GOLD RUSH DREAM

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  He was almost too eager to make it right. He was afraid for a minute he would ruin everything due to his over-excitement. Rose drew back from his mouth and brought her hands to his cheeks, smoothing his skin and looking into his eyes.

  He felt himself calm a little. He pulled off his clothes and carefully untied the top of Rose’s slip so he could draw it over her head. By the time he entered her, he was confident he could last long enough to satisfy them both.

  It was the sweetest lovemaking they had ever done, he thought afterwards. It was like a dream it was so perfect. He lay on his back, sleep pulling at his eyelids. Rose dressed again so she wouldn’t freeze in the cold night. She cuddled beneath his out-flung arm, hugging the blankets close around them.

  He had his Rose back. She was not so damaged that she could not love him again. He thought he would burst with joy and he wanted to relish it, but sleep dragged him down into slumber so deep it was as if he had died.

  #

  Rose pressed her firm little belly against Travis’s side and wrapped one arm across his chest. He was asleep within minutes. She smiled into the dark, happy for the first time in a very long time. It had been a dark journey back from the days she’d spent as a captive to this night in Travis’s arms. She had blocked out the events that had followed her abduction. She didn’t want to relive them. In the place of those horrid memories, she kept to the locked room in her mind where there was silence and safety. She could see Travis and everything around her, but she wasn’t really a part of his world. She ate if he gave her food, she drank when offered water, but if Travis didn’t come to her to move her in some way, she sat quietly and waited. It had been as if she didn’t know what else to do. Decisions were beyond her ability.

  She did not know what she waited for. Perhaps it was for distance from the trauma or she waited for healing or she waited for a sign it was all right to come out of hiding.

  It was the woman Beth who had brought her all the way out and into the world again. Beth sat with her while Travis and Horace talked at the campfire. Beth brought her a cup of soup made from gathered greens and tubers. It tasted vile, but Beth told her it would make her strong and help her baby.

  “I don’t know what happened to you, hon, but I don’t think it was something your husband done to you. He seems like a mighty nice fellow. Whatever happened, it had to be bad, though, I can tell that. If you want to talk about it, we can do that. If you don’t, that’s fine, too. I just wanted you to know that it would be better for your baby if you work a little bit to get yourself well. Babies need our full attention, you know. Having one ain’t scary or anything like that, but it does require a big effort. You want to do right by your baby, don’t you?”

  Rose raised her head from the cup of green soup and looked in the other woman’s eyes. She was old enough to be her mother. She had children of her own and knew these things. “I…I wasn’t sure I was going to have a baby. And I can…I can hurt it?”

  Beth smiled indulgently. “You’re definitely going to have a baby. And you might, might not hurt it, but what I’m saying is it’s going to need you right here, right now, wide awake. It don’t come out all by itself and it sure can’t survive with a mother don’t pay it no attention.”

  “I don’t want to hurt my baby.”

  “No, I’m sure you don’t. You’re a real pretty girl and sweet, too, I can tell that. You’ll make a good mama, but not if you don’t get hold of yourself. Men don’t know what it takes to raise up a child. They don’t generally have to raise them so they don’t know how your mind’s got to be on that baby every minute. There are so many accidents, so many dangers. They’re so helpless. You understand? Men can’t watch them like we do. Your baby’s going to need you.”

  Rose finished the soup and even slurped the stringy greens in the bottom of the cup, swallowing with a grimace. “That’s good,” Beth said. “One more cup in the morning and you’ll be right as rain.”

  Once Beth left her she sat thinking about the outside world like she hadn’t done in weeks. It was safe in the room in her mind, but it was lonely there, too, and now she saw it was selfish to stay apart and disconnected. Travis needed her and soon the baby would. She had never been needed before. She had never had a duty as important as this one.

  She spread both her hands over her belly and rubbed it lovingly. Something alive was inside her, growing. She had known that, really, but the other woman had made it official. The little being inside her had a tiny face and arms and legs. It would suckle at her breasts and grow up one day to look like Travis or her. It did not belong to her abductor. It just couldn’t. The baby came from love, not lust, from caring, not shame. She just knew it.

  She looked at the fire and saw Travis, his back to her. He had been so patient. He knew she had been defiled and still he loved her. He showed his love in every gesture, every word. She couldn’t deny him any longer. She couldn’t deny herself. She might be scarred in mind and body, but she was not dead, and now she was expecting a baby. Beth was right, it was all up to her.

  It was as if she took the door in her mind with both hands and wrenched it open. She had merely peeked out a crack to talk with Beth and now she had to get it open all the way and walk out with her head high.

  The world was not safe, that is what she had to face. It would never be completely safe. Horrible things had happened to her, but they had happened to other people, too. She was not so special that she had a right to turn her back on living. She was one more cog in the machine of the world. She would grind forward one day at a time and the world would continue to spin.

  She stood, taking stock. She felt so grateful to Beth. At the tent entrance, she crawled in and, while on her knees, took off her dress and pulled off her boy’s pants. She had slept in her clothes every night unless they had been washed and were wet. Tonight she would undress voluntarily. She hoped Travis still wanted her after so long being turned away.

  She owed it to him. To the baby. Most of all, as Beth had pointed out, she owed it to herself.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The last two hundred miles of their journey seemed the longest stretch of all. They had left Horace and his family behind the first day, riding ahead toward the setting of the sun. The going was slow, due to Rose’s condition, and because of the terrain. They had to cross through a thick, virgin forest full of hills and ravines. Vines and brambles clutched at their legs and arms as they made their way through thickly grown trees. The forest floor was littered with fallen limbs and rotten trees, sudden rapid streams they must cross, and at one point the brambles were so thick it was like trying to move through a tangled fence Nature had thrust in their way.

  Once through the forest, the land opened up into dry desert filled with hump-backed mountains, though they were nothing compared to the mountains they’d already crossed in Colorado. These mountains were seared brown this time of year, filled with dry brush and loose rock and shale that made the horses slip and stumble.

  The sun here was weak this time of year and the sky was gray, threatening rain. Travis had to admit he was worn from the long journey. The only thing that kept him going was the thought of getting Rose to a town. She needed to see a doctor to make sure she was all right. Even now she periodically ran a fever. It would go away and she’d brighten, talking with him a little as they plodded over the brown mountains. Then the fever returned and her cheeks filled with a worrying blush. She would hang her head and let the horse be led by Travis who held the reins.

  At nights she seemed so tired she couldn’t sit up. Often she crawled into the tent before he even had something for them to eat. The food he’d taken from Whitley’s cabin was running out so he often had to stop early and leave Rose alone while he hunted some small wild game for their supper. He never went far from the camp, keeping it in sight. He had learned his lesson. The savage had killed Whitley, so he was still alive and out there somewhere. He wondered if the Indian would follow them all the way to the gold fields. It would not
surprise him in the least. Already the savage had traveled clear across the country on their heels.

  Twenty-two days after camping with Horace, Travis began to see signs of human habitation. The trail was littered with sign, from discarded felt hats to a harpsichord that lay in a ditch alongside the trail. People began to show up, too. Some passed in the opposite direction with tales of woe from their adventure west. A few bedraggled groups joined them from the south and the north, heading toward Sacramento.

  Now at nights Travis and Rose entertained company. After being alone so many months, it seemed odd to see so many people.

  Sometimes they met a loner who had left the gold fields. One was a man in his late thirties who was returning east to his home and family having invested all his savings to strike gold and had gone bust. Another encounter was with three men traveling together, sullen about the bad luck they’d encountered. Though it was the wrong time of year to head east again, the men claimed they would spend the winter hunting in the mountains rather than try to live in Sacramento where they could no longer afford anything. Many claimed to have lost their stakes and were forced to sell all their equipment to survive.

  The travelers going to Sacramento were of a happier nature, longing for their own gold strike, hoping to be rich, but they were as weary as Travis. Some had come as far or farther than Galveston, and had seen comrades die along the way. One traveler spoke of an avalanche that buried four of his sojourners. Another lost his son in a flooding river. This route wasn’t meant for the wagon trains so there were no families, but the trail was full of men going in both directions, east and west. One of the travelers let Travis buy a little coffee. Supper that night was fragrant with the beautiful scent of boiled coffee and Travis drank so much he couldn’t sleep.

  Fidgety and sleepless, Travis told Rose, “It sounds like it’s a hard thing to find gold out here.”

  Rose didn’t appear to be worried. “My uncle wouldn’t have come if he didn’t think he’d succeed. I bet he’s one that’s found gold.”

  “Maybe.” Travis wondered what he’d do to provide for Rose and the baby if he couldn’t find enough gold. The thought of turning around and trying to go all the way across the country again, his tail between his legs, made him sick to his stomach. And he was no shopkeeper. He didn’t know all that much about totaling sums and making change. From the stories he heard it seemed to him there were only two kinds of work in the golden west—hunting for gold and selling supplies to the gold diggers.

  Soon the land began to rise, one rolling hill leading up to another until they seemed to be on a stretch of land that was much higher than where they’d been days before. Trees began to show up, first just a few tall pines and evergreens. Then the tree stand thickened and spread over the mountains until it became a veritable forest.

  “It looks like we go through this to get to the city,” Travis said. There was a plain path through the trees that had obviously been used for a long time.

  “I think I smell water,” Rose said, smiling. Her fever had gone for good, but she was much too thin, her belly a strange protrusion that billowed her skirts. She now had to hitch up her shirtdress so the waist rode below her breasts in order to accommodate her growing mid-section.

  Travis sniffed the air, but he couldn’t smell anything other than horse sweat and leather.

  ”It’s like Galveston,” Rose said. “Sacramento’s a port, isn’t it?”

  “Well, not exactly, not on the ocean. It has a big river through it that empties into a bay that leads to the ocean, they say. That’s how they get ships full of people and goods in there.”

  Some hours later there was evidence the forest had been thinned, stumps showing clearings where people had put up temporary shelters and tiny cabins. Travis heard a dog barking and knew they were leaving the wilderness behind. In one clearing he saw children playing barefooted and a woman hanging clothes on a line tied between two standing trees. She waved at them and Travis waved back, happy to see the beginnings of civilization.

  Next they saw a field that lay dormant for the winter, but stubs of corn stalks marched in long rows across it toward the woods’ edge. Just past the field they passed a huge paddock where many head of cattle stood around swatting flies with their long tails.

  The city came into sight suddenly once they rode over a rise. It lay before them like a jumbled mass—buildings made of white limestone, hastily constructed wooden buildings, tents, board sidewalks, and more people than Travis had ever seen in one place in his life. Even the busy port of Galveston, Texas hadn’t afforded a scene such as this. It looked like utter chaos. The town had been hacked out of a forest. It looked as if it were a collection of dun-colored blocks that had been plunked down into place by a giant. The streets were laid out in a grid, but the building of the town was haphazard in every other way. Next to a huge stone building stood a ramshackle wooden structure, and next to that were a series of large tents obviously used for commerce. Everywhere he looked, Travis was amazed.

  “Oh my,” Rose breathed. They sat on their horses at the rise of the hill and looked down on the spectacle. They could see the big river snaking through the town. It was clogged with ships and sails. People moved like ants unloading crates along the crowded wharves. Wagons stood everywhere and horses nervously nodded in their traces. Now and then there was a gunshot that made both Travis and Rose flinch in their saddles.

  “How will we ever find them?” Rose asked, meaning her aunt and uncle.

  “I have no idea.”

  “They can’t be in this place,” she said.

  “Isn’t this where they said they’d be? In that letter?”

  Rose had brought the letter along with her, secreting it safely in her saddlebags. “I thought some—somewhere near Sacramento, they said.” She moved uneasily in the saddle, putting a hand to the small of her back. “But…” She stretched out her hand at the sight of the chaotic, bustling city and then let her hand fall. “How can we ever find them in that?”

  #

  That was the problem. The city was so packed with people—rich, poor, ragged, and sublime---that Travis didn’t know where to begin the search. Once inside Sacramento it was as if they’d been dropped into a hell on earth. It was even worse than when seen from a distance.

  It stunk of smoke from the many chimneys, excrement in the streets from the many animals, and of uncollected refuse. Often they couldn’t even walk on the board sidewalks it was so crowded. Many times they were forced into the street where wagons and horses raced. A pickpocket got his hand in Travis’s front pants pocket, but Travis felt it and grabbed the other man by the collar. He looked the pickpocket in the eye and said, “You’re about to lose a hand, friend.”

  When he let him go, the man scuttled off into the crowd and disappeared. Hawkers sold all manner of things from carts set up in the streets. Sausages browned over a bucket of coals, raw sides of beef hanging from a rack and blown by flies, bolts of imported cloth, candies, and all sorts of miners’ equipment. There were pick axes, metal pans for panning gold, tarps, shovels, stacks of wood for building sieving contraptions, nails, hammers, sheets of tin, barrels of soap bars and hickory nuts and brine pickles.

  It was an assault on the senses that made Travis a little dizzy. He didn’t know where to start. Maybe he had enough money left to get them a room. He inquired at one hotel and found they were charging a month’s wage. He was outraged and said so, but the hotel clerk merely shrugged and said, “Go get a place in one of the tent cities then, I don’t care.”

  “I’ve got a pregnant wife, what’s wrong with you?” Travis asked.

  “It’s not my job to worry about that,” he said haughtily. “I’d have to say, sir, that your wife is your problem.”

  Travis hustled Rose out of the lobby. They stood in front of the hotel jostled by pedestrians.

  Even the tent hotels cost too much, they were soon to discover. Travis shook his head in consternation. He bought two potatoes baked in coals fro
m a vendor and finally found a quieter boardwalk leading west of the town where they could sit down. While they ate, ravenous for the root vegetable as they hadn’t had one in months, Travis said, “We’ll have to head back out of town and set up our own tent. We can’t afford to stay here.”

  “That’s all right,” Rose said. “I like being alone with you better anyway.”

  “You could have used a bed for a change. It would have done us both a world of good.”

  With her mouth full of potato Rose said, “Don’t have to have a bed. Didn’t have to have one all this time, I don’t know if I’d even like it now.”

  Travis wanted to tell her she was the most courageous woman he’d ever known, the most resilient and wonderful, but he was too worried to voice the compliment. The two potatoes had cost him almost half the money he had left and he just didn’t know how these people lived with things costing so much. They had to be finding gold or no one could afford to eat here, much less stay in town any length of time.

  “I have to tell you, I don’t like this town,” Travis said. He’d finished his meal and now sat with his hands hanging between his knees. He saw his pants needed patching and they needed thorough washing. He knew his hair was long and tangled, and he needed a shave. His face itched all the time from the beard. He must look like a tramp, he thought, and indeed in this place that is what he was. He was poor, unemployed, and he had no gold mine or even the hope of one. He owned no equipment and didn’t know thing one about panning for gold. He’d heard the most successful miners made sluices and dammed off the rivers so they could force the water to drop flakes and nuggets of gold. But he did not know how to build a sluice or how to go about making a claim on a river. If they didn’t find Rose’s people, the two of them were going to be in very big trouble in a very short time.