Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  Collis felt as if he were travelling across the surface of some desolate prehistoric world, with only the grating of the buckboard’s wheels and the hot low whistle of the wind to disturb the silence. Up above them, red-tailed hawks turned and turned in the blatant sky.

  But they were making their way up into the mountain now, and the mining valleys were more deeply clefted. The steep sides of the road were bristling with Shasta firs, mountain hemlock, and pines. It grew cooler, and more fragrant, and through the dark trunks of the trees they could make out the peaks of the High Sierras, as white as sugared almonds.

  The mining communities through which they drove were generally no more than a cluster of makeshift cabins, a general store, and a cookhouse-cum-saloon. Bearded men in dusty hats watched them pass. Sometimes they called ‘How d’you do?’ but more often they stayed silent.

  They spent the first night by the side of the road, sleeping on blankets in a stand of Digger pines, with a small fire burning to keep away the wildlife, human or animal. The next morning they led the horses down to a broken flume to drink, and then Collis and Theodore shaved with ice-cold water and soap. Wang-Pu kept his chin clean the Chinese way, by plucking out each hair individually.

  They reached Gold Run, sixty-four miles out of Sacramento, a little before noon. It was sharp and clear up here, and the mountain wind was snapping a flag on a tall flagstaff. The settlement of Gold Run itself was a cosy collection of shacks and cabins in a clearing of pines and sequoias. A wide flume curved in from the mountains and down beyond the trees to the slopes that were Gold Run’s whole reason for being there. Theodore halted the buckboard alongside a rough boundary fence, and they all climbed down.

  A toothless man with a grey beard was leaning against the door of the cookhouse. Thick smoke issued from the tin chimney, and there was a rich, greasy smell of stew. The old man was whistling between his gums and spitting from time to time on to the pine needles.

  ‘Sharp morning,’ he remarked, as they tied up their horses and walked over towards him.

  ‘Good for the lungs, after the valley,’ said Theodore. ‘How far is it to Dutch Flat?’

  ‘In a hurry, or dawdling?’

  ‘Shortest time possible.’

  The old man looked over his shoulder into the cookhouse to make sure the food wasn’t bubbling over. Then he said, ‘Not more’n two hours. Lookin’ for anyone special?’

  ‘Daniel Kates, as a matter of fact,’ said Theodore.

  ‘Doc Kates? You ain’t sick, are you?’

  ‘No, no. This is just business.’

  ‘That’s okay then. But you can’t be too careful. Had a whole bout of cholera last year. Fellows was dropping like fir cones.’

  Collis looked into the smokey interior of the cookhouse. There were rows of cleavers hanging up, and a large smoke-blackened cauldron boiling over a brick range. He sniffed in the aroma of the stew.

  ‘Smells good,’ he told the old man. ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘The usual.’

  ‘What’s the usual?’

  ‘Well, I got twenty-two men to feed, barring myself. That works out at eleven squirrels, two jays, a couple of nutcrackers, and eight pounds of greens.’

  Collis nodded. He suddenly didn’t feel so hungry any more. ‘You take the tails and the beaks off before you start cooking, I hope?’

  The old man spat. ‘Sometimes. Did today. Want some?’

  ‘No, thanks. Thanks all the same.’

  They did accept the old man’s offer of hot coffee, however. They took their chipped enamel mugs to the edge of the treeline and looked down while they sipped the black, bitter brew at the gold miners working on the slopes. At the top of the slope, the water from the wooden flume was directed into a tall slatted box, and from the bottom of the box came a long canvas hose, which looped its way down the rocks to a man standing at the foot of the hill. He was gripping a brass nozzle at the end of the hose, and spraying the gold-bearing gravel away from the rock face.

  ‘You see that jet of water?’ said the old man, coming up behind them. ‘That’s so goddam powerful that if a fellow stood in front of that, it could cut him in half.’

  ‘Thanks for the warning,’ said Collis.

  After they’d emptied the dregs of their coffee on the ground and tipped the old man a dollar, they untied the horses and climbed aboard their wagon again. They clattered out of Gold Run and continued to climb through the pine forests towards Dutch Flat. A chilly breeze began to blow, and Collis buttoned up his coat.

  ‘Did you ever do any surveying up this way before?’ Collis asked Theodore.

  Theodore shook his head. ‘A little. Not much. I’ve been along the Carson River, and down along the south shore of Lake Bigler, and back to Sacramento through Carson Pass, but I must admit I gave this whole area up. I kind of assumed that the Donner Pass was the best corridor there was, north of the Lake, and when you’ve seen it for yourself you’ll understand why I wasn’t too hopeful. It’s even worse in the middle of winter, of course.’

  They came through a small stand of pines, and there was Dutch Flat – a small dusty community with one wide street, and a flagpole, and that abandoned silence that always characterised a mining town whose veins had given out. The sound of their buckboard wheels seemed unnaturally loud and intrusive, although as they came closer they could hear a baby crying somewhere, and the uneven tinkling of an upright piano.

  It wasn’t difficult to locate Daniel Kates’s drugstore. It was one of the few two-storey buildings along the street, and there were five or six men sitting on the stoop outside, a couple of white-bearded old-timers, and a man with a drooping moustache who had his scruffy shoes propped up against one of the veranda’s white-painted uprights. Two or three children in leggings and long dresses were playing hopscotch in the dust. From the top of the veranda, a makeshift pole stuck out over the street, and suspended from this was a large apothecary’s pestle, painted gold. On the store windows, gold lettering announced, ‘Drugs, Toilet Articles, Notions’, and there were enamelled advertisements for Star Tobacco around the door.

  Wang-Pu tethered the horses while Theodore and Collis went into the drugstore. It was cool and dim inside, with glass-fronted counters and cabinets, and it smelled of barley sugar and peppermint and oil of cloves. Each cabinet was crowded with patent preparations, like Dr Griffith’s Toothache Remedy, and Hard Water Cocoa Soap, and Eastman’s Camphor Ice; and along the back shelves were glass jars of rock candy, green and orange and red, and preparations for the ladies, like White Lily Face Wash (contains no lead, arsenic, or bismuth). Behind the counter was a short, ruddy-faced man with eyeglasses and a white apron. He had full whiskers, once fair but now almost white, and bulging blue eyes. He looked like the kind of man who would take no nonsense, and listen to no slander, and who would always be ready to pack his medical bag and come out to help you, even in the coldest of winters.

  ‘Mr Kates?’ Collis said.

  ‘Doc Kates to most people,’ said the drugstore proprietor. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘I’m Collis Edmonds, of the Sierra Pacific Railroad Company. This is Theodore Jones, the railroad engineer. And this is Wang-Pu, our assistant.’

  Doc Kates came around the counter and grasped Collis by the hand. Then he shook Theodore’s hand, and Wang-Pu’s, and his whiskers bristled with confidence and pleasure.

  ‘Am I glad you gentlemen came! I was beginning to doubt you would. After all, we’re pretty small beer up here in Dutch Flat. Not much of a mining town any more. Not much of anything, to tell you the truth. How would you like a fruit soda? Or maybe something stronger?’

  ‘I could use a beer,’ said Collis.

  ‘I have a keg of North Beach steam out in back. Listen, why don’t I get my boy to mind the store while we talk? I can’t tell you how glad I am that you came.’

  Doc Kates’s ‘boy’ turned out to be his thirty-year-old son, taller and darker than he was, but with the same style of whiskers, and the same straig
htforward friendliness. He tied on a striped apron while Doc Kates led them into a small parlour in the back, and invited them to sit down at a kitchen table laid with a green gingham cloth. Through the windows, Collis could see a long sloping garden where pieces of white cloth fluttered to keep the birds away from the vegetables, and beyond that, the beginnings of a dense pine wood. Doc Kates drew them each a glass mug of steam, and then sat down himself.

  ‘I didn’t know whether you’d credit my story or not, that was the trouble,’ he told Theodore. ‘You can ask any of the old miners around here about ways through the High Sierras, and sure, they know hundreds of ways. They know passes you could stroll through in your shirtsleeves, pushing a baby in a perambulator. But you ask them where to locate these passes, and suddenly they get a little vague. Oh, it was a long time ago. Or, oh, it must’ve been snowed under by now. Or, oh, there was a heavy rock fall, and I guess the pass is blocked.’

  ‘Most of the experts in the East say there isn’t any way for a railroad track to come through the Sierra Nevada at all,’ Collis said.

  Doc Kates drank some beer, which left foam on his whiskers. ‘Well, that’s what I thought. But a year back, I took to going out on foot and exploring. I did it because I enjoyed it. The folks around here are pretty much dependent on having me around, in case someone needs a tooth pulled, or a broken ankle set, or a baby delivered. So now and again it’s good to get out on your own, where you don’t have to worry about measles and sore throats and labour pains. It’s real peaceful when you’re walking across the mountains. You’ll see for yourself. Nothing but you and all those peaks, and maybe the North Fork rushing through the valley beneath you.’

  ‘You sound like a man of inner tranquillity,’ said Wang-Pu.

  Doc Kates smiled. ‘Well, I guess you could say that. But I’m a man who cares for his town, too, and apart from taking walks for the pleasure of it, I made a real effort to look for a better pass across the Sierras. I thought to myself, if Dutch Flat is going to die out because she’s running short on gold, then there’s only one way to revive her, and that’s to link her up with Nevada Territory, and make her a staging post between the silver mines and Sacramento.’

  ‘So you looked,’ said Theodore. ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘Just what I said in my letter. A pass through the mountains that’s level, and not too winding, and certainly wide enough for a wagon road.’

  ‘You can negotiate gradients and bends in a wagon that a locomotive could never cope with,’ said Theodore.

  ‘Well, I know that,’ replied Doc Kates. ‘And that’s why I asked you to come up here and give me a professional opinion. I’d like to think a railroad could run through here. It would do a hell of a lot for Dutch Flat. But I don’t have any expertise as far as surveying goes, none at all, and what looks to me like a railroad bed might not look like anything to you.’

  ‘Can you spare the time to guide us?’ asked Collis. ‘The railroad company will offset your costs.’

  ‘You don’t have to pay me,’ Doc Kates told him. ‘If the pass that I’ve discovered is suitable for running a railroad through, that’s reward enough for me. When do you want to leave?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ said Collis.

  ‘Well, that’s pretty short notice. I’ll have to see if Nathan can look after the store. But I guess it’s okay in principle. Yes, I guess so.’

  ‘What’s the weather like up there?’ asked Theodore.

  ‘Patchy. There’s been some early snow. It’s over seven thousand feet above sea level when you get to the top, so I hope you’ve brought yourselves some warm clothes. It might be fall down in Sacramento, but it’s already winter up here.’

  ‘We’re prepared,’ said Collis.

  ‘The Donner party were prepared in ’forty-six,’ Doc Kates reminded him. ‘One of our old-timers here found the bodies, and it was pitiful.’

  Wang-Pu said quietly, ‘There is a saying in Peking that if your path takes you into the mouth of a tiger, then all you can do is pray that he does not close his jaws.’

  Doc Kates let them use two of his upstairs rooms to unload their blankets and their supplies. There were two narrow beds up there, and a sagging sofa, and out of the windows they could see the forests and the distant snow-capped summit of Mount Rose.

  They took off their shoes and relaxed for an hour, and then Doc Kates came up and knocked on their door and invited them out to meet some of the citizens of Dutch Flat. It was an idle, social afternoon. They called in on Mrs Fitzpatrick, who had come to California six years ago, and lived for a while in Yankee Jims before Mr Fitzpatrick had been unjustly accused of stealing another man’s gold, and had had his ears cut off, and then been shot down. She gave them coffee and sugar cakes, and the crumbs that were left on the table she gathered in her apron and shook out in the yard for her chickens.

  They sat on a log under the shade of the pines and talked to old Wallis, a forty-niner whose face was as soft and brown and wrinkled as an overripe pear; and he talked of the days when Auburn used to be called Rich Dry Diggings, and when men had been disembowelled with shovels in a fight over who should pan gold from a dry creek bed. ‘Them were rough days,’ said old Wallis, ‘but they won’t come back no more.’

  At evening, they gathered on the veranda of the drugstore and listened to one of the old-timers reading from a Book of Wonders about the camel, which the author proclaimed ‘the ugliest animal I ever saw’. The wind blew through the pines, and Doc Kates rocked himself backwards and forwards in a rocking-chair, until it was too dusky to read any more, and everybody went back to his home for supper, and bed.

  It was overcast the next morning when they set off. The mountains were deep green, and crowned with clouds. They wore their knapsacks strapped to their backs, and they were all dressed in warm coats, gloves, and walking-boots. Only Wang-Pu insisted on retaining his tall hat. ‘I am a gentleman at all times,’ he said. ‘Even in the mountains.’

  From Dutch Flat, the trail rose steadily. The north fork of the American River glittered through the trees to their right, and the South Yuba River lay somewhere off to their left, so they were climbing a natural granite ramp between the two, all that remained of a prehistoric peneplain. As they walked, the cloud cover gradually thinned, and, by noon, when they were nearly fifteen hundred feet above the valley of the American River, they were red-faced and sweating and almost ready to give in. They stopped on a high rocky bluff, and took off their knapsacks, and passed around a bottle of water, and a flask of whisky.

  ‘From here on, it starts getting harder,’ said Doc Kates, unwrapping a loaf of sourdough bread and a piece of bright-yellow cheese. ‘If you look down there, you can see where we’ve come from, up from the Flat, and if you look over your shoulder, you can see where we’re going to, right up to the crest at the old emigrant pass.’

  Collis shielded his eyes from the grey glare of the sun. Ahead of them, mantled in pines, the Sierra Nevada waited in imperious silence. They were so high, so massive, so dark, that as the clouds drifted past their peaks, it seemed as if the whole world was turning under Collis’s feet.

  Neither Collis nor Theodore talked much as they rested. They drank, and ate their bread, and then they gathered up their baggage and set out again. Throughout the afternoon they climbed higher and higher, until they began to see mountain peaks topped with snow, and the wind began to blow uncomfortably cold. Collis pulled on his gloves and turned up the collar of his coat.

  ‘It’s been real cold this year,’ said Doc Kates. His breath was smoking in the dusky evening air. ‘I got myself caught in a snowstorm already, and damned near froze to death. If you’re going to build a railroad through here, you’re going to have to keep the line clear with snowsheds, especially in the valleys, where it drifts.’

  Theodore had lagged behind as they climbed towards Lake Valley and into the forests, but every twenty minutes or so he’d been jotting notes into a small dog-eared pad, and pausing to read the temperature
and the altitude. ‘It looks pretty good so far,’ he said, peering up towards the summit. The crests of the mountains were sparkling in the light of the dying day, as if they’d been sifted with frosting. The sky behind them, though, was sullen and grey, and the wind was rising.

  They spent the first night at Bradley Hay Camp, a motley collection of pine huts which had long been abandoned to squirrels, decay, and curious bears. Collis swallowed a cupful of warmed-over broth, ham and split-pea, which Doc Kates had cooked up the evening before; and then he folded together a makeshift bed out of blankets in the corner of a hut and went to sleep. Doc Kates slept over on the other side of the hut, snoring deeply.

  In the middle of the night, Collis was woken up by a door banging. He lay on his back for almost an hour, listening to the wind and the sounds of the forest. He felt closer to God up here in the mountains, for some reason he couldn’t explain to himself. It wasn’t just the altitude, or the silence. Perhaps he was getting closer to what God had always wanted him to do.

  They left Bradley Hay Camp the next morning a few minutes before eight. Theodore wrote that down in pencil in his logbook. ‘7.56, Hay Camp, Therm 39, Aneroid 24.00.’ It was even colder than the previous day, and for the first two or three hours of their walk, they were soaked by fine, persistent rain. They trudged miserably up the muddy, uneven trail, through fir trees that were beaded with silvery wet, up slippery outcroppings of rock, and all around them the mountains were hidden behind pearl-grey curtains of drifting mist.

  The rain cleared towards lunchtime, and at 12.23, with the thermometer at 43 and the barometer at 23.77, they stopped on a windy ridge overlooking the deep valley of the American River and ate sausage and bread. Doc Kates, with his mouth full, said, ‘Fine view from here, what d’you think?’