Blood Gold

by Michael Cadnum

  Ben said he had been certain that bandits, or at least a panther, had dragged me away.

  When Ben heard the story of the fugitive, he said, “Willie, we don’t have time to catch a robber.” Sometimes Ben assumes that because he reads books about botany and wild animals, he is much wiser than I am. He adopted a tone of aggrieved patience when he added, “Dr. Merrill needs us.”

  I was less enthusiastic to return to Dr. Merrill than I might have expected. His secretiveness, and his choice of sport for the night, had made me, for the moment, cool toward my medical acquaintance.

  But I walked quickly through the trailing vines and low-hanging branches with my friend, until we stood in a room like a stone jailhouse—bare earthen floors and white-painted walls. Smoking candles illuminated the stricken men in rows along the walls, the stink of dysentery in the air.

  Dr. Merrill stepped with labored care through the groaning, feverish patients of this improvised hospital. It took him a long time, and I made every effort to draw only shallow breaths. As the doctor approached us, he raised a nearly empty bottle of local rum to his lips.

  “There are men like this in every hotel in the city,” he said, unsteady on his feet, but his words as precise as ever. “I received word from Dr. Hauser as I was about to teach Ben here the joys of filling an inside straight.” The obscure poker term struck me as devilish and frivolous under the circumstances. “The hospital is filling up rapidly. I need you and Ben to bring sick men here.”

  I was tired. My feet were sore. Some tonic or other would bring these men to life overnight. I wanted to lie down on a cot somewhere and close my eyes.

  “This isn’t just another plague, is it?” Ben was saying. “This isn’t some unknown pestilence with no name.”

  “These men are suffering profound fevers,” said the doctor, by way of answer, “and what medical books call rice-water stools.”

  I had heard more than enough already.

  “Their diarrhea is so severe,” said Dr. Merrill, examining the contents of his rum bottle in the smoky light, “that their intestinal lining is wrung out of them, in little bits that resemble grains of starch.”

  “It’s cholera,” said Ben in a whisper.

  The doctor did not deny it.

  CHAPTER 16

  The California departed Panama City before noon.

  Her side wheel thrashed the water, stirring it until it was the color of coffee from silt at the bottom of the harbor. Hundreds of Americans stood on the wharf, waving and cheering halfheartedly, full of hope that another ship would soon set forth for San Francisco.

  Captain Wood had allowed the steamship her full complement of passengers, more than three hundred—already too many for the ship to safely carry—and then allowed nearly one hundred more to clamber up the gangway, hauling trunks and staggering under overstuffed bags.

  Dr. Merrill raised his hat from among the crowd looking up at us from the wharf, giving us as much of a smile as he could manage—he was eager to return to his patients. His small hospital had swelled with patients overnight, and he assured us that he would sail in a week or two, if a ship was available.

  As we had boarded the steamship, the doctor had pressed a flask into my hands. “Dutch gin,” he had said. “Some praise genever as a tonic. You and Ben take a hearty drink of it at the first signs of a fever.” The flask was pewter, and fit snugly in the inner pocket of my coat, right over my heart.

  The word that cholera had been confirmed had not caused panic so much as a determined desire to leave for California at once. Everyone had already guessed that this deadly illness, long the scourge of frontier villages, had taken its place among us. To be able to name it openly was a relief. We had all expected hazards along the journey, and people in towns and cities died of cholera without the least opportunity for adventure.

  We were all quite relieved, however, to be departing the jungle.

  To my happy surprise, Aaron Sweetland continued to show increasing signs of life. Mr. Gill and Mr. Kerr, the lens grinder, handled Mr. Sweetland down into steerage, strapped into a stretcher. Mr. Cowden, the rotund former law student, hovered nearby, keeping overeager fellow passengers from stumbling into the patient.

  Aaron smiled up at me, reaching out his one good hand, and his touch was neither warm nor cold, his fever past. His pupils were huge—the opiates that sustained him and kept him from pain gave him a mild, almost saintly countenance.

  Aaron gave my hand the ghost of a squeeze, and croaked, “We’re off to the Golden Shore!”

  I agreed that indeed we were. Smoke billowed from the tall, shiny black smokestack, and the Stars and Stripes lifted languorously over our wake. Cinders from the smokestack bit our skin and made our eyes smart.

  Stewards descended into the steerage, to help arrange the stowing of mining equipment and clothing. They answered complaints that there ought to be laws against such overcrowding with reasonable humor, and generally held their own against an excited, eager crowd that did not look likely to sleep much during the passage anyway.

  The great vessel began to heave slowly from side to side, and plunged deliberately into the brine, the ocean swells carrying her now. As waves misted over us, the men enjoyed a promenade on deck. At times we were so jammed together, we were unable to turn around without apologizing for treading on a boot.

  The last outline of land sank to the east.

  At twilight of the first day Nicholas Barrymore bumped into me along the rail. The sight of him brought my hand to the handle of my knife, an involuntary gesture.

  It was not lost on him—he crinkled his eyes in a knowing smile. I wanted to ask him if he’d managed to get all of his kin and equipment on board—frying pans, kettles, and thieves. But instead I simply wished him a good evening, like any gentleman out for a promenade downtown, and he greeted me likewise in return.

  I told him that I worked with my hands, too, repairing carriages and guns. “I can do a bit of carpentry, too,” I allowed.

  “I’ll take my chances shoveling Sierra gravel,” he said amiably. “But I respect a young man who can use his hands.”

  “Your entire family is going to the gold country?” I asked, still determined to root out the identity of the thief.

  “Every one of them,” he said. “All but the family dog. The poor mutt died on the way.”

  I made a remark regarding last night’s offer of a cup of coffee.

  “That will be something to look forward to,” he said, cordially enough. “We’ll have a good sit-down talk—when we have the space to stretch out and feel at home.” He looked me in the eye, both kindly and deeply amused. “Willie, I don’t mind telling you that some of my children are little better than rascals.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.” Nevertheless, I couldn’t help feel a stab of compassion for this family man, keeping his tribe fed and out of trouble on this long journey.

  “They are rascals and rapscallions,” he said with an air of cheerful meditation. “But good-hearted young people, nonetheless.”

  “I have no reason to doubt it,” I said. Politeness forced me to exaggerate my faith in his family’s character, but I found myself liking this man and his kin despite myself.

  “I would stay out of their way, though, Willie—if I were you,” said Mr. Barrymore. “Don’t ask too many questions.”

  “I beg your pardon,” I responded with more than a little spirit. I don’t care to be threatened.

  He put a hand out to my arm, with every show of good nature. “What father can tell his children not to sin, and be certain they’ll follow his counsel?”

  Something likable about Mr. Barrymore, some warmth in his nature, continued to keep me from being completely annoyed by him—or intimidated. He was a heavily clawed, shaggy beast who, without ceasing to be a predator, was capable of real friendliness.

  “If I were you,” cautioned the white-haired family man with a chuckle, “I’d stay out of their way.”

  In the forthcoming days I met
every manner of person.

  Men reading volumes of Lord Byron or tuning a violin, men gambling at cards, and some men temporarily paralyzed with hard drink. But my mind kept traveling back to the Barrymores. I found them fascinating, for reasons I could not have named.

  I spied the dark-whiskered man with the long, naked Bowie knife, but I did not see the thief again.

  Not yet.

  CHAPTER 17

  A touch of coolness had slipped into my friendship with Ben.

  We shared a brief sip of Dutch tonic from the pewter flask from time to time, as a defense against illness, but I decided to conserve the liquor, not certain what plagues we might face in the future. Perhaps this touch of abstemiousness annoyed Ben. He was still keen to tell me the names of sea life—porpoises, sharks, and a broad, smooth-skinned creature he said was a ray-fish. But Ben was full of ideas—whether to search for the ore by hand, or find some profitable occupation, one that would earn the wealth that had been discovered by others.

  I still tried to maintain that my major interest in voyaging to California was to find the man who had wronged Elizabeth. It was no longer entirely true. Hour by hour I was beginning to succumb as well, gold fever simmering in my heart. I was as eager as any man to set foot in San Francisco, and find a land or river route up into the Sierra foothills where, even now, men from around the world were digging fortunes right out of the ground.

  Perhaps I was a little envious at the easy way in which Ben found an audience, reciting sonnets and scenes from Shakespeare. Educated and unlettered men alike enjoyed hearing a bit of high culture, and Ben was satisfied to respond—and he was good at it, giving the words just the right color. You could listen to Ben for hours and never get tired.

  On the other hand, I could read a man his own death warrant and make it sound dull.

  The ship’s beef was so tough—and so close to being rotten—that men protested at being served their first portion, certain that some joke was being offered at their expense. Even when we realized that this leathery, rancid fiber was to be standard fare during the voyage, we ate the stuff with a semblance of humor. My fellow voyagers became clever at ruses that improved the food, such as sinking a slice of bread in a weak mixture of rum and water, and waiting as the weevils abandoned the bread only to drown.

  It was possible for a steamer to navigate all the way to San Francisco in well under two weeks—there was talk of ten-day voyages, and even shorter passages. Our voyage, however, was punctuated by a delay off the coast of Mexico. A wood boat out of Mazatlan was scheduled to meet us, but the vessel did not arrive for many hours, while the seas around us grew ugly, laced with froth. Waves crashed over the prow as the side wheel churned to keep us in place. When the wood boat arrived, it was too dangerous for the bargelike craft to approach until late that night, when, in the darkness, the heavy seas subsided.

  Early morning saw ship’s boys gathering gnarled fragments of fuel wood from the deck. Within hours, our first burial at sea took place, within sight of the low hills of the Mexican mainland. A law clerk from New York, this cholera victim was given a solemn burial, the captain officiating.

  No one dared to utter the name of the illness, no doubt praying that some heart ailment or chronic dropsy was to blame for this fatality.

  One night a voice was lifted in song, the hymn about the Rock of Ages.

  It was Aaron Sweetland, singing again, his strength nearly fully returned.

  People from all over the world were pouring into California, by all accounts, and I was not certain that I would be equal to the adventure. In a world of brawn and energy, I was not sure that the habits of steadiness that I had learned repairing harnesses and flintlocks would serve me well on the Golden Shore.

  The two weeks passed. I believed at times that this span of days would never end. Each day was the same, identical twenty-four hours, the same daylight and nighttime repeating over and over, land a faint ghost way off to the east as we steamed north, cinders raining down on us from the smokestack. Only the weather altered, very slightly, fading from robust tropical sun to something less ardent, sunlight slipping from cloud to cloud.

  Perhaps I expected some ceremony, or an announcement from the captain.

  The wind had been growing colder, but the sun was still pleasantly warm as we steamed along a coast of distant cliffs and trees. Men had been whispering, checking and rechecking their mining equipment, shovels brought out and then packed again with the picks and hoes and other tools the shipping companies had sold at a premium.

  One minute we were churning north.

  The next the vessel was heading eastward, the side wheel churning, bits of charcoal falling all the more thickly from the smokestack. We made our way into the waters of a large inlet, tall hills to the north, and a low, sandy shore to the south. Men crowded the starboard rail, already laden with their traveling bags.

  Ben turned to find me in the pack of people against the rail, his eyes ablaze with excitement.

  We had reached the Golden Gate and we were moment by moment closer to San Francisco.

  PART TWO

  BLOOD

  CHAPTER 18

  A year or two before, this city had been a sleepy outpost, a Franciscan mission and a sparse village with a view of empty bay and distant hills. Since the days of the conquistadors, California had been a remote Spanish territory, and then, with Mexican independence in the 1820s, a peaceful province of vast rancheros and poppy fields belonging to Mexico.

  Now San Francisco’s harbor was a crowded tangle of sailing ships, two or three hundred vessels. The skeletons of naked masts and spars resembled a wintry wood. No sailors worked these ships and, save for the creaking grind of hull against hull, nearly all were dead quiet.

  “They are all abandoned,” said a ship’s boy, spitting tobacco juice over the side. “Their crews are off striking it rich.”

  A small steamer, spewing sulfuric smoke, towed us toward the dock, bits of coal grit raining down on us from the diminutive pilot boat. I realized that this was where the California had received the since-repainted scratches along her hull, forcing her way through the abandoned fleet.

  The wharf was a bustling maze of coffee sacks and wooden crates. I had a glimpse through the crowd the gangway disgorged onto the docks of Mr. Gill and Mr. Sweetland, Aaron carrying one arm in a dirty yellow sling and smiling, Mr. Kerr and Mr. Cowden half buried under baggage.

  Then we were lost in the flood of new arrivals. A longshoreman looked right through me—I was invisible. I tried to give him a look right back, unsteady on my legs because of our voyage. A man in a top hat, the first such headgear I had seen in a long while, introduced himself as a hotel agent, and said he could supply “accommodations of every variety.”

  Neither Ben nor I spoke to the gentleman, not because we were discourteous, but because we were momentarily stunned at the scene. The top-hatted gent abandoned us with a tip of his hat, and his business offer was repeated to one disembarking passenger after another.

  I was so accustomed to the dependable, if crowded, nature of shipboard life that the stewing noise of the street bewildered me. I put out a hand to steady my frame on Ben’s shoulder. The buildings along the street were brick, with balconies overlooking a scene hectic with men in a hurry, calling out to each other, clutching papers or valises, no one simply walking along, every individual in a rush. Even the men who labored under loads of sea trunks, helping passengers who had come to an agreement with a hotel agent, went quickly, bent under their loads.

  I made an effort to appear unimpressed, making our way down the middle of the street, each of us carrying one end of our sea-trunk. But this wasn’t an easygoing sort of town, and it was hard to appear carefree holding up one end of a steamer trunk.

  A violent crash froze us.

  CHAPTER 19

  One wagon collided with another, so close to us that a splinter hit Ben’s hat and stuck there.

  The iron wheels locked, and the wooden fellies—the rims
just under the iron—broke with a load crack. Spokes popped out, both wagons instantly crippled, and both Ben and I were surrounded by bits of wagon spokes and shouting men.

  I had spent long hours in the carriage shop on Harrison Street shaping such ash or white oak spokes with a drawshave. I used to help quench the wheels, heating the iron rim and lowering it sizzling and spitting into water. I used to paint the fine red lines on the spokes and polish the brass lamps on either side of the driver’s seat. I helped fit the best Norway iron onto the hub collars, and in every way came to love carriages and wagons.

  I hated to see the sudden wreck that chance had made of two serviceable, if inelegant, mud wagons. Both wagon drivers set their brakes, by habit, brakes being only partially useful in such a situation, and climbed down into the street. Each driver had assistants, boys in oversized, floppy caps, with dirty, hard-looking hands, evidently traveling to help load freight. These helpers leaped down to the muddy street, their fists bunched and ready for a fight.

  Both drivers were equipped with whips. Wagon spokes lay strewn about, and the mules shied nervously, lifting up their hooves and gingerly putting them down the way animals do when they want to run away but are forced to stay put. But the moment of greatest tension seemed about to pass without a blow being struck.

  Without a word of command, the assistants eased the two wagons apart as one of the mules laid back his ears and took a chomp out of a sleeve. Observers laughed, and I had the hopeful intuition that everything was going to be all right.

  It was not the first time I had been badly mistaken.

  The two drivers had plenty of help, men gathering spokes, assistants heaving the wheel rims over to the buildings, where several chairs lined up along the street allowed a few gentlemen a view of the ongoing tumult. One of the drivers, a big man with a bald head and a flowing blond beard, declared, “I don’t like to see a drunken poltroon handle a team of mules in a city street.”