Bound for Gold--A Peter Fallon Novel of the California Gold Rush

by William Martin

  And James Spencer turned to his daily routine.

  He made an effort to refill the chamber pot, which met with some trickling success. Then he dressed in the brown suit that Chang had set out for him the night before. He chose a red cravat because red would project confidence when he sat for breakfast at the Bohemian Club. But he did not call for hot water, because on Wednesdays he took a shave in the barber shop in the Spencer Building, and he expected that by eight o’clock, the city would be getting back to normal. So he would do his part.

  * * *

  JAMES SPENCER’S MORNING ABLUTIONS took twenty minutes and included two aftershocks. Then, fully and finely dressed, he went to the top of the stairs, looked down, and decided that he and his wife had built well. The staircase rose straight and undamaged. The oak pillars that supported it and the oak balusters that separated it from the foyer all appeared plumb upright.

  But at the bottom, he saw how the earth had throttled the mansion known as Arbella House. The chandelier had fallen from the fifteen-foot ceiling and smashed into a thousand pieces. The wires holding up the huge, gilt-framed mirror had snapped. The mirror remained miraculously upright, leaning against the wall, but the glass had shattered.

  James Spencer straightened his shoulders, tugged at the points of his vest, and smoothed the broken reflection of his cravat. Then he turned to the library at the front of the house.

  His collection of books, his California histories, including the complete works of H. H. Bancroft in red morocco, the rare books he had bought from the old Spanish missions along El Camino Real, and all the works of San Francisco’s “local color” school—his Bret Hartes, Jack Londons, and Mark Twains—had all been jolted from their cases. Books now covered the floor.

  He picked up the volume at his feet—Roughing It. He glanced at the inscription: To the Spencers, who knew where to find the real gold. Best Wishes, Mark Twain.

  He did not inventory the damage. There would be time enough for that later.

  He turned instead from the dark woodwork and heavy draperies of the library to the other side of the foyer, to the bright sunlight and golden walls of the parlor. He glanced at the portrait above the fireplace. It had not budged because it was screwed to the wall. It was like its subject. It endured.

  Janiva Toler Spencer wore a proud expression and a green dress in the portrait, the expression formed by raised chin and arched brow, the color carefully matched to the tile surround on the fireplace. She had planned it that way, he thought. She had been an excellent planner.

  “Well, my dear,” he said, “it seems we’ve had a little shake.”

  She answered, but only inside his head, and only for him.

  Then he heard the pantry door scrape open. Something new, he thought. That door had never scraped before.

  Mickey Chang pushed through with a tray: coffeepot, cup, newspaper. “In here or in conservatory?”

  “The conservatory, as usual.”

  Mickey just stood there in his black mandarin jacket and silk hat.

  James Spencer knew his servant well. Mickey Chang’s hesitations and movements and grunts and silences all formed part of the unspoken language of master and man.

  James Spencer said, “Is the conservatory—?”

  “Maybe in here. Not so much broken glass in here.”

  Spencer felt the weight of the day pressing on his chest. He gave the portrait another glance and went into the dining room.

  As Mickey poured the coffee and opened the Chronicle, the house rattled with another aftershock.

  James Spencer pretended to ignore it, like the seasoned San Franciscan he was. He sipped his coffee, read the news, then turned to the review of Carmen, which had premiered at the Opera House the night before, featuring the legendary Enrico Caruso. Spencer had considered going. He still liked to be seen out and about in the city he had helped to build. But a heartburn had kept him at home, and it was starting up again.

  He was studying an advertisement for Bromo-Seltzer, wondering if it might put out the fire in his chest, when the back door banged open and Mrs. Cooney’s brogue filled the kitchen. She was his cook. Every morning, she rode the California Street cable car all the way from the Slot, the tough neighborhood on the other side of Market Street. Ordinarily, she got straight to work. But today, she pushed through the creaking door and right into the dining room.

  James Spencer barely looked up. “Good morning, Mrs. Cooney.”

  “It ain’t a good mornin’ at all, sir, I hate to say.”

  “Did you see much damage, then?”

  “I did indeed. Damage everywhere. But it ain’t the damage that’s been done, sir. It’s what’s comin’.”

  “Coming? What’s coming?”

  “Fires, sir.” Grace Cooney stepped back, as if she had delivered a blow. “There’s … there’s fires breakin’ out everywhere.”

  “Fires?” James Spencer felt a new thump of pain in his chest.

  Mrs. Cooney wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Must be half a dozen last time I looked. And there’s gas hissin’ somethin’ terrible, sir, all over town, right out of holes in the ground it’s comin’.”

  James Spencer had feared that. Fire, not earthquake, had always been San Francisco’s greatest enemy. He went back into the parlor and looked east along California Street. And yes, gray smoke was fogging the sky beyond Nob Hill.

  Mrs. Cooney said, “The fires is all south of Market Street, sir. But the thing of it is … they’re spreadin’. That’s why we rode up here in the horse cart, me girl and me. We loaded up what we could and come over the hill. It’s for certain the fires’ll burn through everything south of Market, sir. Then … well, before long, it’ll be just one big fire.”

  “Calm yourself, Grace,” said James Spencer. “The best fire department in America is right here in San Francisco.”

  “That may be, sir, but the thing of it is … there’s no water.”

  “No water?”

  “I seen the lads openin’ hydrants all over, and nary a drop did they get. Busted mains, I’m thinkin’. And you can’t put out a fire if the hydrant’s as dry as a fence post.”

  James Spencer looked again at the distant smoke, then turned to Mickey Chang, who had been listening to every word. “Start the Ariel.”

  “The Ariel? Where we goin’? Not to the fire!”

  “To the office. To get our papers. And my journal. I must get my journal.”

  * * *

  JAMES SPENCER ALWAYS RODE in the front passenger seat and let Mickey Chang do the driving. He liked to watch the world speed by, and he liked the looks they got when people saw his chauffeur, looks that said, “Who knew a Chinaman could drive an autocar?”

  And the Ariel was fast. It had a big four-cylinder engine that could push the car along at forty miles an hour. But that was not why James Spencer had bought it. Nor did he buy it because it was built in Boston, as his friends suggested. And he did not buy it for the rich forest-green color, the seats of tufted brown leather, or the distinctive horse-collar grille. He bought it because of the advertising: As fast on the hills as most cars are on the level. That, he said, made it a car that was made for San Francisco.

  While he waited for Mickey, he stood on the porch and studied the sky. The sun was up full now. The morning air was warming. The breeze came out of the northwest, so he did not smell smoke. But he knew that he had to hurry. He kept the business records of Arbella Shipping and Mercantile in fireproof safes, but he had locked the original journal and transcription into his desk on the fifth floor. And oak desks burned.

  He took off his homburg and waved impatiently at his servant. The Ariel coughed and came puttering out of the barn. Spencer gripped the handrail, pulled himself into the seat, and said, “Don’t drive over any live wires. And don’t dawdle.”

  “I never dawdle.” Mickey had replaced his indoor silk cap with a felt fedora. Had he added a suit and cravat instead of his mandarin jacket, thought Spencer, he might have passed for a w
hite man. He said, “Just don’t be givin’ so many damn orders when I drive.”

  There were no other cars on the street, but people were everywhere now. Some had come out, half dressed or still in nightclothes, to move as aimlessly about as sleepwalkers. If they glanced at Mickey Chang, they did not register shock that a Chinaman was driving. They had no more shock to give. Others were standing on sidewalks, gazing toward the columns of smoke rising beyond Nob Hill. Still others, the industrious ones, the ones made for crisis, the ones who had built the city and would rebuild it, too, they had shaken off the shock and were already attacking the rubble.

  As the Ariel rolled through the intersection of California and Van Ness, James Spencer looked left and right. The fine big houses that lined the avenue had survived with little damage, despite the heaved sidewalks and uprooted cobblestones.

  But another block brought them to Polk, a business street that served the wealthy of Van Ness and Pacific Heights. And here James Spencer saw devastation. Bricks littered the street. Plate-glass windows had exploded from storefronts and sprayed shards everywhere. Other storefronts had simply collapsed onto the sidewalks.

  They passed a man sitting on a broken curbstone. He was weeping. In front of him lay a cart, and still attached to it, a horse killed by a falling chimney. The man looked up and said something in a foreign language. It sounded like Italian.

  James Spencer told Mickey to keep driving.

  But they could not go quickly because there, in the swale between Nob Hill and Pacific Heights, it seemed as if the earth had actually split open. Great chunks of pavement had broken and heaved like tide-driven ice floes in some frozen East Coast harbor. And the steel rails of the cable track had twisted right up out of the ground.

  At the intersection of Hyde Street, the views north and south were the same: buildings knocked off their foundations, power lines snapped and sparking, choppy rivulets of cobblestone and pavement, puffs of smoke, and people struggling to make sense of it all beneath a brilliant blue sky.

  Mickey Chang wheeled around a chest of drawers jolted from the second floor of a building that had lost its entire façade. James Spencer could look into all four rooms—neat parlor, dining room, two upstairs bedrooms. An old woman was sitting in a rocking chair in the parlor, staring out at the street and rocking … and staring … and rocking.…

  Just below Leavenworth, they came upon a group of men digging with bare hands into a small mountain of bricks that muffled a woman’s cries for help.

  Mickey gave a look. Should they stop? James Spencer pointed ahead.

  So the Ariel climbed to the top of Nob Hill, where the mighty mansions, side by side, proclaimed that this was a place beyond wealth. The richest San Franciscans sought the heights. The richest men built their homes where the views were majestic and the breezes fair and others of their breed had built, too.

  Names like Crocker, Stanford, Huntington, and Hopkins—the Big Four—echoed from the earliest days of the Gold Rush. Their fortunes, born of the picks and shovels they sold to the miners, had matured into unassailable, unimaginable wealth when the Transcontinental Railroad made them titans.

  James Spencer had done business with all of them. He had been welcomed into their homes. And he had welcomed them to Arbella House, the envy of any who visited, unless they visited Nob Hill first. Here was a fanciful world of turrets and towers, of marble and brownstone, of Italianate palazzos and high Victorian castles, houses so huge that they competed for grandeur with the new Fairmont Hotel, perched on the edge of the summit. But beyond the hotel, columns of smoke were rising, gray and foreboding.

  Mickey said, “Maybe the fire will follow the smoke and burn toward the bay.”

  “Let’s hope so.” James Spencer pointed ahead. “Keep driving.”

  Mickey steered across the top of the hill, avoiding piles of rubble, a cornice that had dropped from one of the houses, holes that had opened around sewer covers and water lines. At the intersection of Mason and California, with the glittering Fairmont on their left and the Mark Hopkins house on their right, he pulled the brake and stopped.

  Below them, hundreds of people were surging up the steep California Street incline, fleeing the fire with their belongings on their backs. Hundreds more were watching. A few had even set out chairs, as if the scene were part of some grand opera that would all be over in a few hours.

  James Spencer brought his hand to his chest. Mickey asked if he was all right.

  “Just keep going,” said Spencer.

  So down the hill they went to Dupont Street, then Mickey turned right and wove through the jam of horse carts, autocars, and fire engines, avoiding the chunks of broken pavement and debris, and made it all the way to the corner of Post Street, where the fallen façade of a six-story building finally stopped them.

  Directly ahead, on Market, the gray granite Spencer Building still stood. The cornice had fallen seven stories and lay in chunks on the pavement. The plate-glass windows that welcomed customers into a street-level barbershop, haberdasher’s, and bookstore had all shattered. A huge crack ran up the side of the building. And in the sky beyond, a new column of smoke was coming to life, as silent and threatening as a snake.

  Mickey looked up at the buildings and said, “You think all this burn?”

  “I don’t know. But the fires are closing in.” James Spencer felt the impulse to run, to go as he had when he was a young man, in the days when he first saw this city, when it was nothing but shacks and tents and mud. So he jumped down and went.

  Mickey turned off the engine and ran after his boss.

  James Spencer was still steady on his feet. He credited his rock-ribbed New England ancestry, the hard work he had done in the gold fields, and the daily walk he took on the hills of his adopted city. He scrambled over the brick wreckage, ignoring the sound of someone screaming deep down in the rubble. Whoever they were, they were doomed. So he kept going, straight for the arched entrance of the Spencer Building.

  To its left, the Palace Hotel gleamed in the sunlight, seven stories of glorious fancy—pillared, bay windowed, crenellated. On the roof, men were looking over the wrought-iron railing, looking down at the street, looking up at the smoke, preparing to fight for the grandest hotel in the West, using water drawn from a seven-hundred-thousand-gallon gravity-fed tank suspended above them.

  So, thought James Spencer, his building would not ignite from that side. And to the right rose the eighteen-story Call Building, tallest structure in the city. Its steel frame construction had withstood the earthquake, and its modern fireproofing, Spencer hoped, would withstand the coming conflagration.

  He took a deep breath, ignored the pain in his chest, and stumbled out into the middle of Market Street. It appeared as if an underground river had rolled in from the bay, run under the city’s grandest avenue, flowed all the way to the other side of the peninsula, then receded, leaving instead of ripples in the sand, great rolls of earth; instead of gravel pockets, piles of broken cobblestone; instead of random boulders, huge deposits of fallen brick and finished stone; instead of dead trees, a tangle of twisted trolley tracks and utility wires.

  “Hey, boss! Careful!” cried Mickey.

  James Spencer looked down at the trolley track in front of him, took a step, and the cobblestones collapsed. His body tumbled toward the sinkhole that opened, and he would have dropped into the depths, but for the track rail. He straddled it, hit hard, and cried out. Mickey grabbed him by the collar before he tipped headfirst, then dragged him back and leaned him against a pile of rubble.

  James Spencer felt as if he might vomit from the pain shooting up through his groin and into his kidneys.

  Mickey squatted next to him. “Boss, you all right?”

  “Yes, come on.” James Spencer tried to stand.

  “No. You stay. You as gray as the cobblestones.”

  “But Mickey—”

  “I’ll go. I know your desk. And I can run.”

  “But Mickey—”

&n
bsp; “No more buts.” Mickey grabbed the gold chain on Spencer’s vest.

  The old man watched his servant’s fingers work through the keys until they found the one for his desk and slipped it off the ring. He gripped Mickey Chang’s hand. “The transcription is in the long ledger … and the notebooks. You know the seven notebooks. They’re all in a single box.”

  “I know, boss. I know. Don’t worry.”

  “If I don’t … If I’m—”

  “Come on, boss! If you what?” Mickey looked up as flames exploded from a store at Stockton Street. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and said again, “If you what?”

  “If I don’t make it through this—”

  “Just stay here. I be right back.”

  A fire engine came careening around a corner. The bell was clanging. The hooves of the horses were pounding, thundering, sparking on the cobblestones and sending up great clods of dirt where the cobblestones had come loose.

  James Spencer thought the engine might roar right over them, or hit a hole and fly into the air and land on top of them. But it sped past, though for all its energy it would be impotent against the unfolding disaster.

  Spencer grabbed the baggy sleeve of Mickey Chang’s jacket. “Give the transcribed journal to the historical society. The original chapters go to my children. Their names are on the folders … and—” He clutched his chest, as if he could hold in a sudden burst of pain.

  “And what? What else, boss? I gotta go.”

  “Mickey, do this, and I will reward you.”

  “Ah, you’re always sayin’ that.” Mickey jumped up and scrambled across the street, leaped over the broken stones on the sidewalk, and disappeared through the arched entrance of the Spencer Building.

  “Reward you with a chapter of your own,” said James Spencer, almost to himself.

  A moment later, the ground shook again. Another aftershock. Two women on Market Street screamed and ran, as if aimless movement would protect them. Other people looked up, covered their heads, scattered. From somewhere back on Dupont came a roar and an explosion of brick dust. Spencer hoped that nothing had fallen on the Ariel.