California Gold (44 page)

“A lot.”

“What’s he get out of it?”

“His fair share.”

Wyatt tilted the jug over the back of his arm, dribbling wine into his mouth, then wiping his chin on his sleeve. “I contributed. Whose land are those wells built on, Mack?”

“How many times do you have to hear it? You disappeared. You abandoned San Solaro. You took cash belonging to buyers who trusted you, and you damn near landed me in jail because of it. Now you walk in again as if it never happened. And you won’t even say where you’ve been, for God’s sake.”

“Mexicali. Catalina. Hawaii. Nowhere important.”

Light in the neatly furnished parlor struck Wyatt’s eyes, giving them that opaque sheen. “I have a bad impression from this conversation, Mack. An impression that you want to push me out. I guess I had the wrong idea about you.” A pause. “I once thought you had a conscience.”

Mack bolted at him, then checked himself.

Wyatt stood his ground, laughing. “Thought that’d get you.” He slapped his thigh.

Mack stalked off the porch and walked over to the edge of the canal. Rubbing his palms over his face, he could feel the grit of the long day’s travel, the frustration, the anger. He quelled it and thought hard. Would the original agreement with Wyatt hold up? Yes. Potter had assured him it would. Then there was an answer, an old and trusted one: percentages.

“All right,” he said in a hoarse voice, approaching the porch again. “I’ll cut you a new deal. I’ll give you ten percent of the net profit of Chance-Johnson.”

“Don’t insult me, partner.” Wyatt swigged.

“Twelve and a half, goddamn it.”

“Am I upsetting you, partner? You’re cursing a lot. No deal.”

“Fifteen,” Mack said with pained reluctance.

Wyatt thought it over, then smiled. “Seventeen and a half.”

“All right. On one condition. You collect your checks at a bank in Los Angeles. You stay away from here.”

The silence was enormous. Wyatt set the jug on the porch with a loud thud, then stumbled down the steps into the starlight. His voice, much lower, carried real enmity.

“Why?”

“Because this is a business. A profitable and well-run business. If I keep it that way, we’ll both make money.”

“Are you saying I wouldn’t keep it that way?”

“Drop it, Wyatt.”

“No, get it all out.”

Silence.

“Get it all out, Mack.”

They stared each other down.

“San Solaro is producing income now, big income. It’s going to produce something else if I can bring water in here—the water you lied about to our real estate customers. It’s going to produce a town. A
real
town, not the one you dreamed up on paper. No steamboats on a bogus canal. Stores, homes, schools, churches, real streets, real people. It’s called progress, Wyatt. It’s entirely unrelated to a free ride, a free lunch, or a fast dollar. But it won’t happen if you’re around here to beat up any banker who says no to a loan, or any contractor who happens to question an order.”

“I didn’t know you had such a low opinion of me.”

“For God’s sake stop it. You have a lot of talent and charm. But you let it run wild, you don’t harness it.”

Wyatt ran to the porch, seized the jug, and smashed it to pieces against a porch pillar. “When are you going to understand? I didn’t come to California to climb into a fucking
harness.
”

“Shut up—dammit, you’re ranting.”

“No, sir, no—I’m going to say this. You’ve been pretty fucking candid tonight. Well, you listen to this, Mack. Candor can be dangerous. Sometimes it poisons a friendship. Poisons it forever. You understand me?”

“If that’s some kind of threat, the hell with you. Do you want the seventeen and a half percent or not?”

“I want it. I’m entitled to it.”

“Then collect it in Los Angeles. My attorney’s name is Potter. He’ll settle the arrangements.”

“We’ll settle it together. I’m staying right here.”

Mack was shaking. He wanted to pull his Peacemaker, but pulled something from memory instead.

“What does the name Sterns mean to you? Don Ysidor Sterns, Rancho de la Bahía?”

Wyatt stood absolutely still. His voice became reasonable again, and very faint.

“I don’t know the name Sterns.”

“That’s peculiar. After you left, I found a long news cutting about Don Ysidor Sterns in your desk. About his murder down near San Diego. Someone killed and robbed him of a lot of money.” Mack swallowed, dry-mouthed. He toed an invisible cliff that would either hold, or crumble and carry him into an abyss. “About as much money,” he continued, “as it took to buy this land, I figure. They never found the murderer. Damn funny that you’d keep a clipping about a man you didn’t know.”

“Are you saying—”

“I’m saying it’s funny, Wyatt. And I’m saying you didn’t get the money from Otto Hellman. That was a lie—never mind how I know. That’s all I’m saying—right now.”

Ten seconds passed. The night breeze carried the rhythmic pumping of the wells and an owl hooted back in the hills.

Without warning, Wyatt started for Mack and Mack instantly snatched the Colt off his hip and cocked it. “Don’t make this any worse.”

“I want the clipping.”

“No. It’s locked up in a bank vault.”

“What do you want, then?”

“I want you to get out. Potter will take care of you. Just don’t come back here.”

Wyatt stood so that the lamplight from inside fell on half his face. Mack watched the charming grin slide back, the charming, smarmy, insincere grin. There was no humor in his eyes, only china-blue malevolence.

“Whatever you say, partner. I’ll sleep on your couch and in the morning—”

“I want you off the property now. I’ll find a man to drive you into Newhall.”

Wyatt thought it over, then lifted one shoulder casually to consent. It was so easily done, so relaxed and pleasant. Somehow it frightened Mack more than Wyatt’s ranting.

“Sure—I’ll go. I don’t expect we’ve seen the last of each other, though. In fact you can count on it. Let’s find that driver. Partner.”

T
HE SOUTHBOUND OVERLAND EXPRESS
slowed down.

Mack snapped back the lid of his gold pocket watch. A few minutes after 1
A.M.
on a Friday in June 1895. He put his tablet aside and leaned toward the window. Black out there—not a light showing.

He sat back and reflected on the irony of traveling on the line he hated. The accommodations were comfortable enough. He was riding in a first-class Silver Palace sleeper similar to those of Pullman’s. A powerful ninety-ton 2-8-0 pulled the train. He’d observed the locomotive carefully before he boarded. It was one of those manufactured in company shops at Sacramento and had a straight stack—coal-burning—and the name
RED FOX
handsomely painted on. Too bad the men who financed
Red Fox
lacked the plain solid honesty of their engine.

The elderly conductor came tiptoeing through. The other passengers had retired into curtained berths, but Mack had asked the porter not to make up his space, two seats facing each other, into a berth. He didn’t plan to sleep.

The conductor was a paunchy man with yellowing bags under his eyes. He noticed Mack peering out the window.

“There’s heavy fog tonight. We slowed down for the Tehachapi Loop.”

Mack nodded and the conductor passed into the dark. The Loop was one of California’s engineering marvels. Ten miles north of the four-thousand-foot pass, and the start of the descent to the Mojave, the line twisted through the mountains on five levels. At one point a train chugged into the tunnel for which the Loop was named and came out directly below the point of entry. If the train was long enough, passengers could watch part of the same train going the opposite way.

Mack’s shirt collar was open, his vest unbuttoned. On the seat opposite lay his reading material: John Muir’s new book,
The Mountains of California
; several issues of
The irrigation Age
; the latest number of
Land of Sunshine
, a new illustrated magazine promoting Southern California;
Overland Monthly
, a literary journal Mr. Bitter Bierce called the “warmed-overland monthly”; the
Fresno Morning Republican
, headlining the Supreme Court’s decision upholding injunctions against Eugene Debs, the railway labor leader who’d brought America’s rail traffic to a halt the previous year until federal troops broke the strike.

Mack had laid them all out and hadn’t picked up one. He was struggling with a letter. He tore his sixth attempt off the tablet and applied his pencil to a clean sheet.

Dear Nellie,

Writing to you on the trip south from the Central Valley. Just bought more farmland there, a fine tract of 14,000 acres near Fresno. The promises of that old guidebook are finally coming true. I am striking more kinds of gold than I ever imagined—

Air brakes hissed and iron squealed on iron. The passenger train was slowing again, perhaps for the station. A series of stop-and-start lurches shook the car. Behind an upper-berth curtain, someone muttered fretfully.

but what I really want to tell you is that I am sorry your last visit ended the way it did. I am not involved with that woman you met—

Frown lines cut into his brow. He hated lying. Was Nellie worth it? Yes.

and never have been in any serious way. Can you please get away from Mr. H. for a few days, come down and discuss it? I want to show you a certain place I have picked out to build a new—

More lurches and—rattles. The train crawled forward. He scowled and peered out. A few distant lights sprinkled the dark diffuse, misty lights. The fog was soupy, all right.

Suddenly a ferocious lurch fluttered the low-trimmed wicks of the kerosene lamps mounted above him. Other passengers awakened and began to ask questions of each other. The car smelled of dusty carpet, bed linen, the kerosene in the lamps.

From the shadows of the vestibule the conductor called out softly, “Tehachapi Summit. The station is Tehachapi.”

Mack decided to stretch and take the air. On his way out he passed the berth of a Scandinavian couple, who were traveling with their daughter. He heard the wife. “What do you see, Nels?”

“Blasted fog, dat’s all.”

Yawning, Mack clambered down the steps to the platform of a spartan passenger station. Electric lights inside were muted by the cold wet fog, the thickest he’d ever seen. The station was empty. He gazed through the pane at the silent telegraph key. Why was no agent on duty?

The baggy-eyed conductor trudged back from the engine swinging his bull’s-eye lantern, its tilting beam slicing the fog like a broadsword.

“Can’t proceed till this fog thins out,” he said. “It’s a real hazard up in these mountains. The engineer hopes it will clear in an hour or so.”

Passengers in robes or rumpled clothing poked their heads from the first- and second-class cars. One man climbed down and cornered the conductor. “We’re on the main line, aren’t we? Shouldn’t we wait on a spur?”

“Only one line through here. There are no other trains this time of night.”

Mack spied something at the end of the train, something that sent a nasty tickle of worry up his spine. Beside the track, the lens of a two-sided signal lantern shone green.

“Conductor, even with no trains, shouldn’t that signal be red?”

The Scandinavian couple appeared, the stocky wife wearing a hairnet heavy enough to catch trout and the husband attired in a fine satin robe, nightshirt, and pointed Turkish slippers.

Mack was watching the conductor. Something was wrong and the man knew it. He tried to cover it with hasty assurances. “Oh, it’s some mechanical problem, that’s all. I’ll have the brakeman see about—”

A train whistled in the dark. Loudly, stridently. Mack’s heart hammered. The train was behind them, chugging rapidly down the grade.

“Jesus and Mary,” the conductor whispered, crossing himself. The passengers began to mill about and exclaim, consternation soon changing to panic.

“That’s a down-bound train—”

“On this track. Scatter!”

“Kirstin,” cried the wife. “Nels, Kirstin’s asleep.”

Her husband’s thick Scandinavian speech lapped hers. “Others, too—”

“Get them out of there, conductor,” Mack yelled. Pop-eyed, the conductor raised his lantern and stared at Mack, his mouth working soundlessly. The roar and chuff of the unseen train grew louder.

Nels, the husband, ran toward the rear, waving his arms. “Stop, hold up—” He lost one slipper, then the other. “Stop!”

A broad white beam slashed around the last curve before the station. Intensified by its mirrored reflector, the headlight flooded the platform and the standing train with a glare as brilliant as a burst of lightning. The train itself appeared with a crescendo roar. Mack had a glimpse of the balloon stack of a woodburner. Shoving the paralyzed conductor aside, he ran up the steps and kicked open the door of the Silver Palace car.

“Everybody get out—right now!”

The engineer of the down-bound train signaled the impending calamity with a screaming whistle. Mack ran along the car, shaking curtains, shouting. “Wake up, there isn’t a minute to—”

Impact. Crushing, crashing, hurling the car and the train forward with a violent motion. The lamps over Mack’s seat shattered. Hot oil splashed from the broken reservoirs and ignited. A woman poked her head from her berth, saw the fire, and began screaming. Mack struck her with an open hand. “Be quiet, get out, save yourself—”

He heard another terrified yell behind him. Then he felt the car start to tilt off the rails. Everything was leaping flame, writhing shadow, the snap of breaking timbers, the yelp of bending metal. And above all, there were the screams.

The shrillest came from the berth of the Scandinavian girl. Evidently she was trapped. He fought toward that end of the car, a hopeless effort because the car was falling over. He lost his balance and tumbled into the open seat he’d occupied. Muir’s book and all his other reading were afire.

Mack smashed down against the outer wall, now the bottom of the car settling on its side. His head slammed the frame of the broken window and he almost slashed his throat on jagged glass.