“Holy Moses!” I yelled, my apple pie untouched. “I’d bet anything that your Papa heard they were in the gold country and came here looking for them. But what happened to him?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered, a quiver in her voice.
“Now don’t worry,” I said, trying to sound sure of myself. “I’ve got some ideas. Maybe, if Eban will help me, I can find your Pa.” Truthfully I had no ideas, at least nothing I could sink my teeth into, but I didn’t want her bawling again so I’d lied. What did it matter anyway? I’d become an old hand at lying by now.
But she still smiled at me, not real bright but enough to make me think she felt okay about all this. And through the open window I caught a glimpse of the sorrel mare out in front. I turned for a better look. It was Doak Wiggins all right, with Jeremiah hanging on the back—alive.
##
While I lit the last lamp in the dining room I heard the rumble of a freight wagon coming this way. Eban should’ve been home long ago. He’d said he would look into things in Coloma so maybe he’d heard something to add to the story that Lacey recalled this afternoon. I walked out the front door.
Eban waved. “Fix me a plate. I’ll be right back,” he yelled.
“Sure thing,” I watched until the mules turned to the stable, went back inside and walked to the counter.
Lacey looked up from the kitchen table. She had two plates full of hot food ready to go. “Are you hungry?” she asked even though she had to know I was. She’d been real quiet and edgy all afternoon, ever since our talk about K.O. Manuel and his cronies.
“I’m starved,” I said. “Eban will be here soon. We need to fix him some supper too.”
She carried the two meals to the counter and set them down. “I’ll get another one for him. You go ahead and eat,” she said without a trace of sparkle in her voice.
“I’m glad he’s coming. He’s real late. Maybe he found something out in Coloma. But whether he did or not we need to talk,” I muttered and picked up the food.
“Do you think he knows something about my Papa?” she asked.
Her face looked tired and tense. The fear I’d seen the first day we met haunted her eyes again. I knew Eban could easily have bad news about her Pa. She had every right to be afraid. “Don’t worry,” I said matter of fact like. “Eban sounded excited and not stewing over bad news.”
The corners of her mouth edged up a bit, sunnier but heedful. I hoped, for both our sakes, that Eban did have good news. I put the plates on the table and sat, lost in thought about his mood when he’d waved. He did seem eager to get back here and that bode well for good news. All things considered, I just wanted Lacey to be happy. For some reason, when she smiled, it always made me feel on top of the world.
She came in from the kitchen with Eban’s supper and three cups of hot coffee and sat. She kept her head down and didn’t look up at all. It wasn’t like her to be so bashful.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine,” she said, but her head stayed low and her voice sounded glum.
“I don’t believe you,” I shot back. “Look at me.”
“No, I’m fine, honest.” A sniffle, followed by a sob, gave her away. She was crying again and as usual I’d been a total dunce about it.
I wanted to understand why she needed to bawl when things got thorny because it really didn’t make much sense to me. I guess girls cried a lot but I don’t remember Maggie ever turning on the waterfall at the drop of a hat like Lacey was apt to do. “Maybe Eban has some good news,” I offered. “There ain’t no reason to be crying till you know for sure.” It sounded like sure-enough good advice to me.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she began. “I don’t mean to be such a bother but I can’t help it. I’m so worried about my Papa. I miss him a lot. I should’ve heard something about him by now, but it’s like he’s vanished into thin air.” She dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. “I’ll be okay,” she added. “Just give me a little time.”
It seemed like she wanted to buck up and face things so I dug into the potatoes and gravy and quickly took a bite of roast chicken. Lacey had done a great job today. Her cooking tasted out of this world. Almost all the miners who ate here said so. I knew that if her food could make Morton quit his bellyaching and eat it must be special.
The front door opened. The bell dinged. Eban strode in and pitched his straw hat onto a table. “Howdy folks. That chicken sure smells fine.” He pulled out a chair and sat. “I talked to Wimmer at the saw mill,” he went on. “Did you meet him when you were there, Lacey?” He looked into her face for the first time and then put his hand on her arm. “Oh my, do you want to tell old Eban about it, dear?” he said, sounding as gentle as I’d ever heard him.
She stirred her fork around the potatoes and shrugged. “I miss my Papa so much. I’m afraid something horrible happened to him,” she said but didn’t look up.
Eban smiled. “I don’t blame you for missing your Pa, but I wouldn’t write him off just yet. Let me tell you about my talk with Wimmer. He runs the saw mill, you know, and has a finger in most everything that happens around Coloma. Well, not long ago he got word that a government feller would be looking into some varmint that might be in town. Seems like it had to do with something from the war. If the feller needs help Wimmer is supposed to give it to him—anything he wants—and when the feller is done he’ll come by and let Wimmer know. Well, I figure that feller is Webster Lawson and he ain’t let Wimmer know he’s done yet. Lacey, your Pa’s still around.”
Eban looked over at Lacey with a bright smile, sure he’d brought good news for her. She dabbed her eyes again and whispered, “Tell him, Tom.”
“Wait up now,” I pled. “What Eban said sounds like good news to me too.”
“Maybe he’s dead,” she cried. “Maybe that’s why Papa hasn’t talked to Mr. Wimmer.” She looked up, her eyes red, the tears in the corners covering her fear, magnifying it like a spyglass did for things far away.
“Hold on here!” Eban snarled. “Where’s Maggie? She said she’d be working here today?” He turned my way. “What’s going on? What are you supposed to tell me?”
I frowned. After Lacey told me about K.O. Manuel and Mule Hill, I thought we’d latched on to something important, something that would help find her Pa, but in no time flat all her worrying, fretting and crying put a bucket full of doubt in my mind. Now I wasn’t sure about anything. Still, I knew I needed to tell Eban the whole story so I started at the beginning. “I went after Jeremiah this morning, Eban.”
“Jeremiah!” he growled like I knew he would.
“Look Eban a lot happened today and, thanks to Lacey remembering some real important stuff, we have a good idea what’s going on with her Pa. I ain’t sure why she wants to whimper so much about it all ‘cause I think we got a good chance of finding him and maybe pretty darn soon. So why don’t we just have our supper and talk this over serious-like and see if we can come up with a plan?” I hoped to turn everybody’s bad mood back into a good one.
Across the table Lacey stared at me with the same heedful smile she’d had earlier, but Eban suddenly beamed wide and nodded heartily. “That’s a fine idea, Tom. Let’s have supper and meantime you can explain your little visit to Jeremiah Wiggins. And Lacey, you ought to be right grateful that Tom cares about you enough to do what he’s doing to find your Pa.”
Her eyelashes fluttered fast and a hint of white teeth flashed between her lips. “You’re right, Eban, he’s pretty special,” she said and a taste of sweetness crept back into her voice.
Eban started in on his mashed potatoes and gravy while I told him the story of my trip to the Wiggins place, K.O. shooting Jeremiah by the gully and me pulling the wounded Jeremiah from the stream and getting him to Maggie who patched him up. Next Lacey told about K.O. and how he’d told the Mexicans the stuff that led to the battles at San Pasqual and Mule Hill. Afterwards I jumped back in to tie everything together.
All the while Eban sat and ate
but his face burned redder and redder till it shone brighter than the lamps. “That low down rotten sack of . . .” he finally fumed, but stopped short of saying something in front of Lacey he’d regret. “I’ll be back in Coloma tomorrow. Then I’ll dig out that stinking varmint and drub his back-shooting face into the ground.”
I thought steam would shoot from Eban’s ears, but I’d put all this together and got Sunday punched and shot at doing it. No way could anybody leave me out at the finish. “I’m going with you, Eban,” I asserted with a large dollop of grit.
“No you ain’t,” he roared, pounding his fist onto the table. “This is too dangerous for a boy. Maggie would skin me alive if anything happened to you.”
I leaped to my feet, toppling my chair over as I did. “I’m going, Eban,” I yelled. “You can’t stop me. I’m the one that started looking for Lacey’s Pa and I’ll be the one to find him. I don’t care what this K.O. character might do. And I ain’t no boy!” My fists thumped down on the table, knuckles white against the bare wood tabletop.
“You don’t understand,” Eban yelled back, knocking his own chair over as he jumped up and faced me nose to nose. “This ain’t no man we’re after, it’s the devil himself. I seen him once in San Francisco, back when they still called it Yerba Buena. He beat a Mexican feller within an inch of his life, would’ve killed him if folks hadn’t pulled him off. He loved it. He wanted to kill him. He enjoyed it.”
“I don’t care,” I bellowed. “I’m going and that’s that!”
“Stop it! Both of you stop it!!” Lacey screamed and sprang to her feet. “I don’t want anybody to go. I don’t want either of you hurt.” Then she kicked at her chair and it too clattered to the floor. “It’s my fault. I never should have come here!” she wailed and rushed out through the front door, slamming it so hard it bounced right back open again.
I wanted to kick myself. It seemed the more I tried to help Lacey the more trouble I got into with her. Eban had a sheepish look across his face, like he felt the same way. But here we were, eyeball to eyeball, two great friends yelling at each other like cats in the barn. Plus I could hear Lacey sobbing her eyes out from in front of the cafe and I felt awful about it.
I yanked my chair off the floor and sat down, elbows on the table, face in my fists. Then I felt Eban’s hand on my shoulder and looked up at him.
“I’m sorry I hollered at you, son,” he said softly. “I shouldn’t have. It’s just that so many good men died at San Pasqual, and now this. It’s something I thought was buried in the past,” he added, his tone real easy, like he usually talked.
“Yeah, I’m sorry too,” I mumbled, not able to understand why when I try so hard to do the right thing sometimes it turns out so wrong. I didn’t understand at all.
Eban picked up his chair and sat. “Did you get a chance to talk to Jeremiah while you brought him to Maggie?”
“No, he was in rough shape and I worried more about him cashing his chips in, but I think there’s a pile of stuff he could tell me, if he’s willing.”
“All right, how about you go down to the Wiggins place in the morning and see what you can pry out of him. After all, it sounds like you saved his life. I reckon he owes you. His Pa, Doak Wiggins, is a good man. He ain’t going to let nothing bad happen to you at his house. You’ll be safe there. Then you can catch up with me on the Coloma Road. We’ll see if we can dig up Webster Lawson without stepping on any rattlesnakes. How does that sound?”
I gave him a wish-I-hadn’t-done-it grimace. “That sounds great, Eban.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Now I’d better go out and talk to Lacey. She’s young and under a big strain for a girl her age. She’s got a lot of spunk though. She’ll be fine, but I’ll walk her up to the cabin so you can get some sleep. Tomorrow might be a long day.”
6
When Rojo and I rode out of the stable I saw her racing down the hill from the cabin, her yellow dress flapping as she ran.
“Tom, wait for me,” she yelled.
I turned Rojo toward the bridge and leaped to the ground. She dashed across. I was glad to see her. After she ran out of the dining room last night, crying and yelling, I wasn’t sure if she cared about me anymore. But straightaway I realized that she was coming fast and not about to stop. She bounced into me like an out-of-control boulder rolling downhill would run into a tree. I barely kept from toppling over.
She threw her arms around me. “Oh Tom, I couldn’t let you go without seeing you,” she whispered, her breath hot on my cheek.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I dropped Rojo’s reins, wrapped my own arms around her and pulled her tight against my chest.
She kissed me full on the mouth and scrunched her body into mine. My breath came quick and so did that lump in my pants. I thought about the cot back at the cafe and how great it would be if we went there right now. But instead I put my hands on her shoulders and pushed her back. “I’ve got to go,” I said softly.
She nodded, and I could see the sparkle of tears in her eyes but she wasn’t blubbering or bawling like last night. “You come back to me, Tom Marsh. You hear?” Her lower lip twitched but her words had force. She meant what she said.
I kissed her again, then reached behind me and grabbed the reins. “Wait for me. I won’t be long. I promise.” I spun around, hopped on Rojo, gave him a kick and tore down the street. Just past the cafe I looked over my shoulder. She stood right where I’d left her, her eyes locked on me. I yanked off the sombrero and waved. She waved back, hopping up and down, her arm swinging wildly back and forth.
I let Rojo gallop all the way through town and didn’t slow him until the trail turned. Here the gully sat too close to the road and seemed way too deep to chance taking the curve that fast. But I hankered something awful to talk with Jeremiah Wiggins, maybe get some answers from him and make my way to Coloma as quick as I could. Today might be the biggest day of my life and my whole body tingled with excitement.
Maggie said that Jeremiah had been lucky. The gunshot hadn’t hit anything important and she thought that bouncing down the side of the gully had done near as much damage to him as the wound. He’d lost a lot of blood though and that would keep him off his feed for a while. I sure hoped Jeremiah would be willing to talk about K.O. Manuel and his cohorts now that I’d saved his bacon.
The gully flattened out to my right and a new group of men stood around the same sluice box that I saw last time I passed, but these guys looked like fresh-off-the-boat easterners, not the Chinamen who’d been here before. Those men had been working hard, jabbering wildly at each other like folks do when they’d found gold. But the new guys mostly just drank. I thought back on Morton talking about how folks got run off good paying claims and wondered if that’s what had happened to the Chinamen who’d worked here yesterday.
I’d find Doak Wiggins’ place up ahead so I rode on. No one stood in the creek where I’d seen Jed yesterday but he’d yelled downstream for his Pa so I kept going till I saw the sorrel grazing on the far side of the water, a rough log shanty with a sod roof behind her. I turned Rojo and splashed across Hangtown Creek.
When I got close I stopped and yelled loud. “Hello, anybody home?”
“Keep your hands in front. I got a bead right down your gut.” Whoever said it had a low, smooth voice that pleased the ear, though he still sounded old and ornery like Morton. But people pointing guns at me day in and day out sure got tiresome fast.
“Doak Wiggins?” I waited a bit but got no answer. “I’m Tom Marsh.” I added. “I don’t mean you no harm but I got to talk to Jeremiah. It’s important.”
“Jeremiah ain’t of a mind to talk to you. Ride on.” The deep voice boomed out from the west side of the shack.
“Maggie said Jeremiah would have bled to death real quick if I hadn’t got to him when I did. I saved his life, Wiggins. Now he owes me. A lot more good people are in danger from the polecats Jeremiah worked with. How about it?”
“He tells me you was lying
when you said some guy in a red shirt did the shooting. He says you shot him ‘cause of a girl you two fought over Sunday.”
I had to get Doak Wiggins to understand things and pretty darn fast so I reckoned to tell him what I knew. “The man in the red shirt is called K.O. Manuel. Him, Reid Harrison and Frank Barney sold out Kearny’s Army of the West to the Mexicans down south at San Pasqual and Mule Hill, and that got a lot of good men killed. Now they’re up here bilking hardworking miners out of their claims and selling the fresh-off-the-boat guys a bill of goods. They’ve already killed three men in Coloma. There’s an army man hunting for them. I‘m out to find him. Things would go better for Jeremiah if he’d help me.”
“You ain’t no lawman. What can you do?” Doak barked.
“I’m looking for the army guy right now. I’ll tell him what I found out and how Jeremiah helped. That ought to mean something.”
“What makes you think Jeremiah knows anything about folks getting killed all the way over to Coloma? He told me he ain’t even heard nothing about any of it.”
It sounded like Doak Wiggins’ deep voice had softened up some so I pushed him harder. “Maybe he don’t, but why not let him tell me that?”
A big, black crow squawked from a tall pine across the creek, but Doak stayed quiet, hopefully mulling things over. At last he spoke, “You give your word you won’t kill him?”
I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t believe Doak thought I would come here to hurt Jeremiah after I’d saved his life yesterday. But I remembered how yesterday I’d planned on shooting Jeremiah if I had to. Maybe Doak had a point. “I swear. I only want to talk. You can listen in if you’re worried,” I said.
Doak didn’t make me wait long. “Leave your horse where he is. Come in slow.”
“You might help a lot of folks, Mr. Wiggins,” I said and slid from Rojo careful so I wouldn’t give Doak any excuse to shoot. I made sure to hold my hands in plain sight all the while I walked toward the shack. When I got a few feet away he stepped out wearing a beat up straw hat, a mud splattered plaid shirt and holding a battered flintlock rifle in his left hand. I stopped and Doak looked me over real careful before he waved for me to follow him.
Into the face of the devil: A love story from the California gold rush Page 9
