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

by William Martin

“We haven’t been here a week,” I said. “I’m not worrying about going home.”

  “Liar.” He laughed. He knew. I was worried. Then he lay back and covered his face with his hat. “I think I’ll dream about one.”

  “A woman?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe a lot of women. Or maybe the best parts of a few women.”

  I agreed that a nap would do us well in the heat. Dreaming of women would be an extra benefit. So I stretched out on the other side of the tree.

  In a few seconds, Flynn was asleep, leaving me to enjoy the most exquisite silence I’d known in months, such quiet that I could hear a bird, something big like a turkey buzzard, crossing high above, its wings flap-flap-flapping in the still air.

  I opened one eye and watched the bird. I closed both eyes and dozed …

  * * *

  .… UNTIL A DIFFERENT SOUND woke me, a metallic meshing of gears.

  I opened my eyes and looked into the barrel of a cocked fowling piece.

  “Buenos dias, señor.”

  I raised my head and the barrel came closer.

  “Carlos, take his gun.”

  So there were two, the one called Carlos and the one giving orders, who now gave an order to one called Pedro. So there were three.

  Carlos pulled my gun from my belt and gestured for me to stand.

  I heard Flynn rouse himself on the other side of the tree. Then I heard the leader say, “Stop, señor. Do not fight. Hand Rodrigo your gun. Sí. Very good.”

  Soon enough, Flynn and I were standing in the bright sun, hatless and bootless.

  The one called Carlos, squat and fat, held the fowling piece. Pedro and a boyishly skinny one called Rodrigo went through our things. Pedro poked into our saddlebags with a machete. Rodrigo dismantled the pack we had built on the burro’s back.

  Two more sat on their horses, close by their leader, whom they called El Patrón. He was mounted on a fine chestnut. He wore a fine sombrero that gave him his own shade. He had a saddle with a fine silver pommel. His spurs flashed silver, too. Even his hair and beard were silver.

  The one called Rodrigo pulled a shovel out of the mule pack and held it up.

  El Patrón shook his head and said something in Spanish.

  Rodrigo threw the shovel at my feet. Then he dove into my sea bag and started flinging out the books.

  I said, “If you tell me what you’re looking for—”

  El Patrón said, “You are very polite to Californios like us. But it is too late for polity.” The man had been well educated in the English language to use such words.

  “We’re just crossin’ this country,” said Flynn, “so polite is the way we go.”

  “Polite now. Palming aces last night.”

  Flynn looked at the one named Carlos. “I remember you now. You give me a nasty look when I beat you fair and square on the last cut of the cards.”

  Carlos did not respond. He let El Patrón do his talking:

  “He saw you palm the ace. That is cheating.”

  “That’s a lie,” said Flynn.

  “No Californio calls out the cheater in a room full of Yankees,” said El Patrón. “He waits until the odds favor him … out here, on a ranchero that still belongs to his patrón, though for how long, I cannot say, now that we have Yankee masters and every man who crosses my ground thinks that my cattle are free for the taking.”

  Flynn said, “I ain’t a cattle thief, or a Yankee, or a cheater at cards. Neither is my friend … well, he is a Yankee, but—”

  “We will take back what is ours and a little more.” El Patrón patted the pocket of his jacket, where he had deposited our coin pouches. “Interest.”

  I heard the turkey buzzard come flapping over again, as if he sensed that soon, there might be something to eat in this isolated grove.

  El Patrón looked up at the bird and the angle of the sun and said, “I would not move again until dusk.”

  “With no boots?” said Flynn. “Where can we go?”

  “I cannot say. It will not be our problem. But we will leave your canteens.”

  I said, “Can’t we talk about this?”

  “There is nothing to talk about, señor. We are toll collectors, collecting a toll.”

  “You’re horse thieves,” I said.

  “The horses are your toll. It is a good deal.” El Patrón leaned on his silver pommel and said, “A few years ago, when California was Spanish, we would have traded like gentlemen. We would have talked, like gentlemen. Sipped brandy and smoked and shaken hands, like gentlemen. But now that we are Americans, we must act more—”

  At that instant, I heard the crack of a rifle and saw a puff of smoke on a low rise about thirty yards away.

  The rider to the left of El Patrón dropped from the saddle.

  Everyone turned to the sound, and Carlos swung his fowling piece just enough that Michael Flynn took his chance and jumped onto Carlos’s back.

  This caused the gun to discharge and blast El Patrón’s beautiful horse square in the face. The animal screamed and reared and then, after staggering for a moment on its hind legs, it fell over sideways, pinning El Patrón.

  Flynn grabbed the gun away from Carlos, who pulled a knife and slashed, but Flynn smashed the butt into the Mexican’s face.

  At the same moment, an American in a short military jacket and bowler hat leapt from behind the rise and ran toward us with a short-barrel blunderbuss at his hip.

  The other mounted man drove his horse between this American and El Patrón and fired his pistol, but the American kept coming, and as he did, he released a thunderous eruption of buckshot that knocked the man out of his saddle.

  Now, the one called Pedro was spinning toward me with the machete over his head, as if driven by the momentum of the moment rather than any real desire to attack.

  I will admit that I stood there, making the observation I have just written with almost as much detachment as I have written it, even though I should have been grabbing the shovel at my feet and fighting back. Then I saw the blade in the air, hurtling toward my face, and I flinched.

  But Flynn swept down with the gun barrel and knocked the blade from Pedro’s hands. And my instinct was correct. Pedro was as frightened as I. He looked at us both, then turned and leapt onto one of the horses.

  The American, running amongst us, cried, “Shoot him!”

  I looked at Pedro galloping off, then I turned again to the American, who shouted, “He’s gettin’ away! Shoot him!”

  I put up my hands, as if to say, Shoot him? With what?

  The American ran toward Carlos, who now lay unconscious in the dry yellow grass. He took the pistol that Carlos had taken from me, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Click. I could have told him it wasn’t loaded.

  But Flynn was turning to the one called Rodrigo, who was hunched over with his hands wrapped around his head and his body trembling against the tree. Flynn kicked him to open up, then pulled his own pistol from Rodrigo’s belt and fired at the fleeing rider. The shot hit Pedro between the shoulder blades, and he fell off from the saddle.

  The American let out with a whistle. The horse stopped and came circling back.

  Flynn looked at me and mouthed the words, “His horse?”

  The tall American looked at me and said, “Don’t like to fight, eh? You won’t last long out here.” He was older, perhaps fifty, grizzled, gray, all angles and elbows and unpredictable movements.

  Flynn held up his pistol. “Mine’s loaded. The one in your hand, that’s my pardner’s. It ain’t.”

  I tried to say that I didn’t want to shoot myself accidentally, but I could not get the words out. I was too shocked by what I had just seen.

  There were dead bodies in the shade and dead bodies in the sun. Rodrigo trembled by the tree. El Patrón lay pinned under his horse, which was breathing in strangled gasps, its huge flanks rising and falling like a bellows, its face an eyeless mess of buckshot and blood.

  I felt the pie rise in my throat, but my neckerchief
kept it down.

  Flynn offered his hand to the stranger. “Thanks, friend.”

  “No need to thank me. Been trackin’ these brigands a good while.”

  Flynn said, “May I ask your name.”

  “Cletis Smith, late of the U.S. Army. We took California away from these thievin’ Mexican snake fuckers, and now they’re tryin’ to take it back, one horse at a time.” Smith went over to my mount and ran his hand over the haunch. “Didn’t either of you damn fools look at the brands?”

  “Brands?” I said.

  “Shit in a shoe, but there sure is a lot of tenderfeet comin’ into this country.” Smith pointed to lettering on the horse’s rump. It looked like “USA.” But the “U” had been rebranded into a “V.” “See that? It’s supposed to stand for, ‘United States Army.’ But this feller says it’s for ‘Vargas, Señor Antonio,’ all nice and alphabetical-like.”

  I gestured to El Patrón, groaning under the gasping horse. “Him?”

  Cletis took the pistol from Flynn’s hand, walked over to El Patrón, crouched, and said, “Vargas, you stole my horses and left me out here to die.”

  “Your horses were your toll. We left you your burro and your boots.” Vargas raised his head and looked into Smith’s eyes. “What have you stolen? A whole country.”

  “Lose a war, lose a lot, old man.” Cletis Smith fished into Vargas’s pockets, pulled out our coin pouches, and tossed them to Flynn. “You figure out which is which.”

  Then Smith stood, cocked the pistol, and pointed it down.

  I cried, “Don’t shoot him!”

  Cletis glanced at me and pulled the trigger. The shot exploded and echoed over the hills. I thought I was witnessing murder, cold blooded and brutal.

  Then I heard Vargas say softly, “Thank you, señor.”

  “Hate to see a good horse suffer. But it’s for the best.”

  “A sad world, señor, when something so bad is for the best.” Vargas looked at me. “Thank you, too. You are a merciful man.”

  I nodded. I did not think I could speak.

  “Just remember,” Cletis Smith said to me, “out here, too much mercy’ll get you killed.” He went over to the one called Rodrigo. “Ain’t that right, son?”

  Tears were pouring down Rodrigo’s face, making rivulets in the dust on his cheeks. He was perhaps sixteen, and he cringed from this growling old American.

  Cletis Smith studied him a moment, then handed the pistol back to Flynn and moved methodically to his next task: snatching a saddle from off the ground and throwing it onto one of the horses.

  “What are you doin’?” asked Flynn.

  “These horses are mine.”

  Flynn said, “I won ’em on a straight-up cut of the cards and—”

  “That don’t mean dog puke to me.”

  “Well, it does to me,” said Flynn.

  I said, “We just killed three men, and all we care about is who owns that horse?”

  Cletis Smith said, “You didn’t kill anybody, son. But you better learn how if you want to stay alive. Ain’t that right, patrón?”

  “If you are going to kill us,” said Vargas, “be done with it. My leg is broken. It hurts very much.”

  But the trembling Rodrigo said, “Please do not kill us, señor. He is my grandfather. I promised my mamá I would look after him.”

  “Ain’t doin’ a very good job of it, boy.” Cletis looked at Vargas. “And you ain’t doin’ too good takin’ care of your grandson. Is one of these we killed his father?”

  “No. These were loyal hands on my ranchero. But my cattle have been stolen. My horses run off. So we do what we can.”

  “Where’s the boy’s father?”

  “Gone to the diggings.” Vargas grit his teeth to hold down the pain in his leg and perhaps in his heart. “Before the gold, we had a good life. But now, some catch the fever, others spread it, and we are all victims of it.”

  Cletis pulled the cinch on the saddle and seemed to give something a bit of thought, then he said to Rodrigo, “Don’t worry, son. There’ll be no more killin’.”

  “Thank God for that,” I said.

  Cletis told me to pick up the shovel. Then he pulled another from the burro pack and tossed it to Flynn. He told us to dig a shallow hole around the body of Señor Vargas.

  I looked at Flynn, as if to ask … Should we do it? Flynn shrugged. Why not?

  So we pulled on our boots and got to digging. In the meantime, Cletis Smith resaddled the horses, slid his handsome Kentucky Long Rifle into a custom-made cinch on a saddle, then reloaded the 1808 model Harper’s Ferry blunderbuss, a true brute of a weapon. When we were done, he said, “Looks like you know how to work shovels. How much do you know about placer minin’?”

  “What we don’t know, we’ll learn,” said Flynn.

  “If you promise to go where I go and do what I say till the winter rains, you can ride with me. I’ll teach you what I know.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I ain’t as young as I used to be. And placer minin’ is hard work.”

  We looked at each other. Flynn winked. I nodded. We liked the offers.

  With a good hole dug around him, we were able to pull Señor Vargas from under the horse. His leg was bent just above the top of his boot, so Cletis Smith made a splint out of Rodrigo’s old musket, set the break, and propped El Patrón against the tree. We gave Rodrigo one of the horses to ride for help, but Smith warned him that we would keep this clump of trees in view for at least an hour. If we saw him riding off before that, we would come back and kill his grandfather. And I think he meant it.

  I took Señor Vargas’s hand and wished him the best.

  “Just don’t tell him we’re sorry,” said Cletis. “Out here, apologizin’ is a sign of weakness.”

  * * *

  CLETIS RODE HIS FAVORITE horse, the chestnut. Flynn took one of the Mexican mounts. I rode the sorrel. The burros followed on a string.

  Presently, Flynn offered Cletis a peppermint from the bag he had bought at Sutter’s Fort, and they began to talk as if nothing had happened in that bloody grove of trees. Cletis scoffed at our plan to head for Sutter’s Creek. Played out, he said. Much better diggin’s deeper in the hills, he said, at a place called Broke Neck, on a river that fed the Cosumnes. That was where we would go, he said, and he did not invite our opinions.

  Then he turned us back toward the north and the Hangtown Road, the main route into the mountains. Soon we were rising as steadily as the afternoon heat.

  Along the trail, we stopped to help a man with a wagon full of mining tools. His rear wheel had snapped, and he was stuck. Three groups of miners had gone past, leaving him helpless. He was a tall, rock-faced fellow with a long beard. He said he was headed to Hangtown to start what he called The New England Trading Company.

  This put me in a warmer frame of mind toward him. Although Cletis wanted to keep moving, I prevailed. If a New England man needed help, help we would offer in the form of muscle to lever up the wagon so that he could change out the wheel.

  It felt good to do a small bit of good after what we had done a few hours before.

  As we rode off the man said, “I don’t forget a favor. I’ll write your names down.”

  Flynn laughed. “You do that, Mister—”

  “Hopkins,” he said. “Mark Hopkins.”

  * * *

  BY LATE IN THE day, we had risen into a different world. The ground remained yellow-brown and paper-dry, but the trees were growing taller. There was black oak and buckeye, and here and there, conifers with crusty red bark standing as straight and reaching as high as the white pines of New Hampshire.

  We were riding south along the line of the Logtown Ridge, which offered the most amazing view that ever I had seen. To the west, and well below, rolled the prairie we had just crossed, fading into the mist of a distant sunset. To the east, a few rods from the road, the land dropped hundreds of feet into the steep valley of the Cosumnes River. But our prospect carried across
the river, across the pines and oaks on the far side, across a distance of thirty miles or more, all the way to the rim of white that ran along the horizon. Yes, I said, white. The white of snow in August, limning the peaks of those distant mountains like sugar on the lip of a holiday glass.

  At a promontory, Cletis Smith stopped and swept his arm from left to right. “There it is, boys, La Veta Madre. From away up north, where them Donner folks et each other a while back, all the way south to the desert, there’s gold strikes everywhere. Men hittin’ paydirt in rivers and streams, in dry gulches and gullies, all of it washin’ out of one great big vein of gold somewhere up them mountains.”

  “A vein?” said Flynn. “How big?”

  “Miles wide, miles deep, or so they say, with lots of little veins runnin’ out of it.”

  “Like capillaries,” I said.

  “What’s capillaries?” asked Cletis.

  “Pay him no mind,” said Flynn. “He went to Harvard.”

  “So he’s what we call an educated fool, then?” said Cletis. “Rides in dangerous country with an unloaded gun. Talks with words so big a simple man don’t understand ’em.”

  “I don’t speak Spanish,” I said, “so … La Veta Madre? What does it mean?”

  “The Mother Lode. Greatest goddamn gold strike since Adam told Eve to bite the apple.” He gave his reins a tug and we kept going. He said that if our horses had needed water, we would have been traveling on the lower road along the river. But the high trail was better going. So we stayed on it a few miles more. Then, we headed down, down and southeast, down toward the Cosumnes, southeast toward a tributary called the Miwok.

  After a time, we crossed the Cosumnes and turned due east, following a crude sign pointing to a place called Fiddletown.

  “Fiddletown … is that where we go to hear a bit of music, then?” asked Flynn.

  “Nope. There’s a camp up there where no one’s gettin’ rich and they ought to clear out, but they just stay, just stay and fiddle around. Fiddletown.”

  Before we had a chance to see the fiddling miners of Fiddletown, we broke off south on another road into another east-west–running valley.

  * * *

  WE REACHED BROKE NECK just as the lanterns were flickering to life. Tents and tossed-together shacks lined a narrow, dusty street crowded with miners. A squeeze-box somewhere was pushing out a tune. Men were laughing. Others were jawing. Others, looking glum, were moving on. It seemed a world made for transition, for quick dismantling and migration, all except for three buildings—a general store on a foundation of river stones just north of the road, and on the south side, a combination assay-and-express office next to a big-top saloon.