something in that time of his life had to account for his fall into the swamp of alcohol. Jedd had no idea what it was. Maybe sometime he’d ask Ben about it.
Not tonight. Jedd felt low enough already, and his ankle hurt worse than it had the night after he was shot. He’d be glad to put this day and night behind and start fresh in the morning.
California was calling.
Ben and Jedd collected Blalock, who was himself significantly besotted by this point, and Jedd took them toward the hotel he’d secured for them earlier. Blalock proved out to be a whining drunk, reliving and relaying in unwanted bloody detail the murder of Carver Dalton’s family back home, the atrocity that had driven Blalock westward on a search for Treemont so he could give him the bad news.
Now Treemont was dead, too. Blalock bemoaned the harshness and bitterness of human existence, the blatant unfairness of it all.
The drunk old former sheriff staggered away from Ben and Jedd, out into the center of the street, and turned his eyes upward to the sky, an angry grimace on his face. He raised his fist and shook it.
“It ain’t right, damn it!” he hollered drunkenly. “It just ain’t right that such things happen! You hear me, God? You got no business treating us so mean! You need to stop all that kind of nonsense! You hear me? You need to stop it. I’ve got half a mind to come up there and kick your…your holy…”
Ben looked horrified and stared upward as if expecting a bolt to stab down from the sky and fry Blalock where he stood raging and blaspheming. “He don’t mean it, Lord!” Ben said to the heavens. “He’s just drunk, Lord. That’s all. Everything’s good. We’re fine down here, thanks. Just fine! Oh…and I’m drunk, too. But I reckon you already know that, huh? You being who you are and all that.”
“Good God!” Jedd exclaimed softly, incredulous at all this strange behavior and babble from his companions. Then he flicked his own eyes skyward. “And I mean that in a good way, Lord. Just to make sure we’re clear on that. And please overlook my two partners here…. They know not what they do.”
Then to his companions, he said, “Gentlemen, let’s move on to our lodgings for the night. After many a night in a bedroll on the ground, we’re in for rest on some real beds for a change, and I believe I’m ready.”
They lingered in Santa Fe for enough days that Jedd began looking for the Sadler band to come rolling into town behind them. They did not. Jedd and company moved on.
In Albuquerque, Colter and company found even more comfortable lodgings than they had enjoyed in Santa Fe, and decided to settle in for the winter. There was no particular reason to rush to California as long as they could reach it by the start of the mining season. The three men found basic labor in the town to sustain themselves, Ben working with a grocer, Blalock with a local marshal as a jailer, and Jedd as a clerk in a gun shop. Low-paying work all around, but the men were glad for a change of pace. Ben even cut down on his drinking, though he was far from giving it up. The fact that Albuquerque had fandangos even more frequently than Santa Fe kept Ben around enough liquor to defray any ambition toward teetotalism that might have stricken him from some unexpected fount of inspiration. Not that such was likely to happen in any case.
The winter passed and still the Sadler emigrants did not appear. Jedd considered backtracking to investigate, fearing disaster might have struck them. Knowledge that he had been deliberately severed from that group kept him from doing it.
Also the fact that he found himself worrying about Rachel McCall. Strange that he would be thinking of her, because he didn’t really care about her. Did he?
He was forced to admit to himself that he wasn’t really sure of the answer to that question. It was odd, and unsettling.
The winter dragged on, but when 1850 rolled around, California called all the more clearly. Jedd and his companions traveled between the route generally known as Cooke’s Wagon Road, and the Gila River. They passed the town of Socorro and tracked along the Rio Grande into Mexico, then turned at the Diego crossing and traveled to the Two Buttes. The journey continued from there, along trails beco
ming all the more worn and well known because of the volume of traffic the rush to California had brought to them.
It was April 1850 before the three men reached Los Angeles, and some weeks beyond that before they were in the heart of the gold country.
What had begun as an adventure with a group pledging to set a new record in crossing to California had turned into a long, slow, yearlong journey, and Jedd Colter found himself lacking any ambition to repeat it anytime in the near future.
It had taken him a long time to reach California. Now that he was here, he was inclined to stay awhile. He wished only that Treemont had survived to complete the journey with him.
PART THREE
SCARLETT’S LUCK
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
AUGUST 1850
Rand Blalock was a sheriff again. He still could hardly believe it, but it was true.
Well, not entirely true, old boy, he reminded himself. He wasn’t a full-fledged, authentic sheriff, just a local marshal in a mining camp that was growing into a town, a jurisdiction he could very nearly spit across if the wind was in his favor. And even though his official title was marshal of Scarlett’s Luck, California, he thought of himself and referred to himself as sheriff, and most everyone around him did as well. Including his law enforcement staff, which consisted of a single deputy, Jedediah Colter, who received no pay beyond being allowed by Ben Scarlett to pan out a few flakes of gold for himself on Ben’s claim.
Blalock downed the final swig of his morning coffee and stood. He’d been seated on the edge of his sagging bed, a rough straw tick suspended from a simple frame by rope slats. He staggered forward clumsily across his cabin floor; the pressure of the bed frame against the underside of his thighs had put his legs to sleep. He grimaced as he moved around, suffering from the painful tingle of blood reentering the deprived vessels.
His eyes drifted upward and he shook his head as he eyed the underside of what served inefficiently as a roof for his little log dwelling. It was merely an expanse of canvas spread over a central elevated ridgepole running horizontally down the middle of the cabin, end to end. Blalock had been known to refer to his fabric roof as his “rain strainer.” This little cabin, like many in Scarlett’s Luck, was a relic of the camp’s beginning, the period when prospectors had only just started to swarm in profusely in response to spreading news of the latest discovery of gold. This find had been made in a small creek by one Ben Scarlett, a newcomer from Tennessee. Scarlett, one of the hardest-drinking men around even by mining camp standards, had ridden into the area in company with Rand Blalock and another fellow named Colter. That they had come at all was surprising to some, because Colter and Blalock had presented little evidence of serious mining ambitions. For that matter, neither had Ben Scarlett.
Which was where the “luck” in Scarlett’s Luck came in.
The story of how Ben Scarlett made his find would become part of mining camp lore carried down through the years. Ben had been drunk one afternoon—no surprise there to any who had come to know him—and had been making his way toward a thicket of trees to relieve his bladder when he’d encountered a little creek he’d not even realized was there. Sufficiently intoxicated that the narrow little step-over rill was enough to flummox him, Ben had come to a halt, stood listening for a moment to the liquid flow of the creek, and had wet himself where he stood, drenching himself from crotch to cuffs.
Embarrassed, he’d looked around and mumbled a drunkard’s prayer of thanks that there had been no one nearby to see him shame himself. Then he’d peeled off the wet pants right there on the spot, leaving on his long underwear to retain a modicum of decency. He knelt and washed his outer trousers out in the creek. Then into the water he’d gone, full body, sitting down as if in a bath and letting the running water wash out his urine-soaked underwear as best it could with the garment still on him. He’d pulled his wet pants back on over his equally wet legs, and stumped back to the tent that served as his first California home. The tent had been a gift from Jedd Colter, bought at a premium in a mining supply store. In his tent Ben had stripped down to his shirt, hung his wet garments up to dry inside the tent, and taken a nap.
Upon awakening two hours later, Ben had stumbled over to the entrance of his tent and stepped out into the waning day, having completely forgotten he’d stripped down earlier. He looked around, stretched with elbows cocked out beside him at shoulder level, and yawned broadly and loudly. Then he’d heard a youthful feminine scream and, immediately after, the chiding voice of a man who was running toward him, none too happy.
“Sir! What in blazes are you doing, showing yourself so! My twelve-year-old daughter is down there in that wagon, and this she does not need to see! Cover yourself, man! Have some decency about you!”
Ben looked down and was visually reminded, with horror, of his nakedness. His hands groped downward, covering himself, and he backed into his tent, apologizing profusely. He quickly pulled on his underwear, then scrambled to get his trousers on with equal haste—but abruptly he stopped.
Something was glittering back at him. Yellow flecks caught in the fabric of his pants, throwing back the last remaining rays of sunlight streaming in through his west-facing tent door. Ben’s mind was seldom quick, liquor having slowed it. This time, though, he knew right away what had happened, and that the golden dust caught in the cloth of his pants had to have been trapped there while he was washing the garment clean of urine.
He’d found gold. He, Ben Scarlett, world’s must unprivileged and unlucky man, had become the only man in history to find California gold because he’d peed in his own pants.
In subsequent days, word spread of the new find, as it always did. Ben established his claim, but before long had neighbors all around him. When details of his odd route to success became known, what started out being called Scarlett’s Creek became Scarlett’s Wash, then Scarlett’s Camp, and finally, Scarlett’s Luck.
Ben liked the sound of that. He’d never thought he’d be considered a lucky man. And his luck continued, day by day, as he began to adjust himself to the discipline of kneeling by Scarlett’s Creek and swirling gravel and sediment in his pan. The dirt was kind, and paid. He was steadily gaining wealth, however modestly, for the first time in his life.
In September of 1850, statehood came to California. By that point, Scarlett’s Luck had become an actual town, governed by a board of “mining commissioners” who oversaw much more than mining. As some mining camps were prone to do, Scarlett’s Luck attracted more than its share of undesirables, leading the commissioners to seek an appointed officer to maintain a measure of law and order. When the sheriffing background of Blalock was discovered, he was offered the post, and took it on condition that he be allowed to hire a deputy to assist him. Jedd, who had never sought to work as a lawman, was offered the job and on impulse accepted it.
It was to be a more fateful choice than he could ever have foreseen.
It was by no particular design that so many of the emigrants from the California Enterprise Company of East Tennessee drifted into Scarlett’s Luck and established claims there. In California, news of a new strike drew miners from all over, both newcomers and those well established in other camps. So Scarlett’s Luck gained new residents derived from any number of recently arrived emigrant bands.
Some of the Sadler group who came to the new mining town did not know that the Scarlett whose name had become attached to the place was the same one who had traveled with them. Others knew exactly who he was and came in part because they could not resist seeing with their own eyes how success and good luck would affect the bedraggled drunk with whom they had passed almost all the way across a continent.
Crozier Bellingham was one of the latter variety. He’d heard the story of Ben Scarlett’s undignified way of discovering gold in his little creek, or at least one version of it, and knew he had to learn the full details. This, he knew, would have to find a place in his novel of the gold fields. Probably in a disguised, renamed form, but
still the same story. And he wanted to get it right. He also wanted to see Ben again, and Jedd Colter, who reportedly was living in Scarlett’s Luck as well. There were stories of the Sadler journey as it progressed after Jedd’s departure that Bellingham wished to share. And he wanted to know what had happened to Jedd and his partners on the final leg of the trip. And if it was true that Jedd’s friend Tree Dalton had been killed.
Bellingham had another reason for wanting to go to Scarlett’s Luck as well. Now that the California Enterprise Company of East Tennessee had completed its venture, it was officially inert and inactive, if not fully dissolved. Bellingham’s part, however, was at an end. He’d filed his last report back to the Knoxville newspaper, simply averting his attention, as he’d taught himself to do, while Wilberforce Sadler worked over his report with a censorious and self-serving pencil before allowing it to be posted off to Tennessee. Bellingham had no idea exactly what was being published under his byline once Wilberforce got through with the copy, but he tried not to worry over it. He was gone from Knoxville now and did not anticipate a return. The newspaper reports did not matter. What mattered was his own, Sadler-free project, his planned novel. He already had a title in mind for it: Schuyler’s Luck. Anyone in the know would easily guess from whence that title was derived, but it wouldn’t matter. He would fictionalize it sufficiently to separate his story from the real-life tale of Ben Scarlett and his remarkable stroke of pants-wetting luck.
* * *
Jedd Colter had built his own cabin within sight of Blalock’s, but had taken it a step or two further than Blalock had by riving wooden shingles and putting a real roof on his dwelling. He offered to help Blalock do the same, but the old lawman was prideful and didn’t want to be seen as trying to keep pace with somebody else’s progress. He’d put on a real roof when he was ready; until then, his tent-cloth covering would suffice.
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