Blood Gold

by Michael Cadnum

  We passed a snake hanging from the crook of a tree, headless but still writhing.

  When we got to the wide place in the trail, night had nearly fallen. The jungle heat teased us with hungry mosquitoes and a ceaseless chirping Ben had said were tree frogs.

  “We need volunteers for first watch,” said Colonel Legrand. He held up a musket with a bayonet attached to it to indicate the responsibilities involved.

  I wasn’t feeling particularly brave, but buoyed by my cheerful mood. Besides, I just didn’t want to lie down on the ground right then, not where spiders and serpents made their homes.

  “I don’t mind if I stand the first watch,” I volunteered.

  I knew I might as well get accustomed to putting up with hardship. After all, I was not going to California to seek pay dirt, like all the rest of these hopeful, ambitious travelers. Ben and I had a special purpose for wandering so far from home.

  We were looking for a particular individual in the gold country, and we fully intended to find him.

  CHAPTER 3

  Colonel Legrand sized me up with a smile, perhaps thinking I was too young and green to be trusted with a musket.

  I am tall and broad-shouldered, and unafraid of any kind of hard work. Mr. Donald Ansted, my employer back home, and author of the pamphlet Some Remarks on the Prospects of Repeating Firearms, had been an expert gunsmith, when the carriage-repairing business was slow. He had always praised my willingness to put in extra hours repairing weapons.

  I knew enough to say, “The gunpowder’s so wet it wouldn’t spark anyway, Colonel.”

  I had test-fired a few guns with Mr. Ansted, and I knew that at twenty paces you had a better chance of hitting a man with a frying pan than a musket ball.

  Colonel Legrand gave a laugh and put the musket into my hands. The weapon was heavy, and gave off the scent of gun oil.

  “It’ll shoot,” said the colonel simply. He meant: be careful.

  Ben hoped someday to study Shakespeare at a university, but I had more lowly ambitions. I had dreams of redesigning carriages, or repairing the fowling pieces of clergymen and scholars. Reverend Spinks was the master of the Methodist School of Classics and the Arts I had attended; Ben had studied at Professor and Mrs. Holliday’s Boys’ School. Ben and I had been friends and neighbors since childhood, and we both enjoyed the same stories of King Arthur and Richard Lionheart. I was not destined to be a gentleman, however. A skilled craft, working with my hands, would be enough for me.

  The other guard the colonel posted that night was Isom Gill, a man who had been seasick every day on the side-wheeler out of New York. A cabinetmaker by trade, he was, like me, neither lofty gentleman nor unlettered day laborer. He was one of the few among us to have a really decent gun, a double-barreled English firearm with one barrel rifled, the other smoothbore.

  Ben said he would stand watch with me, but I told him to get some rest. Mr. Gill had a determined set to his mouth, eager to prove himself, and I believed we would be in good hands. A few of us had packed guns or pistols when we left our families and homes, but all day we had been passing cast-off fowling pieces and flintlock pistols, already rusting in the vegetation, along with piles of heavy wool clothing. Dr. Merrill kept a Navy Colt revolver in a mahogany case, the sole example of the newly invented repeating pistol I had ever seen.

  The doctor bent down over Aaron Sweetland, asked a question, and straightened, heading back to his trunk for a blue bottle of laudanum, the one sure medicine for cramps. He administered the potion to his shivering, sweating patient. We had buried a blacksmith at the trail-head by the river, and a jolly gray-haired cooper named O. P. Schuster, and Dr. Merrill had confided to me that he suspected there would be more outbreaks of fever.

  The doctor met my eye as he stepped back to his medical bag, pressing the stopper back into the bottle. “Mr. Dwinelle, every bandit in Central America would faint dead away at the sight of you.”

  I laughed. It was true that I was tall enough, and sturdily built enough to fancy myself a man among men. But inside I knew I was a rank novice at adventure, and just for now I was happy to keep dramatic thrills in the distant future.

  The musket the colonel thrust into my hands was an old Brown Bess—type weapon, the sort the British army had used for generations, the barrel well oiled but the lock tarnished from the damp. I imagine I made a tough-looking figure, in my slouch hat and heavy trousers, a foot-long knife in my belt. In fact, any one of my traveling companions would have frightened off the toughest alley fighter in New York or Philadelphia. A more dirty-looking set of men I had never seen.

  Many other traveling companies were camped in the same clearing, and it was some time before tents had been arranged in spots that were not knee-deep in water. After Ben brought me a plate of fried salt beef and a cup of thick, sweet coffee, I felt about ready to fight off an army of robbers.

  Later I would marvel at my confidence that all would be well.

  The night was pure darkness, and the smoke from our fire lifted straight up. I tried to find a place where the smoke drifted down again, weighed down by the humidity. When I did, I stood there surrounded by wood smoke, even though my eyes smarted—the smoke discouraged the needling attacks of the mosquitoes.

  I must have had what my late father used to call “a special inkling” what was going to happen that night, because I kept well away from Mr. Gill and his expensive gun. When he came around the camp full of sleeping men, his footsteps shuffling the sodden underbrush, I circled away from him, even though it meant that the blood-starved insects could find me again. They stung hard and often, with tiny, keening voices.

  I heard the distant, distinctive double-click not long afterward. Even at this distance, through the thick air and the sound of snoring, there was no mistaking the sound, the double hammers of Gill’s Bond Street gun being cocked.

  I wanted to call out, What is it?

  It would be just like a gang of bandits to rush us while nearly all of us were stretched out on the ground like this.

  Before I could make a sound both barrels fired.

  The thud of the smoothbore and the crack of the rifled barrel sounded like the reports of two entirely different weapons. The rush of wings and startled bird cries echoed off through the dark jungle, animals frightened by the noise.

  Humans stirred; frightened voices joined with the snorts of startled mules.

  Colonel Legrand called out, “Mr. Gill, what’s wrong?”

  There was no answer.

  CHAPTER 4

  I rushed through the dark, not bothering to cock my gun, knowing that with the darkness, the hubbub of voices, and the venerable age of my weapon, I would have better luck with the cold steel of the bayonet.

  “Mr. Gill, what do you see?” Colonel Legrand was demanding, lanterns sputtering to life. The colonel hurried through the camp carrying a coiled whip.

  He called for everyone to stand back and calm down. People did just what he said, fading back toward the ebbing campfire, falling quiet.

  Dr. Merrill was huddled over someone at the jungle’s edge in quaking lantern light, the lamps held high by apprehensive, unsteady hands.

  Aaron Sweetland sprawled, gasping for breath, blood bubbling. In the shivering pool of light his head gleamed, half scarlet, and gore welled from his shirtfront.

  Men turned angrily, seizing Mr. Gill, the expensive gun snatched away and passed high, hand to hand, until the colonel took it.

  “Whip him!” said several voices, the loudest of them David Cowden, an office clerk from Williamsport.

  “Put him in irons!” said Albert Kerr, a former neighbor of Mr. Gill’s. Heavy fists began to fall on Mr. Gill in the surging light of the campfire, where wet wood was dumped on the embers, raising a flume of illuminated smoke.

  I pushed my way through the crowd of sweaty, angry men, and stood before Mr. Gill, the musket level in my hands.

  Firelight gleamed along the bayonet, and men fell silent at the sight.

  “
It was an accident,” I said.

  “If he dies, it’s murder,” rasped Mr. Kerr, a lens grinder by trade. He wore oval, silver-rimmed spectacles, the lenses glittering in the lamplight.

  “Manslaughter,” corrected Mr. Cowden, a dimpled, soft-looking man who had once studied law. Soon the anger was spent in a bickering debate over which legal term would apply. But there was relief in the men’s voices, seizing upon legal argument instead of further punishing Mr. Gill, who was on his knees.

  “Thank you, Willie!” said Mr. Gill, clutching at my trouser leg.

  I felt an instant of revulsion at his gratitude, and wanted to step well away from him, to separate from his grasp. It wasn’t that I particularly disliked the man—I didn’t want any of his bad luck.

  But then Colonel Legrand said, “Well done, Dwindle,” and clapped me on the arm. He helped Mr. Gill to his feet, and half forced him through the already dissipating tangle of men.

  “The sentry mistook an intruder,” called out the colonel, and the military character of his voice settled all of us further, giving a soldier’s dignity to the mishap.

  But Aaron Sweetland was bleeding hard.

  CHAPTER 5

  Dr. Merrill stood at the fire, stirring the smoking coals with a ramrod.

  Aaron Sweetland had been heavily dosed with medicine from the blue bottle and he was no longer sobbing with pain. One ear had been shot away, and the rifle shot had drilled him right through his shoulder, just below the collarbone.

  Morning was not far away; the camp cook was carrying a kettle through the dark.

  Dr. Merrill turned from the fire, bleary-eyed from the smoke, with the tip of the rod glowing red.

  “If you have the heart for it, William,” said the doctor, “I can use your help.”

  Stomach for it, he should have said. I knew all about cauterizing wounds—Aunt Jane and my sister and I had lived upstairs from a surgeon who treated bargemen and their knife wounds.

  I knew too well what was going to happen. But I have an optimistic outlook on things that often causes me to utter outright untruths. “I’m happy to help,” I heard this cheerful part of me sing out.

  Ben took a deep breath and shook his head.

  Dr. Merrill was only a few years older than us, but with his wooden box of drugs and clean-shaven countenance he was like another sort of man altogether. Furthermore, he reminded both of us of home, where kind-voiced men and women exchanged pleasantries. I treasured the memory of Philadephia’s Walnut Street, where whale-oil lamps cast a silver glow over Elizabeth, the reverend’s daughter, as she read to me from Macbeth.

  Ben and I had been happy to help Dr. Merrill at small tasks on board the ship, holding a pan while he bled a sailor, repacking his books when a storm swell sent them all over the deck. But cauterizing wounds was one of the most painful procedures medicine required. A hot iron was understood to seal the wound and encourage healing, but by all accounts it was painful beyond belief.

  Now Dr. Merrill was thrusting the ramrod back into the coals one last time and asking Colonel Legrand, “Would you have some brandy for all of us just before we begin?”

  “All we have is the local rum, Dr. Merrill,” said the colonel sympathetically. “I haven’t seen brandy since Christmas.”

  I tilted the heavy bottle, and found that the liquor tasted of molasses, hot peppers, and poison. I could barely swallow. I passed the bottle on to Ben. He took a long drink and coughed, just like me.

  Dr. Merrill took a drink from the bottle, too, and swallowed it down like water. Then he withdrew the glowing tip of the ramrod from the fire.

  He strode purposefully over to the place where Mr. Sweetland had been carried by his friends, men from his hometown who had formed the Tioga County Mining and Assaying Company. Many small groups had set up such companies, signing bylaws and solemn promises to help each other. If nothing else, it provided support for times like this, and, if the worst happened, companions who would arrange decent burial.

  “Hold the lamp high, Ben,” said Dr. Merrill, his voice firm. “Willie, you hold Mr. Sweetland down.”

  Mr. Sweetland was agape, blessedly half-stunned by the opium-and-spirits he had been swallowing.

  The glowing iron approached the wound in his shoulder.

  I couldn’t help thinking that this was the sort of injury I would give Ezra Nevin—when I found him. If he so much as gave me the least argument about coming home with me.

  If he gave me the least quibble about the harm and embarrassment he’d created for Elizabeth.

  CHAPTER 6

  Wherever he went, everyone liked Ezra.

  I liked him, too—despite my loyalty to Elizabeth. Anyone would. He had a smile nearly as infectious as Ben’s, and a manly, rough elegance that made dogs fawn and grown men clap him on the back.

  The younger son of the family that published the Philadelphia North American, he had traveled to London and Paris, spending a year on the sort of Grand Tour most young men can only dream about. He could speak French, play the piano, and had recently met a man on the field of honor, prepared to fight a duel.

  Ezra had brought the brace of horse pistols—the very dueling weapons themselves—for my employer to repair shortly afterward. They were silver-chased .65 caliber flintlocks, made by Hadley of London. A morning rain shower had dampened them, and Ezra had wanted them cleaned and oiled by an expert.

  “I hope I never set eyes on Murray again, Willie,” he had said with a shaky laugh. “He ran away before I could take a shot at him, and that’s the worst sort of enemy to have.”

  “One that can run away?” I said, jokingly.

  “No,” said Ezra in all seriousness. “A proud man who’s embarrassed himself.”

  I knew Murray about as well as I knew Ezra. Where Ezra was quick with a smile, and easy to admire, Murray was a young man I almost felt sorry for—he was so difficult to like. Ezra’s newspaper had criticized the Murray banking family as heavy investors in the “rat-thick hovels for the poor” in an article I suspect Ezra had penned himself.

  The two young men had met in Rittenhouse Square, exchanged unpleasantries, and the duel had been inevitable given the high-minded energy of Ezra and the stolid pride of Samuel Murray. The big redhead was an anxious man, with a broad pale forehead and a humorless laugh. He had a way of cracking his knuckles and toying with his watch fob as he complained that the harness I mended, or the wheel I repaired, was too late, overpriced, and the workmanship unsatisfactory.

  At the same time, Murray was not a person you’d want as an enemy—rumor told of his favorite sport, shooting stray dogs with a fowling piece. Rumor filled in the details of Murray’s disappearance after the abortive duel. Some said he was having a repeating pistol custom-designed in London. Others suggested that he’d fled to Boston, where he was looking for sterner, more violent companions, so he could return to Philadelphia and shoot Ezra like a cur.

  Ezra’s family newspaper had carried dispatches from San Francisco on its front page the year before, a California official crowing “your streams have minnows, ours are choked with gold.” Ezra found a graceful and perfectly respectable reason to leave town with one of his card-playing companions, a good-natured gentleman named Andrew Follette. They were by no means the first men in Philadelphia to head west, but they were the first I had known personally.

  Ezra waved to Ben and me as servants packed his brand-new, bright-hinged trunk into a wagon, calling out the well-worn “Ho! For California!”—laughing as he spoke. It was his laugh you’d always remember about him, his white teeth flashing, a sunny, stirring sound that made you join in, despite yourself.

  Only in his fresh absence did Elizabeth write me a letter, her beautiful, usually carefully quilled handwriting unsteady with feeling. We arranged a secret meeting, late at night, the neighborhood asleep, out by the green where during happier times the summer horse races were held.

  There in the dark she confessed to me that Ezra had sworn to marry her, and had taken advantag
e of her passion for him. She whispered a further confession, halting, barely able to put it into words. She believed that she was carrying Ezra’s child.

  Perhaps I had read too many tales of chivalrous heroes. Perhaps I was hostage to feelings toward Elizabeth I had not fully realized until then. But I stood there under the stars and swore on the graves of my parents, with God as my witness, that I would find Ezra Nevin, and bring him back.

  The next morning Ben had chuckled in amazement. “So old Ezra is a scamp, as well as a gentleman.”

  “I guess the two are not contradictory,” I said.

  Ben never hesitated.

  We unearthed our hard-saved money and left heartfelt, loving notes for our families. It was a simple matter, in my case, with both my parents dead of fever, and Aunt Jane worn with the trouble of cooking my meals. Ben’s family had two older sons, already happily busy in the family drayage business. Perhaps the Pomeroys had hoped, without saying so in words, that Ben might leave for the West, and come back to them with chests of placer gold.

  We departed on the Express Line from the Walnut Street wharf. We ferried across the Delaware River, took the railway to South Amboy, New Jersey, and rode a steamboat to New York. It cost three dollars each, the trip lasting just under five hours.

  Now Aaron’s sobs were subsiding, and the early-morning sun was just beginning to weaken the darkness, bird life stirring all around us.

  The injured man was carried tenderly to a wagon in the early light. Two other men lay down with him—they had been overcome by fever in the night. Anxious rumors had swept through the gold seekers, of a mysterious fever that was swallowing men in the prime of life. There was a hospital in Panama City, we were told, run by a German physician named Hauser and his daughter. The more optimistic among us enjoyed the first morning chew of tobacco and agreed that no doubt Dr. Hauser would have a tonic that would break every fever.