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

by William Martin

  “No, but I can kill you, you son of a bitch, and two or three others.”

  Moses uncoiled his bullwhip and said to Flynn, “Where are your pardners?”

  Sloate leaned back in his saddle. “One of them is up there writing all this down. That’s all he’s good for.”

  I watched as if this were a play unfolding in a Boston theater. But through the fog in my brain, I could see that Flynn was right. Exposing myself to their guns would do no one any good. Standing ready to fire from cover might keep them at bay. So I pointed my pistol out the window, aiming it at the men who had hanged Maria like a dog and done it as self-righteously as a New England jury.

  David Gaw shouted up at me, “Write it down that we hanged a whore who murdered a white man.” Then he turned to Mei-Ling, “And if my eyes don’t deceive me, we got another whore right here, of the Chink species. A woman breakin’ the rules of Leviticus by dressin’ as a man.” He knocked Mei-Ling’s straw hat off her head. Then he put his hand under her chin and turned her face to him.

  From his spread-eagle on the wheel, Chin shouted something in Chinese.

  Ng-goh, the biggest and strongest of all the Chinese, let out a bellow and swung a shovel into the back of David Gaw’s head. And the uprising began.

  Friendly Liu swung his threshing sticks as he put himself between the girl and the other whites. Little Ng leapt foward with a wild cry. Uncle Bao raised his hoe like a club.

  These Chinese men had protected Mei-Ling across thousands of miles and most of a year, and they would fight for her now, lest she be violated.

  Deering Sloate, however, was unmoved by their anger. He pulled his gun and coldly shot Uncle Bao, just as the Chinaman was turning his hoe onto Moses Gaw.

  Flynn fired at Sloate. But once, twice, he pulled his trigger in frustration. Two haphazard loads, two misfires, so he shouted, “Run, Mei-Ling! Run!” And before Sloate could swing his pistol again, Flynn leapt at him and pulled him off his horse.

  As Flynn and Sloate went at it, Mei-Ling scrambled into the bushes and up the bank.

  Ng-goh swung the shovel at two Sagamores who came flying from his right.

  Moses Gaw looked at Chin and said, “See what you done?” Then he kicked out the chock, so the wheel started to turn with Chin tethered to it, down into the water then up, around, and down again … Wei Chin, tortured by his own handiwork.

  Uncle Bao had fallen and was screaming in pain, his body curling around the hole in his belly. But Friendly Liu, who always seemed to be smiling, even when he wasn’t, backed toward the bushes, keeping himself between the white men and Mei-Ling.

  David Gaw got to his feet and pointed his pistol at Friendly Liu.

  And a rifle shot cracked from somewhere downstream.

  David Gaw cried out as his elbow seemed to explode in blood.

  Another shot came right after, from the bushes on the north bank. Were two men shooting from cover? Had Emery and Abbott come to our rescue?

  Christopher Harding turned his gun toward the trees and loosed two or three rounds. He was answered with a rifle shot that took off his hat, which was followed by the high-pitched cackle of Cletis Smith. “I wasn’t aimin’ for the hat!”

  And for a moment, there was silence, punctuated by the steady thump of the flutter wheel, turning Chin up, around, and down, while David Gaw sat on the ground and moaned, and dying Uncle Bao whimpered in agony.

  Then the disembodied voice of Cletis Smith echoed again, “Hey, Harvard! Rest that hog leg on the windowsill. Aim good. And shoot Hodges first.”

  Realizing his predicament, Hodges shouted up to me. “Our arrangement still holds, James. If you want it—”

  Moses Gaw was tightening his belt around his brother’s arm to stop the bleeding. He said, “Arrangement? What goddamn arrangement?”

  Cletis delivered another shot that cut the reins on Samuel Hodges’s horse.

  “That’s my arrangement.” Then he shouted, “Now, we got two muskets and a rifle up here, and a big old blunderbuss, too. Every time I shoot, I get another gun right in my hands. So I’ve got you in a crossfire, boys.”

  Vinegar Miller emerged from the bushes, dragging Mei-Ling by the hair, shouting, “And we got the China whore.”

  Chin, still turning up, around, and down, cried out to his sister, then splashed into the water again.

  Flynn, who had left off grappling with Sloate, ran toward her, but Moses Gaw fired his whip, took out Flynn’s legs, and dropped him on his face. Someone else drove a knee into Flynn’s back. Sloate pinned his arms. And two more took Ng-goh.

  Hodges ordered Miller, “Put a gun to her head.” Then he shouted up at the hills, “There’ll be no more shooting. We’re arresting the big Chink for assault on a white man, and Flynn’s a deserter from the William Winter. His fate is sealed.”

  I hadn’t fired my pistol yet. I knew that if I did, I was likely to hit someone I cared about. And Cletis had gone silent.

  Hodges ordered his people to mount. Then he shouted up at the hills again. “You can have the Chinaman riding the wheel. You can have the girl, too.”

  Tom Lyons looked up at our cabin. “We’ll give them a fair trial, Spencer. I promise. In town, tomorrow, as prescribed by the council. You can testify.”

  “Then we’ll hang them,” added Moses Gaw.

  * * *

  CLETIS DID NOT DESCEND until after the Triple MWs had disappeared up the road with Flynn and Ng-goh, hands tied and tethered to saddle pommels, running along behind the horses.

  By then, I had chocked the wheel and was untying Chin, while Mei-Ling and Friendly Liu comforted the dying Uncle Bao.

  Cletis led his horse and burro into the clearing, followed by a young man leading a horse of his own. I recognized Rodrigo Vargas. The frightened boy who had waylaid us in August, the angel of mercy who had nursed me in January, had once again been the agent of our rescue.

  Cletis said, “I met him on the road. He was comin’ up. I was goin’ down. He said he was lookin’ for the girl he loved. The girl named—”

  “Maria?” I said.

  “I told him I’d help him find her.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, Harvard, I could never get a woman to love me, so I reckoned I’d help a young feller who could.” Cletis bit a chaw of tobacco. “Then we heard that she’d been hanged, most likely by them who just left.”

  Rodrigo looked from under the brim of his straw hat. His face had been a river of tears when first I gazed upon it in that bloody grove of trees. It was now a mask of grief. But his jaw was set, as if he would never cry another tear. He told me he would bring Maria back to the ranchero to bury her, and he would avenge her. “It does not matter in what order I do these things. I will do them.”

  I said, “They may have buried her already.”

  “Then I will help you,” he said. “Help you kill the men who killed her.”

  “You helped plenty already,” said Cletis. “Damn good loader.”

  Chin, soaked and exhausted, half drowned and disoriented from his riverine crucifixion, dragged himself to his feet, listened as Little Ng unleashed a stream of Chinese, then said, “He wants to know … what will happen to his brother.”

  “They’re supposed to wait for the law,” I said. “But if they promise a trial tomorrow—”

  Cletis said, “Elected head of the Miner’s Council does the job when you don’t have a real alcalde nearby. That’s Hodges. So, if there’s a trial, it’ll be quick.”

  “We can’t just leave them,” I said.

  “We can fight,” said Rodrigo with a sudden, adolescent ferocity.

  “Hodges has two dozen men, boy, all armed,” said Cletis.

  “I will fight,” said Rodrigo. “I will fight them myself if you will not.”

  Chin added, “We not let them hang Ng-goh.”

  Mei-Ling came toward us, standing straight, head high, as if something had happened within her, something that overcame her natural subservience. “Uncle Bao dead. No hang F
lynn and Ng-goh, too.”

  Chin said, “No hang. I help. Little Ng, Friendly Liu, they help, too.”

  Little Ng scowled. Friendly Liu smiled and nodded.

  I remembered the body of Sean Kearns hanging in a grove of trees and the corpse of Maria twisting above Broke Neck. I would not let them do that to Michael Flynn, too. No man worth his manhood would let them hang his friend. I said, “A small, dedicated group of fighters can win by catching an enemy in his bed.”

  Cletis spat tobacco. “When did you become a military expert?”

  I massaged my aching head. “I’m a student of history. George Washington led a surprise attack in a sleet storm at Trenton and changed history.”

  “Is that a fact? Well, whatever we do, we’ll change history, too. Our own.” Cletis led the animals across the river, up toward the cabin.

  Chin called after him, “Ng-goh not be hanged.”

  Cletis looked at Chin. “No matter what happens, you’ll have to go. Make for San Francisco, get on a boat, go home.”

  “Gum Saan home, now,” said Chin. “We go Chinese camp or San Francisco.”

  Cletis looked at me. “You ought to go home, too. You ain’t made for this.”

  “Get Flynn first,” I said.

  Cletis leaned on the burro’s back and appeared to think it over. “Well, they’ll never expect us. They think we’re too frightened.”

  “We are,” I said.

  “Can you draw a map of the camp, the log piles, the sluices, the dam? All of it?”

  * * *

  AROUND NINE O’CLOCK, IN the midst of our plotting, we heard someone crossing the river below. The moon was up, so we could see him clear. He reined about twenty feet from our cabin and called my name.

  Cletis pointed his blunderbuss out the window. Then he nodded to me. Go ahead.

  I stepped into the moonlight as the rider dismounted and came closer: Christopher Harding, no more than a shadow beneath the brim of his hat. He said he was leaving.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Hodges has no … no conscience. Neither does Sloate.” And I saw a flash of the boy I had known in our school days—honest, principled, perhaps a bit naïve—not the man who had taken abuse on the boat, taken a predator like Sloate as a pardner, and taken to doing the work of Samuel Hodges in the Mother Lode.

  He said, “Flynn will be hanged at dawn.”

  “Without a trial? Tom Lyons said there’d be a trial.”

  “Trask says deserters get hanged. They don’t need a trial. That’s the argument.”

  “And Hodges won’t stop it?” I said.

  “Hodges wants him dead. Moses Gaw hates him. Sloate wanted to shoot him. They’ve all gone mad with their own power and ambition up there, Jamie. They think you men down here threaten it. So they’ll hang him and come after you.”

  “We were here first,” said Cletis from the window.

  “Doc Beal cut off David Gaw’s arm tonight,” Christopher told him. “Your shot shattered his elbow. He’s gone feverish. If he dies, they’ll hang you first.”

  Cletis came out of the cabin. “Where they keepin’ Flynn.”

  “They put him and the Chinaman in the saw pit.”

  “I know the saw pit,” I said. “Right in the middle of the encampment.”

  Christopher Harding said, “It’s about six feet deep so a man can work a ripsaw and turn tree trunks into planks. They cover it at night so animals won’t fall into it. That’s all I know.”

  “That’s enough,” I said.

  As Christopher mounted again, I asked if he was going home.

  He said, “After all I’ve seen? All I’ve done? No.… but California is a big place. A man can get lost.”

  I watched him go and thought, yes, a man could get lost, or find himself, even a man who had killed an albatross. Then I told Cletis that I could draw the sawpit on a map.

  “That’s good,” said Cletis. “Good that you can draw. But can you kill?”

  I showed him my Colt Dragoon. I could. I would. I had seen enough death to know that, sometimes, violence was the only answer.

  Cletis nodded. “Then we have to go tonight, whether they’re expectin’ us or not.” But we’ll leave the girl and Friendly Liu here.

  April 1, 1850

  The Dams

  Gunpowder is not a weapon. It merely allows a weapon to work. The weapon is a pistol or a musket, or in our case, a door. Yes, the door that Cletis Smith had made so proudly for our cabin. He had always said that an honest door must be thick enough to shut out the weather yet wide enough to admit a friend. He might also have said that it should be solid enough to float two hogsheads of gunpowder on a river.

  I had scouted an overland trail to the Triple MW dam, so I went in the lead, Chin and Little Ng following, with Rodrigo and Cletis at the rear, leading the burro that carried the door and gunpowder. What a strange vision we must have made in the moonlight, moving though the brush and over the hilltops, following deer paths and rabbit runs, angry and aggrieved men, bent on rescuing our friends and securing vengeance. Around three in the morning, we came onto an open patch overlooking the Triple MW camp and the dam …

  … that marvel of primitive engineering, eight feet high, three feet wide, built of stone and wood and earth, reaching halfway across the stream, turning at ninety degrees, running fifty feet downstream, then turning back to the bank, all to expose a portion of riverbed. At the upstream end, they had built a footbridge all the way across the stream, and they had installed a sliding-log sluice gate, so that they could allow more water or shut off the flow entirely. That would be our escape route, the last step in a four-part plan that began with diversion, destruction, and extraction.

  Cletis would stay on this side of the river. There was not much cover, a few rocks here, an outcropping there, a dozen three-foot stumps where a blue oak grove had stood not that long ago. He could do his best work with his Kentucky Long Rifle and musket, sowing fear and confusion, while Rodrigo did his loading and fired off a few potshots of his own.

  I would climb the hill on the other bank, above the road, to play my part.

  Torches burned on the dam and in front of the longhouse where the men slept. Someone was moving through the night to the outhouse near the edge of the settlement.

  “Figures they’d put the shithouse downstream,” said Cletis. “About the only thing they want flowin’ down to us.”

  We could hear the river running and a wheel turning, driving a shaft attached to a pump that removed water from the exposed riverbed so that in the morning, men could get at the gold in the bottom.

  Most dam building did not happen till late summer, the driest time of year. But as soon as the rains of January and February had subsided, the current had slackened enough to make it possible for determined men to work until the snowmelt began. And they had made remarkable progress, damming and fluming and slowing the Miwok right where it bent.

  But we cared nothing for their ambition. We cared only about saving our friends.

  Chin and Little Ng took the burro. If the animal honked, it would sound as if he was just another beast in the Triple MW corral, which lay unguarded at the upstream end of the camp. Just before the attack, Chin would open the corral gate because frightened mounts were sure to scatter, raising more confusion.

  I moved downstream, well below the camp, where I was certain there would be no lookouts, and I slipped across. Then I scrambled up the bank. There were more stumps and fewer trees than on my last visit, so there was less cover in the moonlight. But I moved from stump to shrub, stopping, looking, waiting, until I had found good cover, near a pyramid of logs.

  From here, the camp spread below me, covering perhaps two acres of flat riverbank: three large structures, scattered tents, sluices, and wheels. The saw pit lay near the base of the hill. Two men were playing cards at a table atop the planks covering the pit. The glare of their lantern made it difficult to see much around them, but I knew that Flynn was beneath them.

&n
bsp; He probably knew that somewhere in the camp, Nathan Trask was tightening a noose just for him. Could he have known that somewhere in the dark, an old man was picking targets? Or that somewhere upstream, two Chinamen were lashing a hogshead of gunpowder to a door, piling branches on top of it to disguise it, preparing to light the fuse and launch their device? Or that I was here, waiting to loose the logs?

  I looked at the moon, which had passed its apex but still shone bright.

  Chin had said, “When the moon dips below the trees, I will light the fuse. Then you will hear Little Ng’s flute, like a bird awakening. Then send the logs.”

  It was not yet time, so I leaned back and I listened to the music of the river. And I wondered at this Mother Lode night. I had dreamed of showing Janiva our brilliant sky, with Mars and the other planets wheeling above me. And I told myself I would do it … a year from now, in Italy or the Alps. But not here. Never here.

  Then I heard a door bang open below. A man strode out of one of the smaller cabins, lumbering like Moses Gaw. I could track him across the clearing because the moonlight caught the white of his nightshirt. He muttered a few words to the men guarding the saw pit, then went into the outhouse and slammed the door.

  Then I heard something in the bushes nearby, something big, coming my way. I pulled my Bowie knife. Could I kill a man hand-to-hand, especially a man who sounded as if he might be bigger than Moses Gaw? And what was he doing up here? Was he with someone? A woman perhaps? Someone’s wife?

  I waited and listened. And yes, there were others with him. It sounded like two, moving off to my left. I held my breath.

  Then I caught the smell, oily and earthy, like a dirty fur collar. I heard a deep-throated grunt and snuffle. I moved my head so that I could see around the branches, and there, rising on its haunches in the middle of the road, stood a huge grizzly bear. The silvering moonlight struck her back, and it was as if she shone in the dark.

  I would have preferred Moses Gaw.

  But here I was, if not eye-to-eye, close enough to be terrified. Then one of the cubs emerged from the brush, followed by the other.

  This hillside in the night was their domain. We gold seekers were interlopers, all of us with our sluices and flutter wheels and high-minded conceits. The sow came to within ten feet of me, then stopped, rose on her haunches again, and snorted. Was it me she smelled in the still air? The salty, pickled stink of white meat, dirty clothes, and abject fear? Or was it the garbage down in the slops pit beside the outhouse?