Comstock Lode

by Louis L'Amour

  Alfie—she did not want to think about Alfie. She had half persuaded herself she was in love with him, but when she warned him of Mousel, he had laughed, skeptical of her fears. She saw him now for the shoddy, third-rate sort of man he was. She had been in a fair way to make as serious a mistake as her mother, marrying to escape.

  Later, she asked Trevallion, “Why do they call Cornishmen ‘Cousin Jacks’?”

  “They say if you hire one Cornishman he will immediately tell you about his Cousin Jack, who is a good miner and hunting a job, and soon the Cousin Jacks have all the jobs.”

  “They must be good miners.”

  “Generally speaking they don’t know much else. When I was six, I was working in a tin mine picking waste rock out of the ore. Then pa took me out, and I worked with fishermen until I was eleven, then back to the mines.”

  Melissa glanced at him slyly. “My grandfather used to say the people of Cornwall were wreckers. That they used to display lights to lure ships on the rocks so they could loot the ships.”

  “It might have happened,” Trevallion said, “long, long ago. Usually they just claimed what was washed ashore. In fact, there’s a story in the family that that was how my great-grandfather got his wife. He helped her ashore from a wreck and claimed her for his own.”

  “And she stayed with him?”

  “By all accounts they were a happy pair. He was a fine, upstanding young man, considered very handsome. When I was a child, there were still things in the house that had been hers, things saved from the wreck.”

  Ledbetter turned in his saddle. “We’ll stop at Dirty Mike’s. We’ve made good time, and Mike serves the best grub. Only trouble is the people come and go so fast he never takes time to wash the dishes. Complain about them and you’ll go hungry.”

  A rider on a fine bay horse was overtaking them. He was a tall, strikingly handsome man with a blonde mustache, and as he came abreast he glanced sharply at Trevallion, then looked a second time, frowning a little. He spoke to his horse then, and rode rapidly away.

  “That man knew you,” Melissa said.

  “Aye,” Trevallion agreed. “I believe he did.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Dirty Mike’s was a ramshackle place of stained canvas and poles. The few tables with benches were already crowded, and men were scattered over the grass, eating from tin plates, dishes of chipped enamel, or heavy crockery.

  “Must be three or four hundred,” Ledbetter said, “about average for this time of day, and this season.”

  He pointed. “Look at ’em.” His disgust was evident. “Ain’t one in ten knows what he’s after or would know a color if they saw it. They’ll spend all they bring with them, and here or there a few will make a little. Most of them will jump at the chance to move on to any other boom camp, always ready to believe the pot of gold is right over yonder, but they want to stumble over it, not work for it. Most of them are looking for something easy, something to find or steal, or what’s offered on a platter.”

  “There’s good men among them,” Trevallion said.

  “Aye. That there is.”

  “And there are some women over there,” Melissa said.

  “They aren’t your kind,” Trevallion replied. “Fight shy of them. If you’re seen with them, you’re likely to be taken for one of them. Just stay away from them.”

  “Do you think that’s fair?”

  “We’re not talking about what’s fair or unfair. We’re talking realities. Some of those women would lend you their last dollar or nurse you if you were sick, but there’s others would steal the fillings from your teeth or give you a knife in the ribs for what’s in your pockets.”

  The area was incredibly dirty. Horses and mules were tied to brush or trees, others were picketed. Here and there a wagon was drawn up and all the spaces between were crowded with men in every possible costume. Coonskin caps, Mexican sombreros, old Army hats or caps, silk hats, beaver hats, and battered woolen hats…men in frock coats, sailor’s jackets, fringed buckskin, and homespun.

  There were men from all the world, sailors who had deserted their ships, adventurers, drifters, ne’er-do-wells, and mining men. Men who had worked the Mother Lode or were rebounding from the disaster on the Frazier River.

  A crude bar, a plank laid across barrel-tops, was lined three deep with men practicing for the saloons of Washoe. Several monte games were going, and at one of them somebody asked, “What’s Washoe?”

  “It’s a place, a place where the mines are. It’s a lake, too, named for a tribe of Indians.”

  “Indians? You mean there’s real Indians?”

  “Aplenty. Take your hair, too, given a chance.”

  “Naw,” somebody interrupted. “Rob you, maybe. Even kill you, but these Injuns don’t take hair.”

  A burly man with unshaven cheeks and a ragged beard as well as foodstains on his checkered vest pushed up to Trevallion. “Mister, I’ve got a claim I can let you have for the right price.” With a glance to left and right he leaned closer, his breath smelling of whiskey. “This here’s a steal for the right man. I won’t sell to just anybody, but you look the right sort.” He coughed effectively. “I’m a sick man. Located the best claim on the lode but can’t stand the weather. Got to get back to the coast. Like leavin’ my own private mint, it is. I’ve been lookin’ for just the right man—”

  “Keep looking,” Trevallion said, brushing by.

  The man swore bitterly, then reached for Melissa. “Ma’am, I tell you this here—”

  “Leave her alone,” Trevallion said.

  The man’s eyes turned mean. “Listen, mister—”

  “The lady is with me,” Trevallion said.

  “ ‘Lady’!” The man sneered. “Why, she ain’t no more a—”

  Trevallion knocked him down. It was a backhanded blow, almost casual, but the man’s heels flew up and he landed on his back in the mud, lips broken and bloody.

  He started to get up but someone hissed, “Stay down, you fool! That’s Trevallion!”

  Trevallion took Melissa’s elbow and guided her through the crowd. “There’s always somebody who hasn’t learned how to behave.”

  He took her to the counter and men, seeing a woman, crowded back and made a place for her.

  “Mike?”

  The rough-looking man standing over the fire with a long spoon in his hand turned impatiently. When he saw Trevallion he smiled. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Trevallion.” He glanced at Melissa. “What can I do for you?”

  “Some grub. Whatever you’ve got. And Mike? Two clean plates.”

  Mike chuckled. “Wouldn’t do it for anybody but you, Mr. Trevallion. Why, I’ve fed five, maybe six hundred so far today, and if the pack train doesn’t get here, folks are goin’ hungry tomorrow.”

  Taking two plates he sloshed them around in what appeared to be relatively clean water, then polished them with a dry cloth he took from under the counter.

  “Beef an’ beans, and there’s some dried apples left.” He glanced at Trevallion. “You two travelin’ alone?”

  “We’re with Jim Ledbetter.”

  “One o’ the best, Jim is.” Mike heaped the plates. “You prospectin’ or hirin’ out?”

  “There’s a place up there I want to look at again, if somebody hasn’t beaten me to it. I thought I’d placer awhile until I can look the situation over.”

  Mike glanced around, then in a lower tone. “You be careful. There’s been a man or two askin’ after you. I didn’t much like their looks.”

  “Thanks, Mike.”

  Mike glanced at Melissa. “Not much up there for a decent woman, nor any place to live.” He filled two mugs with coffee and took them to a table inside his cooking tent. “Sit here,” he said. He looked at Melissa again. “Ma’am? Can you bake? Pies, doughnuts an’ such?”

  “I can.
”

  “That’s it, then. These men can’t get enough of such truck. I’d hire you on m’self but you’d do better on the Washoe. You bake pies an’ you can get whatever you ask for ’em. They’re hungry for home cookin’, sweets, an’ such.”

  “All right.”

  “You’ll be rich, ma’am. You’ll make more money than if you had some feet in the richest claim on the Comstock.”

  “The Comstock?”

  “That’s what they call the lode. Named for Ol’ Pancake Comstock who was one of the first on the ground, and a four-flusher if I ever seen one. Claims ever’ thing in sight, but he’s a bluffer an’ a liar to boot.

  “The man who knows most about that place and the leads is Ol’ Virginny—when he’s sober. He knows more about minin’ in a minute than all the rest in a year.”

  “The Grosch brothers gone?” Trevallion asked.

  “You knew them? Well, they’re gone, all right. Dead. One of them drove a pick into his foot, and when blood pizenin’ set in, he wouldn’t let them take it off. He died, and his brother stayed too long nursin’ him and got caught in the Sierra snows. He made it over but was in such bad shape he failed. He died, too.”

  “They were good men.”

  “That they were. When they were gone, ol’ Comstock busted into their cabin. Claimed they left him in charge and maybe they done so.

  “Anyway, he found maps and such, and he crawled all over Gold Canyon an’ Sun Mountain tryin’ to figure out what they meant.

  “Trouble was, he didn’t understand any of it. He didn’t know what they’d found or what to do with the maps he had and was scared to take anybody in with him.

  “He never did find anything, but any time a newcomer found something, the ol’ buzzard would swoop in an’ lay claim to part of it. I don’t know whether the Grosch brothers found anything or not, but they sure thought they had.”

  As Trevallion ate his eyes scanned the crowd. The faces were mostly strange but like faces in all the gold camps. Most of them were the type who crowded in with the first rush, and for a few days they were in all the saloons and brothels, and then somehow they just melted away, disappearing so gradually nobody realized they were gone.

  Rumpled and mud-stained, most of them armed, they gulped down their food and headed back for the trail.

  “You’ve been here before?” Melissa asked.

  “A couple of times. Boom camps are all much the same. The first time I was just a youngster, and after the deserts the Carson River looked like paradise.”

  He emptied his cup, glanced at it, and Mike walked over with the pot and filled both their cups. “Ain’t many I’d do that for,” he told Melissa, “but if you’re ever in trouble, Trevallion’s your man.”

  He walked away, boots sucking at the mud. Melissa glanced at Trevallion. “He likes you.”

  “Known him awhile. Pulled a man off him, once. Another time I staked him when he was on his uppers.”

  “I think you’re nice.”

  He shook his head. “No, I am not. I think I’m a fair man, but not many take to me, and I’m a loner. I’d seen Mike around, always working, always trying, so when I heard he was broke, I staked him. Mike’s not very smart, and he has no education to speak of, and he’s failed a dozen times, but he always comes up trying. One of these days he’ll make it.”

  His eyes strayed to the mules. Ledbetter was tightening cinches, talking to a lean, hard-bitten Arkansawyer, a man dressed far too lightly for the country, but who carried a rifle like it was an extension of himself. He was one of their party.

  “Finish up,” Trevallion said, “Jim’s ready to move out.”

  They went to the mules, and the Arkansawyer thrust out a bony hand. “Name’s Tapley, Mr. Trevallion. Christian Tapley. Folks call me Tap.”

  “They call me Trevallion, no mister. This is Melissa Turney.”

  “I reckon.”

  Mounting up, Ledbetter took off at a good pace, and glancing back, Trevallion saw Tapley fall in at the rear. He had known the kind before. Probably Tap had grown up in a backwoods cabin listening to gospel-shouting preachers. A lean, stoop-shouldered man who had lived his life along the ragged edge of poverty, asking nothing of God or man but freedom to make his own way. He would always be where he was most needed because he was that kind of man, and he could probably shoot the head off a turkey at two hundred yards with that old rifle.

  Ledbetter pushed into the first gap in the line, despite the cursing of those who followed. Coolly, he blocked the way until all his train were on the trail, then, oblivious to the curses, waved at them and rode on to the head of the line.

  Several times in the next few hours Trevallion saw men stumble and fall, get clumsily to their feet, and keep on. A broken-down wagon was rudely shoved out of the way and left hanging over the lip of the cliff, despite the loud complaints of the teamster.

  A ragged returner shouted angrily at them. “You’re wastin’ your time! Nothin’ up there but rocks an’ wind! Everything worth havin’ has already been taken!”

  Nobody paid any attention and he glowered at them, muttering. Then he shouted, “You’re a pack o’ fools! I been there!”

  A more sober-seeming man agreed, pausing in his downhill trek. “He’s right, you know. It’s a cold, windy, altogether miserable place. Nothing decent to eat and no shelter unless you build for yourself.”

  Other passersby merely stared sullenly and continued their way down the slope, heading back for the placer streams of the California Mother Lode.

  Melissa turned in her saddle. “Mr. Trevallion? What is it really like?”

  The air was growing colder, the sky was bleak. It was coming on to snow. “Probably much like they say,” he commented, at last. “When I was there, no Virginia City existed and nobody had heard of a Comstock Lode, if there is such a thing. There were some raw, ragged hills, some sagebrush, stunted cedar, and winds that didn’t blow dust, they blew rocks!

  “If it’s like other such places we’ll have to build places for ourselves, or hire somebody to build. I’m not talking about houses, just shelters, anything away from the wind.”

  He thought back to that remembered time when they had come out of the Forty-Mile into the minor paradise of the Carson River. One of the older men had tried a pan in one of the small streams that came down from the mountains to flow into the Carson. He found gold.

  The others laughed at him. “That little bit? Throw it away! That’s nothing! Just wait until we get to California!”

  “But this here’s gold!” the man protested. “My very first pan!”

  “Forget it! Ain’t more’n a couple of dollars there, an’ in California your pan would be covered with it! Not just those few flakes!”

  That was what they believed, that was the dream that led them on.

  His father had said nothing, but he was the only miner among them. He knew little about gold, but he knew something of ores and how they occurred. He looked up at the small cluster of mountains from which the gold had to come. “Maybe if California doesn’t pan out we will come back here.”

  At that time he had no idea that his father would never live to see California and that, having lost his mother, he was soon to lose his father to the same men.

  CHAPTER 7

  Trevallion hunched his shoulders against the increasing chill. A slow rain began that turned almost at once to snow, and the icy trail grew more icy still. Men slipped on the steep path, scrambling up only to fall again. The mules, wise in the ways of trails, plodded on, ignoring the cursing of the men around them. At the trail’s end there would be feed, and there would be water to drink, and they walked for that.

  Trevallion tugged his hat brim lower and watched the girl ahead. She was taking it well, with no words of complaint. He had known few women well, but he could read human sign as well as that found on t
rails, and this girl had iron in her system which, in a few years, would turn to steel. She was strong and would grow stronger, yet he believed he had detected a fatal flaw that he had discovered in women before this.

  There were women with a penchant for picking up stray cats and dogs, which was all very well. There were others who had the same tendency to pick up superficially attractive but empty men. Judging by Alfie, Melissa might be such a one.

  His thoughts reverted to his own situation. The blond man who had passed them, forging on ahead, had recognized him, but who was he?

  Not one of the men he still sought, he was too young, not much older than Trevallion himself.

  Yet they would be coming here. The chances that any of them were still together was slight, but thieves and murderers were attracted to the boom camps, and it was a certainty one or more of them would come to the Comstock.

  Riding along hour after hour, with nothing to think of but the trail, gave a man time to consider, and lately he had been doing a lot of thinking. Possibly it was because he was growing older, and perhaps wiser, but he had detected a slackening of purpose in himself and it angered him.

  For years the horror of what he had seen and heard that night had obsessed him. The murderers had gotten off scot-free and then had killed his father. There had been no convenient law to pursue and punish. Even before his father’s death, his father had become a changed man, from a quiet but easygoing man he had become a sullen, morose shadow of himself.

  As for himself, there had been years when he had awakened, crying out in fear, the horror of his mother’s last hour indelibly imprinted on his mind.

  Trevallion’s thoughts turned to the night he saw a man playing cards, and it was a face he remembered.

  To the bartender he spoke casually. “Who is he? The one in the blue-checked shirt?”