Blood Gold

by Michael Cadnum

  “Who are they?” he asked.

  CHAPTER 36

  Jeremiah offered us some of his very hot coffee well before dawn, thickened as before with brown sugar. Johnny and I swallowed gratefully, although the stuff was nearly too hot to consume.

  I was shivering, and stiff from lying on the ground, and I felt eager to hurry upriver to Spanish Bar. At the same time I wanted to stay where I was, in the crackling warmth of Jeremiah’s campfire. I was finding Jeremiah a good companion—steady, alert, measuring out his words.

  He searched in the tent, and brought out a coarse horsehide sheath. He gave it to Johnny, who accepted the gift with wide eyes.

  “Take her out and heft her,” said Jeremiah.

  A brilliant Bowie knife gleamed in the faint early light.

  “I can’t keep it,” protested Johnny.

  “Then bring her back,” said Jeremiah cheerfully, “when you’re done with her.”

  This puzzled Johnny. “When will that be?” he asked.

  Jeremiah smiled, but his eyes were quiet—even somber.

  Jeremiah said it was only three miles to Spanish Bar, “but hard going in the rocks, unless you’re a goat.”

  A mist had risen over the river in the early-morning hours, a shadowy river of fog that filled the mountain canyons on either side. Small birds with flashing white tail feathers darted among the red branches of the underbrush. Jays fluttered and squalled in the tall, mist-shrouded pines. It wasn’t the first time I realized how sharp-edged and rough the ridges and vegetation of this land were, compared with the dales and barrens of the East.

  Johnny swaggered along beside me, his hand going to the hilt of our recent acquisition, drawing it experimentally. It was still dark in the shadows of the huge boulders along the river.

  “That’s quite a knife,” I said, wanting to tell my young companion, without alarming him, that he should appreciate the quality, weight, and beauty of his unexpected possession.

  I reasoned that he might need it soon.

  CHAPTER 37

  It was full morning when we arrived. The shadows were still cold, but the sun was hard off the stones, and glittered off the rills of white water.

  Spanish Bar was a long spit of black sand, jutting out into the current. The river made a constant, low rumble, coursing over boulders.

  One long tent, flaps wide open to the river, glowed in the brilliant daylight. But some more-or-less permanent structures had been erected, too, shacks and leantos of white pine timbers. An arm of the river had been diverted by an improvised dam of gravel. The earth all around was so pitted and delved that any hasty progress across it would risk injury.

  I crouched beside the river trail and eyed the camp. I had promised myself I would confront Ezra with my news before I uttered a word of greeting. I had dreamed of accusing him of betraying Elizabeth, uttering false promises, and leaving her to be scandalized by her condition.

  But at this last moment I was grateful to have made it to this place safely, hopeful that I could preserve Ezra’s life.

  Johnny made a tiny whisper of impatience through his teeth. “Go on up, Willie,” he urged me, “and let them know you’re here.”

  I thought of a dozen greetings, and imagined lifting a full-voiced call over the sound of the river.

  To my surprise, Johnny gave a whistle. This was a sharp, keen sound, heart-stopping so close. Even a deaf man would hear such a shrill, piercing sound.

  Johnny lowered his gaze in apology, but I nudged him. “Try it again.”

  No one moved from within a tent. Only the faintest thread of smoke lifted from the fire, where a black kettle hung over half-charred wood. This late in the morning, work should be under way, pick hammers flashing.

  “Ezra!”

  It was my voice, adding to the intermittent shrill of Johnny’s whistling. I willed my imagination into hearing his response as I stood and took a tentative step forward.

  Willie Dwinelle, is that you?

  I wanted to hear the words so badly. Every man’s speech got honed down out here in California, fancy talk giving way to a masculine flatness of tone and phrasing. But we were a sentimental lot, too, and old friends shouted greetings and wept with joy, hugging each other after long absence, and every night we had heard singing in the distance, romantic songs about long-lost loves.

  Ezra and I would throw our arms around each other. I blinked tears of relief and anticipatory joy at the thought of seeing him, newly bearded and sun-tanned but decidedly his usual, jaunty self, stepping out from the tent right ahead of me. Of course I could not raise a fist against the fellow, and of course he would be the Ezra Nevin I had always known him to be in the old days—a gentleman.

  Johnny followed, our boots crunching across the dug-up gravel. I was brimming over with my tidings: Elizabeth expecting a baby, Ezra needed back home, honor requiring him to return at once.

  God, it would be good to see him. I wished Ben could be here, too, so we could all trade laughing tales of travel and adventure.

  I stopped still. I put out a hand and stopped Johnny in his tracks.

  “Wait here,” I said.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Johnny.

  But he stayed where he was, frozen by the tone of my voice.

  I went forward to the tent, and looked in. I straightened at once.

  I considered what I had just seen.

  “William, what is it?” asked Johnny in a voice nearly lost in the roar of the river. I read his eyes, touched with fear, and put my hand out.

  Wait.

  While I steeled my will to look again at what I had seen, telling myself that I had to be mistaken.

  CHAPTER 38

  The interior of the tent had been torn up.

  A portable writing desk had been wrenched open, journal pages—dates and neat, brown-inked entries—ripped and scattered. A telescope had been thrown out of its black leather case, and thick canvas miner’s trousers sprawled all over the bedding. A one-ounce gold scale lay beside a smashed strongbox, a few scant grains gleaming where treasure had spilled—and someone had scooped most of it up.

  Whoever had done this, I reasoned when I could think at all, was not only a killer. He was also a thief.

  As though that distinction mattered. I had seen the red splatter, all over the place, but deliberately did not look directly at the source. I put that event off for a few heartbeats. Blood was everywhere, I had observed that much. It was up along the sides of the tent, along with bits of hair, and something else—dark matter. It was all fresh, flies just now discovering the gore.

  I could not wait any longer.

  I forced myself. I looked, and glanced away immediately. A man lay arms every-which-way, legs sprawled out, his features largely obliterated. I felt some inner resolve leave me and I made myself look yet again.

  I left the tent and made my way to Johnny.

  Suddenly I hated the up-and-down terrain of this landscape. Goldfields had conjured a vision of pastoral fortune hunting, low hills and sparkling nuggets. This campsite was narrow, like so many others, surrounded on three sides by steep, forested mountainside. Unseen eyes could be studying us, even now.

  “I want you to head on back to Jeremiah Barrymore,” I said. I had to stop then and steady my voice.

  “What is it?” asked Johnny.

  I tried to prevent him, but he rushed forward, stooped and looked inside.

  He was breathing hard, too, when he stood upright again, stiff and hearing me without responding.

  “Run back,” I told him, “and get Jeremiah.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Tell him to bring his shotgun,” I continued, “and all the buckshot he can carry.”

  Johnny stayed right where he was.

  I deeply regretted bringing him here, so close to danger.

  He shook his head: Wait.

  I understood Johnny’s need to observe it again, bending low to confirm what he had seen.

  “Go on, Johnny,” I urged hi
m.

  “Who is that?” he asked.

  I was trembling. It didn’t seem that human speech could be possible at such a time. I said, “I believe it’s Andrew Follette. Ezra Nevin’s friend.”

  I had scarcely known him. He’d been a young man fond of French cordials and well-bred hunting dogs, I had heard—the perfect companion for Ezra.

  “Whoever did this will get me, too,” Johnny said when he could speak again. He looked years younger suddenly, a pale and unsteady child.

  “The killers don’t want to hurt you,” I said, in a voice hearty with false confidence. I wanted Johnny away from that camp, safely downriver.

  “They’ll run me down,” he said.

  I put my two hands on his shoulders, looking him straight in the eye. “Then you better be fast.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Johnny fled downriver, and I wondered if I should have left with him. I was afraid of what else I might discover in the camp.

  It did not take long. I spied what looked like a pair of trousers tossed down, by the edge of the claim. As I approached I had to stop and check my knife in its scabbard. I took one step, and then another, aware as I drew near that I was closing in on a human body, arms flung, face turned away like a man receiving a slap.

  He lay flat on the ground, eyes half open. I had heard that dead people resemble sleepers. He didn’t. I felt that I had to touch the corpse, to let him know, in some irrational way, that someone with good sense had found him. His hand was not warm, but it was not cold, either. It was wrapped around a miner’s pick, a tool with a sharp spike at one end of its iron head and a flat, hoelike blade on the other. The spike was bloody.

  One side of his face was lathered with still-drying soap. This attracted my eye only after I had caught a glimpse of the ugly rent in his clothing, something I did not want to examine right away. I took a breath, steadied my nerve, and took it all in.

  In the breast of his well-knit, fawn yellow waistcoat was a dark hole, perfectly round. The bullet hole was seared all around, the woolen fibers black and frizzled. I stood over the young gentleman—the man Elizabeth had loved—and I wept.

  The top of his head was gone, the skin of his forehead seared, a round hole just below the hairline. The pistol barrel had pressed against his head—the killer had taken extra care to make sure Ezra was dead. I was furious with myself. If only I had pushed on through the night, and had not lingered by Jeremiah’s cheering fire, digesting a belly full of bacon. Even as Johnny and I sat savoring morning coffee, Ezra had lost his life.

  Now falling stones whispered, shards and splinters of quartz-rich rock tumbling down from above. I blotted my tears on my sleeve and headed upward, through the boulders. A woodpecker squalled, hiding higher in the sweeping pine branches, and the perfume of woodland surrounded me.

  I scrambled, climbing higher up the ridge, the sharp pink-white gravel cutting my fingers, following a trail of blood.

  CHAPTER 40

  Never before in my life had I felt such fear of solitude.

  The days of my boyhood, classrooms and Sunday church, were more remote to me now than the stories of Noah and his Ark and Moses and the Burning Bush. I had always liked my neighbors and my friends, but now I felt a stab of need—a sharp, inner longing for the company of good-hearted people.

  This was rank wilderness. No painter in oils or watercolor would ever be able to depict such a woodland—there was nothing pretty about it. But there was something rough and breathtaking about the landscape, a quality beyond poetry. Pines with red-scaled bark speared upward, and sharp-crusted lichen cloaked the rocks. If only I had lingered there with a few companions, I would have considered the vista beautiful.

  Somebody just ahead of me had left a trail of blood, drops of darkening scarlet in the coarse-grained soil.

  But I caught no sight of my quarry, the brush ahead quiet and unstirred in the warm, late-morning sun. And the bleeding was slowing down, and ceasing altogether, judging by the smaller and more subtle evidence on the pine needles as I clambered over a ridge, and looked down on a mountainous scene.

  Elizabeth used to recite poems, fine verses by Keats and Shelley, and I had once imagined myself cresting peaks in far-off continents, an exploring adventurer like stout Cortez. Now I continued to wish I could be far from this rugged wasteland, right in the middle of some slow and smoky town.

  At that moment I saw one of them.

  He was curled into a ball at the foot of a moss-cloaked tree, and at first I was certain he was dead.

  But at the sound of my step he tried to raise up into a sitting position. All anger left me for the moment, seeing a fellow creature so badly hurt. I reached for the flask at my breast, thinking that I would offer him a sip of juniper spirits, but he produced a knife and made an effort to climb to his feet.

  “They’re after you, Murray!” he called out.

  He sank down again and then, like a dog too weary to do more than curl up, he fell to his side.

  When I knelt to help him, he said, weakly, “Don’t!”

  I reassured the injured man that I would not hurt him. He said again, faintly, “No, damn you.”

  At last I realized that he meant: Don’t touch me.

  Leave me alone.

  When I glanced back at him, he had taken on an awkward stillness I could not mistake for life.

  I tried to climb upward. The mountain was composed of crumbling granite, crisscrossed by strata of hard, glittering quartz. In places the weathered, mealy granite bits were held together by the black roots of pines, and I clung to these roots as I climbed upward, my fingertips raw.

  When I began to slip downward it was a matter of simple inertia, my weight dragging me. But soon there was a small avalanche cascading down, grains of granite down my shirtfront, and when I tried to seize a root, it slipped free of my grasp. On my helpless way down I passed the body, with its look of rapt astonishment, and I wished for my sake that his last words had not been a curse.

  I did, in truth, feel close to being damned. With the logic of an event that had happened long ago, I felt my boots shoot out over nothingness, and my body fold around the hard edge of a precipice.

  All around me a fan of tumbling stone, skittering down and past me. I could not brake my momentum—I was falling, too, over the root-slashed ledge.

  Into empty space.

  CHAPTER 41

  I scrabbled, clawing at the rocky surface and the embedded pine roots. I hung on.

  But I knew that if I moved again, or even took a deep breath, I would plummet.

  I flung one leg up over the granite precipice, the stone warm with morning sunlight, and said, out loud, “That’s enough.”

  I can stay like this forever.

  I gathered my strength, trying to meditate on the sparkling granite and the red, searching figures of the ants just a few inches from where I clung. When I felt steady and determined, I extended my hand, feeling for invisible cracks and imperfections that would support me. To my surprise, I breathed no pious prayer during that long moment, nor did I envision the gentle eyes of Elizabeth back home. No grand hymn echoed in my breast.

  I thought of Florence.

  I held on to a sweeping, fragrant pine bough, and rolled my glance back at the abyss I had just escaped. The void was much shallower than I had sensed, but still enough to break bones, a slope of granite shingle that flowed all the way to the mining claim with its tent and improvised wooden shacks.

  I had held on, and I had survived. A sensation of shaky relief, and even triumph, swept me. And the sight of the camp inspired a moment of reverie, the small improvised buildings, nailed upright with the bark still on the lumber. They were like the make-believe dwellings a child might assemble on a rainy day, out of splinters and toothpicks, safe and imaginary—except for the crumpled figure of Ezra Nevin, just visible among the stones.

  I was more careful, now, clinging hard to roots, embracing trees, gauging each toehold. A late-season wasp settled down over the remai
ns of the unhappy man as I passed him again, the insect perhaps mistaking blood for blossoms.

  I paused once to empty sand and pea-gravel out of my boots. I was just beginning to feel like my normal self, and wished I had a plug of apple-cured tobacco to chew. I labored hard, and as quickly as I was able, and at last stood on a ridge. And immediately fell to one knee behind a tangle of brush.

  Just ahead of me sat Samuel Murray.

  He was a haggard, whiskery copy of himself, garbed in a thick, loose-fitting coat, his red hair uncombed.

  He knelt on a rocky ridge well ahead, in a sandy clearing, pouring powder from a flask into a pistol barrel. Another pistol gleamed on the ground beside him. When I tucked behind a tree, and eased out my head just a little bit, I could easily spy his companion—a large man with the weathered look of a laborer, missing many teeth.

  The two of them were a long stone’s throw away, and even at this height the ceaseless rushing of the river below masked the sound of my steps as I hurried forward. Murray plied a ramrod, stuffing the black powder down the muzzle of his pistol.

  I lost sight of them as I snaked through the bronze branches of the underbrush, twigs snatching at my clothes. Climbing forward on all fours, I powered ahead.

  Pine scales clung to me, branches seizing my limbs as I hurried. The vegetation could not impede me. I was intent on nothing but sinking my knife into Murray, and I had to make haste, because when he got the pistol in his hands loaded and cocked, he would be dangerous again.

  But at the same time I mocked my own fears. I had spooked myself down there on the mountainside, convinced that I had been a heartbeat away from destruction. Surely I was foolish to be so afraid.

  I strode quickly into the clearing, hastily rehearsed greetings running through my mind. I realized too late that I had misjudged Murray’s readiness.

  There was a lead pistol ball the size of a chestnut in his fingers, and he was just beginning to poke it down the barrel. But at the sight of me he interrupted the procedure. He reached for the other gun, on the pine needles beside him. He cocked it.