California Gold (20 page)

“Turn,” Bao shouted, practically thrown into the pilothouse by the ferry’s sudden rise on the next swell.

“I’ll not,” Barnstable shouted back, and yanked the halyard. Five short blasts: collision warning.

Bao seized him and threw him aside. He pulled the halyard twice, two short blasts to signal his intent to alter course to port. Then he flung the wheel over.

Mack nearly went through a window headfirst. Captain Barnstable reeled around, screaming, “Mutiny!” Mack heard the roar of
Santa Clara
passing and saw the malicious faces of her master and crew glide by above.

Then the bow wake hit them.
Bay Beauty
nearly broached and a cry went up that a passenger had fallen overboard. Frantic, Mack clambered down the slippery stairs and flung a preserver out to the man. They hauled him aboard safely but he promptly vomited up water. When he left the ferry he promised a lawsuit.

They ran back to Oakland empty except for one Irish housemaid, who huddled on a bench inside, clicking her rosary beads. Barnstable sneaked a fortifying swig from his brown bottle. Bao Kee caught him and took the bottle away. All of them finished out the day in a bad mood.

A hand-inscribed letter arrived at the Oakland First National Gold Bank, where they deposited their daily receipts. It was from Fourth and Townsend, and was addressed to “The Proprietors, Oakland Bay Transportation Line, Gentlemen.” A cold legalistic paragraph asked them to name the purchase price of the line and all its assets, stated that the railroad would pay a 5 percent premium for a sale closed within thirty days, and requested the favor of immediate reply. Mack showed Bao the signature: “Walter Fairbanks III, Assistant General Counsel.”

Bao’s pensive gaze stayed on the fine parchment letterhead with the railroad’s name engraved. “It is war in earnest,” he said.

“They lost this round.” Mack tore up the letter and threw it into
Bay Beauty’s
galley stove, where the flames disposed of it. “Not for sale,” he added with a smile.

When Nellie came aboard for a Saturday-night supper, she confirmed that the war was indeed in earnest.

“Collis P. Huntington registered at the Palace Hotel this afternoon—six weeks ahead of his regular semiannual visit. He’s hopping mad about the nickel ferry. In the past, Huntington’s never tolerated competition any longer than it’s taken him to get rid of it. He hasn’t changed.”

“We’ll worry about that later, Nellie,” Mack said. “Sit down, please.” He wore a canvas chef’s apron. A bottle of dark red merlot from a Saint Helena winery stood on the galley table, already uncorked.

At the stove, Mack checked his skillet. “Just right.” Then he served up the fragrant mixture of scrambled eggs, bacon, and fried oysters on three stoneware plates. He poured the wine and took his seat, beaming. “Hangtown fry. Dig in.”

“I’ve heard of it but I’ve never had it,” Nellie said.

“Pa brought the recipe back from the diggings. It’s supposed to be the dish a condemned man requested for his last meal. You couldn’t get bacon or eggs very easily in the mines, let alone oysters, so the man figured it’d be some time before they hanged him.”

Bao laughed and Nellie clucked in a skeptical way. “You’re both in a wonderful mood, considering that you’ve succeeded in bringing the great Huntington, and his wrath, all the way from the Atlantic seaboard.”

Mack raised his wine cup. “We’re going after a second ferry. We decided this afternoon.”

She clicked her cup with his. “My, you are feeling expansive.”

He was; he felt jubilant, successful, and brimming with love for this small, bright girl, even though they hadn’t made love, and had hardly kissed or embraced, since Yosemite.

He told her about the Fairbanks letter. “Getting that offer is enough to make a man feel like David after he knocked out Goliath.”

“I hope your story comes out the same as the biblical one,” she said. “This Goliath is far from dead.”

She wasn’t joking.

The next week passed with no further harassment by the railroad. Passenger loads remained steady, and they began to carry small freight parcels from businessmen who heard they undercut the SP ferries by 30 percent.

The partners were eager to buy their second boat but could find nothing suitable. Mack was thinking about the problem when he crawled into his bunk late on Friday night. Bao was already snoring in the bed below. Mack lasted about three minutes, and then sleep plucked him away.

About midnight, a sound woke him. At first he couldn’t sort it out from the familiar lulling lap of the water on the ferry hull. He raked his hands through his sleep-mussed hair, listening. It sounded like a marine engine throttled back to minimum power. Who could be coming along at this time of night?

He glanced out the porthole beside his head, but could see only the rippling reflections of the red and white port and mast lanterns. He dropped over the side of the bunk and shook Bao’s bare shoulder.

“What is wrong?” Bao said, waking slowly.

“Not sure. I think we’ve some visitors. Or else someone’s way off course.” No one else ever docked at the half-collapsed pier by the mud flat.

In the dark Mack pulled on his suit of flannel underwear. Now he berated himself for not taking the precaution of keeping at least one pistol aboard
Bay Beauty.
They had simply assumed the SP would compete hard, but fairly.

Bao, having dressed quickly, poked Mack to signal that he was ready. Mack started for the companionway, only to stop again at a sound from above.

A footfall. Then many footfalls. Men jumping aboard.

He felt the other vessel bump their hull. “Who’s there?” he shouted, crashing the door open.

He rushed on deck and saw a dark figure swinging a sledge at a window of the pilothouse. Glass burst inward, the shards snatching the green glow of the starboard lantern and winking as they fell.

A quarter-moon shed pale misty light on the scene. Mack counted at least eight men. They’d come from a rust-bucket launch tied up alongside. A tall man with a familiar long beard was in charge, gesturing fore and aft with a crowbar. “Two of you see to the engines and the bilge pumps. Tear this fucking boat apart.”

Mack doubled his fists and charged. “Get the hell off this vessel—”

A man he didn’t see in time lunged in from his left, striking his legs with a two-handed sweep of a two-by-two. Mack fell and skidded chest-first on the deck. Bao jumped at the man, but he turned and drove the board into Bao’s ribs, hammering him back to the rail. Bao held his side, howling in Chinese.

Mack breathed in long wild gulps. Lurching to his feet, he scrambled up the steps to the pilothouse. Redbeard was inside, slipping his crowbar between spokes of the wheel. Quick leverage snapped four of them. Mack made it through the door just as Redbeard shattered the wheel yoke with two blows.

Mack leaped on him, but Redbeard hurled him off and started to bash him with the crowbar.

A piece of tooth flew out of Mack’s mouth and blood Spurted from his upper lip. Then Redbeard rammed the crowbar into his privates. Mack fell backward out the door. He grabbed for the stair rail and missed, landing on his back on deck, almost knocked out.

Redbeard clambered down and stomped on him. Mack cried out, clutching his middle. “Told you we didn’t want Chinks competing with white men in this bay,” Redbeard said. “Got it now, have you?” He made a kissing sound, spit on Mack’s face, and disappeared.

Mack fought the gut pain, pulling himself up by grasping the rail. He stumbled forward and wrestled an ax from a man savaging the hull. He heard someone’s sledge blasting out the last pilothouse window just as he rammed the ax handle under the man’s chin and shoved him over the side.

Mack felt dizzy with a mix of fright and rage. All around him, shadow-men wielded crowbars and axes. Bao ran here and there, punching, dodging blows, screeching curses in Chinese. It was futile; there were too many. Mack heard the inside benches splintering and, below, the tortured sound of metal being pried and bent. Down there too, someone was chopping the hull.

He staggered aft and found a man with a knife slashing the new awning he’d hung to protect the open stern deck. Bao rushed the man, grappling him around the waist and crushing him in a savage hug. The knife clacked on the deck. Another man, the one with the two-by-two, now raced at Bao from the dark.

“Bao, behind you!” Mack shouted. He started to run, but time seemed to liquefy and flow too slowly; he couldn’t cover the distance fast enough. His arms pumped. His bare feet slapped.
Not fast enough—
The man behind Bao swung the lumber; it seemed slow, so slow. Mack kept running, getting nowhere—The board struck the back of Bao’s head and he arched, pitched onto his knees…Horrified, Mack watched the blood splatter and spurt from Bao’s broken skull.

The man Bao held twisted away, laughing. Bao’s unpinned queue writhed like a black-and-red snake. Then Bao screamed, and time flowed again.

Mack leaped on Bao’s attacker and tore the two-by-two out of his hands. Then he beat him about the head with it, driving him back, using it like a sword. The man moaned, “Jesus,” and vaulted the rail into the water.

Bleeding and sweaty, Mack wiped mucus dripping from his nose. He felt the boat list and heard water gurgling. She was hulled.

Turning, he said, “Well, at least there’s one less of the sons of—”

The other man had found his fallen knife. Crouching over Bao, he turned to look at Mack, then rammed the blade into Bao’s chest and ran.

“She’s finished, boys. Good work. Let’s go.”

The ferry tilted more sharply, going down on the port side, scraping against the crusted and slimy pier pilings. Men were jumping back aboard the rust bucket, and her engines roared up and carried them away. She bore no running lanterns. Mack watched her white wake spread under the faint misty moon, Redbeard’s laughter carrying over the water.

Mack knelt and raised his partner’s heavy body in his arms, pulling Bao’s fat shoulders onto his knees. “Bao Kee. Oh God, Bao Kee.” He didn’t dare pull the knife out. “I’ll put you down. I’ll try not to hurt you. You lie here while I run for help…”

Bao’s eyes opened. He seemed to recognize who was holding him. His voice was faint and dry as rice-paper pages rustling.

“
Kum Saan
—Gold Mountain—is dust.”

He smiled, as if saying,
That is life’s way
and died in Mack’s arms.

Mack hoisted Bao Kee onto the pier and laid him under the moon while
Bay Beauty
slowly sank into the flowing high tide. The moon lit his tear-filled eyes. This was not going to be the end. By God, not nearly. He knew the man responsible and he knew where to find him.

T
HE FOLLOWING EVENING
,
C
. P. Huntington received Walter Fairbanks in the large suite permanently reserved for the railroad chief on the seventh floor of the Palace Hotel. After Huntington’s clerk was sent into the next room and the door closed, they sat down for a working supper—oxtail soup, quail under glass, champagne.

The suite offered the same modern amenities found throughout the luxury hotel: fifteen-foot ceilings; call buttons connected with the desk downstairs and with a service pantry on the floor; elaborate multijet gas fixtures (electricity was promised but not yet installed); a completely private chamber equipped with bathtub, washstand, toilet. Such things no longer impressed Mr. Huntington. In his world, he expected them.

Collis Potter Huntington was sixty-seven. A Yankee peddler from Connecticut, he’d made his first substantial money as an Argonaut. On the Isthmus of Panama, he decided he could make some quick money by supplying potatoes, rice, sugar, and similar necessities to others who, like him, had started across the Isthmus on the way to California. To get his goods, Huntington went into the jungles to trade with local people, walking twenty and thirty miles one way on many a trip, defying the fevers and ticks and bad water that weakened and even killed lesser men. In those young days, he was hard as bar iron.

Later, in Sacramento, he went into the hardware business with a partner, forming Huntington Hopkins & Company of K and L streets. He frequently dashed to San Francisco to check incoming ships and temporarily corner the market for blasting powder, shovels, or other items in demand in the gold mines. It was in a room above the hardware store that he and the other men who would become the Big Four first heard the young engineer Theodore Judah propose his transcontinental railroad over the mountains. Huntington was no patriotic visionary; he liked the idea because it could create a monopoly on fast movement of freight to the Nevada silver mines and thus drive a lot of teamsters out of business.

A tall man, he was running to flab now. He maintained that symbol of business respectability, a neat full beard, gray-shot, and was an altogether unassuming and forgettable figure except for the black silk skullcap he wore to hide his humiliating baldness. When he was exercised, however, his keen blue-gray eyes caught fire. Men antagonized him at their peril; his enemies called him “ruthless as a crocodile.”

At the moment, supper over and pressing business out of the way, he was expounding some of his philosophy to the smartly dressed attorney.

“I have a broad interpretation of the term
corporate expense
, Walter. Rails and rolling stock are legitimate expenses, but so is the money we spend for a politician’s vote in the state legislature or the Congress. I can tell you precisely how much it costs, in either body, to pass a bill favorable to us. I cheerfully disburse money to politicians who have done right by us, friendly newspapers, the local Associated Press man, many others. Spending generates control. Control generates profit.”

“That’s a breathtaking concept, Mr. Huntington.”

Huntington wasn’t lulled by the flattery. “It’s just the way I operate. You’d better too, if you want to get ahead in this company. You have a lot of promise. You don’t let niggling scruples stand in me way of the right deal, the right contract. That’s why I wanted to share—”

There was a loud knocking on the door.