Silver

by Graham Masterton

  ‘How much?’ Henry asked him, irritably.

  Mr Seforim walked around the open trunks, stared at with unashamed interest by two local loafers in large Mormon hats, and a cluster of four or five small boys. There was no better sport on Third and Quick than to watch an emigrant being obliged to take whatever price Mr Seforim felt like offering. In a country where hand-carved bureaux were left by the side of the trail for anybody to pick up, a pawnbroker could name his own price.

  ‘Twenty-five dollars, all three trunks, and everything in them,’ Mr Seforim suggested.

  ‘Twenty-five dollars?’ Henry exclaimed. ‘The tools alone cost me three times that.’

  ‘It’s the best I can do. You want me to cut my own throat? What have you got here, hammers, a few shirts, you’re lucky I’m even prepared to look at it.’

  ‘Forty,’ said Henry, belligerently.

  Mr Seforim linked his hands behind his back, and tightened his mouth, and shook his head.

  ‘Thirty-five,’ Henry suggested. Again, Mr Seforim shook his head.

  ‘Thirty, and that’s as low as I go,’ said Henry.

  There was a long silence. Mr Seforim prowled around the trunks, lifting out coats and stretching suspenders, but Henry knew that they had a deal. Mr Seforim had probably been prepared to pay thirty right from the very beginning, if not more. But Henry needed money far more urgently than Mr Seforim needed stonemason’s tools, and spare collars, and a portable rosewood writing-desk with a dried-up inkwell. Back in Bennington, before he had left, Henry had imagined writing out invoices on that writing-desk. To: one monument block, polished and traced on the face, with fine-hammered apex cap and curved undercut; bottom base rock-faced except for fine-hammered wash bevels, $51.25. Now he was accepting less for all of his tools and all of his possessions than the price of an ordinary family memorial.

  ‘All right, because you look honest, thirty,’ said Mr Seforim.

  ‘I’ll come back for them,’ Henry promised.

  ‘Surely you will,’ nodded Mr Seforim. ‘They all say that. It’s a good thing for me that I don’t hold my breath, waiting for them.’

  Henry took the money and went to the Criterion Lunch-Rooms for a pot-pie and an Indian pudding, a meal that left him with only $28.42, but with his morale considerably improved. He still had to pay off Mrs Newell at the Pottawattamie, but he considered that it was more important to find Edward McLowery first, and see how much it would cost him to be guided over the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada.

  He found Edward McLowery sitting asleep in the back of Wonderling’s, the printers, his gaping brown leather boots parked on a table, his arms spread to either side, as if he were dreaming of being crucified; his eyes closed, and his mouth wide open. He was thin and rangy, with a thick auburn beard, and a sharp nose that could have punched holes in newspaper. He was snoring loudly; but his snoring was drowned out by the clatter of a printing-press, which was turning out posters advertising Leland’s Grand Sale, Come One, Come All.

  ‘Edward McLowery?’ Henry shouted, and the printer jerked a thumb towards the sleep-martyred figure behind the table, and grinned, as if he were used to people walking in and asking for Mr McLowery, and causing trouble, too. Even when he was asleep, Edward McLowery looked like the kind of a man who might give the world some difficulty. Henry skirted the printing-press and laid a hand on Edward McLowery’s shoulder, and yelled hoarsely, ‘Mr McLowery!’

  Edward McLowery opened his eyes, startled, and his feet dropped down from the table on which he had been resting them. ‘Who the dang hell are you?’ he demanded. ‘Dang it, I was asleep there, and having dreams. Dreamed I was walking by the Navasota River with a lady called Philippa Paul. Now, dang it. I haven’t seen that lady in thirty years, and you’ve spoiled it all. My great reunification.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry,’ said Henry. ‘But my name’s Henry Roberts; and I was told that you were a guide, and that you could take me to California, if the price were right.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t do any of that guiding no more,’ said Edward McLowery, shaking his head, and sniffing. ‘I haven’t taken anybody to California for three years now, not since the winter of ’57, and I wouldn’t do it never no more, not me. I just can’t stand to see them womenfolk thirsty and suffering and almost giving up hope, and those children so bored they almost go crazy. I saw a ten-year-old boy stick a broom-handle into a waggon-wheel once, on account of something to do; and of course what happened was there was three spokes busted, and no lumber for two hundred miles, so all they could do was saw the legs off of the best dining-room table, instead of spokes. I sometimes wonder whether that kid ever lived to see eleven.’

  ‘I haven’t come on behalf of a waggon-train,’ said Henry. ‘I’ve come for myself. Me, just me, that’s all. I want to go west.’

  Edward McLowery tugged at his beard and twisted strands of it around his fingers. ‘You?’ he demanded. ‘You mean, you and nobody else. No friends, no partners, no hangers-on? Just you, going off to California by yourself? No bride?’

  ‘No bride,’ Henry assured him.

  ‘Well, I’ll be,’ said Edward McLowery. ‘A man without ties. You know what they say about a man with no ties, don’t you?’

  ‘I have a strong suspicion you’re going to tell me, even if I do know.’

  Edward McLowery leaned forward and stared Henry directly in the eyes. ‘I see a man that don’t got ties; I seen a privy that don’t got flies.’

  ‘You mean you don’t believe me?’

  ‘Course I mean I don’t believe you. How far do you want to go?’

  ‘Sutter’s Fort would do me.’

  ‘Sutter’s Fort, hey? Just yourself? How much baggage?’

  ‘What you see is what there is.’

  ‘Well,’ said Edward McLowery. ‘There has to be some baggage. A man has to eat once in a while, and wet his whistle from time to time. If you was thinking about you, and me, travelling east by mule—is that what you was thinking?’

  Henry nodded.

  ‘In that case,’ said Edward McLowery, ‘we’d have to take five mules minimum, along with flour and bacon and coffee and corn-meal; as well as a spider to cook in and a couple of plates to eat off of; and blankets, and ground-cloths, and lanterns; and a couple of reasonable rifles, plus powder-and-shot. .And that’s just supposing I wanted to do it, which I don’t much.’

  ‘What would you charge?’ asked Henry.

  Edward McLowery counted on his fingers, working out how many days it would take them to follow the Platte River westwards, across the plains of Nebraska, passing the landmarks that had already become familiar to nearly half a million emigrants: the severe bulk of Court House Rock; the strange attenuated spire of Chimney Rock, and the city-like peaks of Scott’s Bluff, beneath which herds of buffalo ran. And still ahead of them, the Rocky Mountains, and the Great Salt Lake, and the winding passes through the Sierra Nevada. A strange, magnificent, formidable journey; along whose route scores of children and mothers and hopeful fathers had been buried, as they searched for Eden.

  ‘Well,’ said Edward McLowery, ‘one hundred and twelve dollars should do it. And we could split whatever we got for the mules, once we got to Sutter’s Fort.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Henry, ‘that’s far too much.’

  ‘You won’t find cheaper,’ Edward McLowery told him, reaching his hand inside the back of his shirt, and scratching his back. ‘Well, you might find cheaper, but you wouldn’t find your same guarantee of getting there, alive and fit and still smiling. I’ve known of guides take money, and then strangle their customers, once they were out on the prairie, and bury them under the sod, and who’s to know? Very much cheaper, that kind of a guide. But for one hundred and twelve dollars, I’ll take you personal to Sutter’s Fort, and hand you over with a smile.’ He smiled, to show what kind of a smile it would be.

  ‘Well,’ said Henry, hesitantly.

  Edward McLowery stood up. He was almost the same height as Henry, but incredibly
thin, so that Henry could have slid his arm in between his pants-suspenders and his concave stomach, without touching anything but thin air. He had a fleshy nose with two dark near-together eyes buried at either side of it, and wide lips, unnaturally red; and the usual frontier beard, all scraggle and curls and unkempt wisps, decorated with breakfast. He walked with a slight hopping limp, as if he had a chip of gravel in his boot which he couldn’t be bothered to take out.

  ‘You could make it on your own, I guess,’ he told Henry, quite affably. ‘There’s plenty of guidebooks, to tell you the way. The National Waggon Road Guide, for instance. All I can say is, keep riding west until you get to Fort Bridger, then take the left-hand fork. If you take the right-hand fork, you wind up in Oregon Territory; which is fine in its way if you was intending to go there.’

  Henry said, ‘I have about twenty-five dollars.’

  ‘Well, if I was you, son, I’d spend it on booze and women, and a return ticket to wherever it was you come from.’

  ‘Listen, I have something else,’ said Henry. ‘Not only twenty-five dollars; but I own a gold-mine in Colorado.’

  Edward McLowery squinted at him. ‘If you own a gold-mine in Colorado, and it’s any good, how come you’ve only got twenty-five dollars?’

  Henry said, ‘Let’s go outside and talk about it. It’s too noisy in here. Why don’t you come across the street and have a drink?’

  Edward McLowery scratched at his beard. ‘That don’t sound like a threatening idea.’

  They crossed the sunlit street to the Cheerful Times Saloon, a dark long mahogany-panelled bar with sawdust sprinkled on the floor and rows of stools and spittoons. On the wall behind the bar was a florid painting of a fat naked woman, protecting her modesty with a fanned-out deck of cards. The title of the painting was ‘Make Your Play’. Edward McLowery gave the barman an auction-bidder’s wink, and the barman produced a bottle of unlabelled whiskey and two glasses. ‘Dollar-ten,’ he remarked, to nobody in particular, and Henry laid the money on the counter.

  ‘Now what about this what you was talking about?’ asked Edward McLowery, discreetly not mentioning the word ‘gold-mine’ on account of the three rough fellows standing close behind him, wreathed in blue tobacco smoke and talking in loud voices about the Saint Susanna steam-boat, and how she had run aground at Horseshoe Lake, and how her complement of harlots on their way to Sioux City had been obliged to lift their dresses up to their waists and wade through the mud in their bloomers.

  ‘It was a fine sight,’ one of them wheezed. ‘Enough to lift a man’s soul, and other parts of him besides.’

  Henry and Edward McLowery sat down at a corner table, and Henry said, ‘I won the deeds to a gold-mine in California Gulch in a card game, in New York.’ He thought it better not to tell Edward McLowery that he had been obliged to take them by a party of outraged Southerners. ‘They’re in here,’ he said, patting his breast pocket. ‘They’re genuine, just as far as I know; and if you take me to California, they’re yours.’

  ‘Why would you want to give me a gold-mine, just for taking you to California? I mean, I charge a high rate, but not that high.’

  ‘Because I want to get to California, and because I don’t particularly want to be a miner, not for gold nor for anything else.’

  ‘Let’s lay an eyeball or two on them deeds.’

  Henry slipped the papers across the table, and Edward McLowery picked them up and scrutinized them, his head held back to compensate for chronic long-sightedness. After a while, he sniffed, and said, ‘They look like the real article, don’t they? Hard to tell, of course, less’n I see the mine.’

  ‘I haven’t even seen it myself,’ said Henry.

  ‘Well, then, I’ve got a suggestion to make,’ Edward McLowery replied, leaning forward with his bony elbows on the table. ‘Supposing you pay me twenty-five dollars to take you to California Gulch, so that we can take a look at this mine of yours; and then, if it’s any good at all, you can transfer the deeds to me, good and legal, and then I’ll take you on to Sutter’s Fort, and we’ll call it a fair day’s work, fairly done.’

  Henry sipped his whiskey. It was fierce and fiery; home-distilled; and flavoured with too much caramel. He knew that he was taking a risk, offering Edward McLowery the deeds to Alby Monihan’s mine. He didn’t believe more than three per cent that the mine was genuine; or that, even if it were, there was any gold to be found in it. But how else was he going to get out to California? A waggon-train wouldn’t take him, not with only twenty-five dollars; and twenty-five dollars was scarcely enough to buy himself a mule and a side of bacon and a couple of sacks of corn-meal. And he would certainly need a rifle if he went on his own; there were still plenty of disgruntled Sioux and Cheyenne Indians on the trail across the plains, quite apart from bears and wolves in the mountains.

  Well, he thought, even if the mine turns out to be barren, McLowery can’t do very much about it. He doesn’t look the kind who would shoot me, if all he got was twenty-five dollars and a wasted journey out to California Gulch. And I would get as far as Denver, at least; and that was part of the way.

  ‘I don’t reckon that we’ll manage to get to Sutter’s Fort till spring,’ said Edward McLowery. ‘By the time we get to California Gulch and take a look at that mine, we’ll be running too late to beat the winter snows in the Rockies arid the High Sierras, and I got the feeling in my water they’re going to be early this year. But you don’t mind a year, here and there, do you? I mean, you’re not in any foot-burning rush, are you?’

  Henry sat back, and finished the last of his whiskey. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I am, any more.’

  Six

  They took the ferry across the Missouri to Omaha on the last day of August, 1860, which was a Friday; and overcast, and very sultry. They stood under the awning on the hurricane deck, watching the coffee-brown river churn beneath them. Their four mules were tethered on the main deck below, already loaded up with all their supplies. Two of the mules were bought; the other two were borrowed, with a promise of payment if they expired on the way, or had to be eaten. Their provisions were minimal: bacon, flour, sugar, and tea, although Edward McLowery had taken the trouble to bring a stone flagon of Taos Lightning, which was a distillation of wheat made in the pueblos of New Mexico, and which was guaranteed to provide ‘instant obliviousness, within a minute of first drinking’. Others thought differently of it: there was a toast which ran, ‘Here’s to the good things that come out of Taos, but its whiskey it ain’t worth three skips of a louse.’

  There were scarcely any emigrant parties starting off west this late in the year. All of the larger waggon-trains had already left in mid-May; and the few straggling groups of emigrants who were leaving Omaha now would have to keep up a relentlessly tight schedule if they were to have any hope of reaching the mountain passes before the snows set in.

  Omaha was an untidy collection of shacks and sheds and river-wharves, but there was a good restaurant there, the Murphy House, and before they set out, Henry and Edward sat at a scrubbed pine table with a rickety leg and ate a large breakfast of steak and beans. They said very little to each other as they walked out through the streets of Omaha, leading their mules behind them. It was eleven o’clock, and the sun was high and brassy and hot, and Henry wasn’t feeling talkative. He kept thinking of Augusta, on her way back to Carmington by train, and of Doris, too. He had dreamed of Doris last night, just before morning, and he could have sworn that he had heard her whispering his name. He had seen her face as clearly as if she had been lying next to him, and when he had opened his eyes he had been sure that he could still smell her perfume.

  They walked at a steady, unhurried pace. They would ride only when they were really exhausted, to save the mules. Once they had left the last few straggling outbuildings of Omaha behind, they were out on the plains alone, amidst mile after mile of short dry grass, a tawny wilderness of heat and dust, without a bush or a tree as far as Henry could see. There had been a few small po
ssumhaws here once, but most of them had been burned down by Indians hunting game. Now there was nothing but wavering heat, and the repetitive sawing of insects, and the clattering of mules on the hard-baked trail.

  ‘There was a real rush of prospectors out this way, last year,’ said Edward. ‘You should have seen them, hundreds of them, with waggons and mules and buckboards and whatever they could get to carry them. They was all after the gold they found at Gregory Gulch, maybe you read about it back in the east. But that gold was so hard to dig out that most of them gave up, and came back. I seen twenty-two Gobacks lying dead by the trail, not sixty miles from Denver, all their food and water given out. Scores more died of the cholera. Well, their families buried them, whenever they could, but more often than not the wolves dug them up again. You could walk along the trail and see a human hip-bone, or a hank of woman’s hair, with a comb still in it, lying right there by your feet. I saw one fellow, walking along the trail here, with his wife and baby dead in a wheelbarrow. Their eyes was all pecked out by birds; but I said to this fellow, “Good morning, need a hand, friend?” but he didn’t say a word, just walked on; probably walked all the way from Denver.’

  Henry would never forget his first day on the trail; the silence of it; the encroaching feeling of great loneliness; the wind that blew dust across the summer prairie. They walked and walked and the sun rose high above their heads, and then beat astoundingly at their foreheads, and at last began to sink in front of them, too fierce to look at. Edward had recommended that Henry bring a pair of green-glass goggles with him, and what with the dust and the furnace-like glare of the sun, he was relieved to have them.

  By evening, they had reached the Platte River, where it curved its nearest to Omaha. The Platte was a wide, slow-flowing band of glistening silt, soaking its way in a series of lazy loops all the way from the Rocky Mountains to join the Missouri about twenty miles to the southeast of them. They had managed over twenty-three miles that day, even though they had left Omaha quite late, and Edward was pleased with their progress. They camped on the eastern bank of the river, and while Henry took the mules down to drink, Edward lit up a fire of scrub and brushwood, and fried up bacon and flour cakes. Later, they sat on their folded-up coats in the dying glow of the day, while the river shone between the darkness of its muddy banks like a silver-pink mirror, curving and mysterious and quiet.