Gold

by Stewart Edward White

  CHAPTER III

  THE VOYAGE

  If I had any scruples--and I do not remember many--they were overcomewithin the next day or two. It was agreed that I was to go in Ward'semploy, he to pay my passage money and all expenses, I to give him halfthe gold I might pick up. This seemed to me, at least, an eminentlysatisfactory and businesslike arrangement. Ward bought the outfits forboth of us. It turned out that he was a Mexican war veteran--hence themilitary cape--and in consequence an old campaigner. His experience andmy rural upbringing saved us from most of the ridiculous purchases menmade at that time. We had stout clothes and boots, a waterproof apiece,picks and shovel, blankets and long strips of canvas, three axes,knives, one rifle, a double shotgun, and a Colt's revolver apiece. Thelatter seemed to me a wonderful weapon, with its six charges in theturning cylinder; but I had no opportunity to try it.

  Ward decided instantly for the Panama route.

  "It's the most expensive, but also the quickest," said he; "a sailingship around the Horn takes forever; and across the plains is ditto.Every day we wait, some other fellow is landing in the diggings."

  Nearly every evening he popped into our boarding house, where, owing tothe imminence of my departure, I had been restored to favour. I neverdid find out where he lived. We took our passage at the steamshipoffice; we went to the variety shows and sang _Oh, Susannah!_ withthe rest; we strutted a bit, and were only restrained from donning ourflannel shirts and Colt's revolving pistols in the streets of New Yorkby a little remnant, a very little remnant, of common sense. When thetime at last came, we boarded our steamship, and hung over the rail, andcheered like crazy things. I personally felt as though a lid had beenlifted from my spirit, and that a rolling cloud of enthusiasm was atlast allowed to puff out to fill my heaven.

  In two days we were both over being seasick, and had a chance to lookaround us. Our ship was a sidewheel steamer of about a thousand tons,and she carried two hundred and eighty passengers, which was about twohundred more than her regular complement. They were as miscellaneous alot as mortal eye ever fell upon: from the lank Maine Yankee to thetall, sallow, black-haired man from Louisiana. I suppose, too, allgrades of the social order must have been represented; but in our youthand high spirits we did not go into details of that sort. Every man,with the exception of a dozen or so, wore a red shirt, a slouch hat, arevolver and a bowie knife; and most of us had started to grow beards.Unless one scrutinized closely such unimportant details as features,ways of speech or manners, one could not place his man's former status,whether as lawyer, physician or roustabout. And we were too busy forthat. I never saw such a busy place as that splattering old ship slowlywallowing her way south toward the tropical seas. We had fifty-eightthousand things to discuss, beginning with Marshall's first discovery,skipping through the clouds of rumours of all sorts, down to intimatedetails of climate, outfit, prospects, plans, and the best methods ofgetting at the gold. And to all these subjects we brought a dozen pointsof view, each of which was strange to all the others. We had with us menfrom every stratum of society, and from every point of the compass. Eachwas a product of his own training and mental upbringing, and wasincapable, without great effort, of understanding his neighbour's pointof view. Communication and travel were in those days very limited, itmust be remembered, and different communities and sections of thecountry produced strong types. With us discussion became an adventurousexploration into a new country; the man from Maine could not but beinterested in finding out what that strange, straight-haired, darkcreature from Carolina might think of even the most commonplace subject.Only our subjects were not commonplace.

  So my chief impression of that voyage down was of knots of men talkinghurriedly and excitedly, as though there were not a moment to waste; andthe hum of voices rising and falling far into the night.

  Only two things were capable of breaking in on this tense absorption ofthe men in each other and in their subject--one was dolphins, and theother the meal gong. When dolphins appeared each rushed promptly to theside of the ship and discharged his revolver at the beasts. I never sawany harm come from these fusillades, but they made a wonderful row. Mealtimes always caught the majority unaware. They tumbled and jostled downthe companionways only to find the wise and forethoughtful had preemptedevery chair. Whereupon, with most ludicrous expressions of chagrin or ofassumed nonchalance, they trooped back to meet the laughter of the wise,if not forethoughtful, who had realized the uselessness of the rush.After a moment's grumbling, however, the discussions were resumed.

  There was some quarrelling, but not much. A holiday spirit pervaded thelot; for they were men cut off from all experience, all accustomedsurroundings, all the restraints of training, and they were embarked onthe great adventure. I do not now remember many of them individually.They were of a piece with the thousands we were destined to encounter.But I do retain a most vivid mental picture of them collectively, withtheir red shirts, their slouch hats, their belts full of weapons, theireyes of eagerness, their souls of dreams; brimming with pent energy;theorizing, arguing, disputing; ready at an instant's notice for anysort of a joke or excitement that would relieve the tension; boisterous,noisy, laughing loudly, smothering by sheer weight of ridiculeindividual resentments--altogether a wonderful picture of the youth andhope and energy and high spirits of the time.

  Never before nor since have I looked upon such a variety of equipment asstrewed the decks and cabins of that ship. A great majority of thepassengers knew nothing whatever about out-of-door life, and less thannothing as to the conditions in California and on the way. Consequentlythey had bought liberally of all sorts of idiotic patent contraptions.India rubber played a prominent part. And the deck was cumbered with atleast forty sorts of machines for separating gold from the soil: some ofthem to use water, some muscular labour, and one tremendous affair withwings was supposed to fan away everything but the gold. Differing ineverything else, they were alike in one thing: they had all been devisedby men who had never seen any but manufactured gold. I may add that Inever saw a machine of the kind actually at work in the diggings.

  Just now, however, I looked on the owners of these contraptions withenvy, and thought ourselves at a disadvantage with only our picks,shovels, and axes.

  But we had with us a wonderful book that went far toward cheering up thepoorly equipped. Several copies had been brought aboard, so we all had achance to read it. The work was entitled "Three Weeks in the GoldMines," and was written by a veracious individual who signed himself H.I. Simpson. I now doubt if he had ever left his New York hall bedroom,though at the time we took his statements for plain truth. Simpson couldspare only ten days of this three weeks for actual mining. In thatperiod, with no other implement than a pocket knife, he picked out fiftythousand dollars. The rest of the time he preferred to travel about andsee the country, picking up only what incidental nuggets he came acrosswhile walking. We believed this.

  As we drew southward the days became insufferably warm, but the nightswere glorious. Talbot and I liked to sleep on the deck; and generallycamped down up near the bitts. The old ship rolled frightfully, for shewas light in freight in order to accommodate so many passengers; and thedark blue sea appeared to swoop up and down beneath the placid tropicmoon.

  We had many long, quiet talks up there; but in them all I learnednothing, absolutely nothing, of my companion.

  "If you had broken my arm that time, I should not have taken you," heremarked suddenly one evening.

  "Shouldn't blame you," said I.

  "No! I wouldn't have wanted that kind of a man," he continued, "for Ishould doubt my control of him. But you gave up."

  This nettled me.

  "Would you have had me, or any man, brute enough to go through with it?"I demanded.

  "Well"--he hesitated--"it was agreed that it was to be _fight_, youremember. And after all, if you had broken my arm, it would have been myfault and not yours."

  Two young fellows used occasionally to join us in our swooping, plungingperch. They were as un
like as two men could be, and yet already they hadbecome firm friends. One was a slow, lank, ague-stricken individual fromsomewhere in the wilds of the Great Lakes, his face lined and brown asthough carved from hardwood, his speed slow, his eyes steady with aveiled sardonic humour. His companion was scarcely more than a boy, andhe came, I believe, from Virginia. He was a dark, eager youth, with amop of black shiny hair that he was always tossing back, bright glowingeyes, a great enthusiasm of manner, and an imagination alert to catchfire. The backwoodsman seemed attracted to the boy by this very quickand unsophisticated bubbling of candid youth; while the boy mostevidently worshipped his older companion as a symbol of the mysteriousfrontier. The Northerner was named Rogers, but was invariably known asYank. The Southerner had some such name as Fairfax, but was calledJohnny, and later in California, for reasons that will appear, DiamondJack. Yank's distinguishing feature was a long-barrelled "pea shooter"rifle. He never moved ten feet without it.

  Johnny usually did most of the talking when we were all gatheredtogether. Yank and I did the listening and Talbot the interpellating.Johnny swarmed all over himself like a pickpocket, and showed useverything he had in the way of history, manners, training, family,pride, naivete, expectations and hopes. He prided himself on being acalm, phlegmatic individual, unemotional and not easily excited, and heconstantly took this attitude. It was a lovely joke.

  "Of course," said he, "it won't be necessary to stay out more than ayear. They tell me I can easily make eleven hundred dollars a day; butyou know I am not easily moved by such reports"--he was at the timemoving under a high pressure, at least ten knots an hour--"I shall besatisfied with three hundred a day. Allowing three hundred working daysto the year, that gives me about ninety thousand dollars--plenty!"

  "You'll have a few expenses," suggested Talbot.

  "Oh--yes--well, make it a year and a half, just to be on the safe side."

  Johnny was eagerly anxious to know everybody on the ship, with theexception of about a dozen from his own South. As far as I could seethey did not in the slightest degree differ except in dress from any ofthe other thirty or forty from that section, but Johnny distinguished.He stiffened as though Yank's gunbarrel had taken the place of his spinewhenever one of these men was near; and he was so coldly and pointedlycourteous that I would have slapped his confounded face if he had actedso to me.

  "Look here, Johnny," I said to him one day, "what's the matter withthose fellows? They look all right to me. What do you know againstthem?"

  "I never laid eyes on them before in my life, sir," he replied,stiffening perceptibly.

  "Take that kink out of your back," I warned him. "That won't work wortha cent with me!"

  He laughed.

  "I beg pardon. They are not gentlemen."

  "I don't know what you mean by gentlemen," said I; "it's a wide term.But lots of us here aren't gentlemen--far, far from it. But you seem tolike us."

  He knit his brows.

  "I can't explain. They are the class of cheap politician that bringsinto disrepute the chivalry of the South, sir."

  Talbot and I burst into a shout of laughter, and even Yank, leaningattentively on the long barrel of his pea rifle, grinned faintly. Wecaught Johnny up on that word--and he was game enough to take it well.Whenever something particularly bad happened to be also Southern, wecalled it the Chivalry. The word caught hold; so that later it came tobe applied as a generic term to the Southern wing of venal politiciansthat early tried to control the new state of California.

  I must confess that if I had been Johnny I should have stepped morecarefully with these men. They were a dark, suave lot, and dressed well.In fact, they and a half dozen obviously professional men alone in allthat ship wore what we would call civilized clothes. I do not know whichwas more incongruous--our own red shirts, or the top hats, flowingskirts, and light pantaloons of these quietly courteous gentlemen. Theywere quite as well armed as ourselves, however, wearing their revolversbeneath their armpits, or carrying short double pistols. They treatedJohnny with an ironically exaggerated courtesy, and paid littleattention to his high airs. It was obvious, however, that he was makingenemies.

  Talbot Ward knew everybody aboard, from the captain down. His laughing,half-aloof manner was very taking; and his ironical comments on thevarious points of discussion, somehow, conveyed no sting. He wascontinually accepting gifts of newspapers--of which there were a half athousand or so brought aboard--with every appearance of receiving afavour. These papers he carried down to our tiny box of a room and addedto his bundle. I supposed at the time he was doing all this on Moliere'sprinciple, that one gains more popularity by accepting a favour than bybestowing one.