California Gold (52 page)

Johnson reined the horse so sharply Mack almost fell off. A Chinese man ran out of the burning section with his quilted coat afire, disappearing toward the road, blazing in the dark like an earthbound comet. Mack jumped down and hit the ground running.

He headed for a tramp holding a worker’s throat with one hand while he stabbed him with the other. Mack stepped side-ways for a better shot, aimed hastily, and fired. The tramp screamed and grabbed his leg. The Chinese man ran away yelling, the black thorn of the knife bobbing in his arm.

Mack didn’t risk another shot. Men were running, shouting, cursing, struggling all around him; the glare and the thick smoke made it hard to tell attackers from victims. Johnson understood this. He waded into the melee with the barrel of his Peacemaker in his left hand and swung savagely to right and left, clubbing any tramp within reach. He hit one man’s jaw and the man raked his hand down across Johnson’s eyes. He jumped back but the tramp’s nails had torn his cheek open. Then the man tried to throttle Johnson with his own bandanna. Johnson broke the tramp’s nose with a blow of the gun butt.

Someone grabbed Mack’s arm, jerking it hard. Before he could pivot to fend off the attacker, a rock bashed his temple. He reeled back and sat down hard. The tramp laughed and lunged in, sweat drops shining in his yellow beard. Mack heard a distant guttural shout but had no time to wonder about it. Before the tramp could brain him again, he fired a bullet into the man’s thigh.

The tramp’s right leg collapsed like a snapped stick and he crawled away. Mack struggled up, the heat scorching his face. All around, the Chinese were running with whatever possessions they could salvage. A few resisted, but most refused to confront the hate-crazed attackers.

Johnson’s wild clubbing soon drove all the tramps away from him and he stood in an open space with his head lowered and blood dripping from his chin. There was a brute gleam in his firelit eyes. From the direction of the windbreak, the shouts grew louder. It wasn’t English. Mack recognized Swampy’s German.

Suddenly he spied someone familiar on the ground: the young bachelor Kim Loo, rolling from side to side and holding his gut. Bruises and bleeding cuts marked his cheeks and forehead. Mack ran over and leaned down to drag him out of the center of the yard.

Bending, he heard Johnson shout, “Watch your left side!” Turning, he stumbled on Kim Loo’s outstretched leg and as he fell across the young Chinese the Colt flipped out of his hand. A tramp landed on Mack’s back with both knees and Mack’s jaw slammed in the dirt, jarring and dazing him.

The tramp raised his right hand like some prophet at a sacrificial altar and light flashed off the rippled blade of a fish-cleaning knife. The tramp’s hand whitened and the knife started its descent—

Johnson’s bullet hit the tramp between the shoulders. The fish knife flew out of his hand. The tramp fell, and Mack crawled away, retrieved his revolver, and staggered to his feet. As he did, he saw Kim Loo push to his feet and run for the dark road, his queue flying behind.

Swampy Hellman pelted across the yard, red with exertion. He brandished his S&W .45. “You goddamn bums—you trash—get off this land.” He veered to the nearest tramp and blew him off his feet. For a moment the man actually appeared to fly against the background of the fire.

Many of the tramps saw that, heard the man’s wild scream as he went down, and it broke their nerve. They tossed away stones and bloody two-by-fours and ran for the windbreak, and the darkness. Johnson collared one but the man bit his hand and escaped.

Mack hurried to Swampy, who was pivoting this way and that, hunting a target. “You shouldn’t have come here—”

“Don’t get the wrong idea, Johnny.” The old man was gasping. “I did it for you, not them Chinks.”

“Sit down before you fall down.” There was an ominous purple tinge rushing into Swampy’s cheeks. “Sit!” Mack yelled, pushing him. Swampy was suddenly short of breath, and pop-eyed with fright because of it; he sat down without protest.

Mack stared at the burning building hopelessly. There was no water at hand—the pump platform was burning too, the pump itself already engulfed—and the nearest storage tank was a quarter of a mile away. Mack ran toward the high bright wall of fire, as if he could somehow extinguish it by the sheer force of his anger.

Johnson’s arm slammed across his chest. “Stay back. The barracks is done for.”

“Goddamn it, I’m not going to stand by and—”

“Yes you are.” Johnson stepped in front of him. “Can’t do anything else.”

Much of the noise was dying out—the shouting, the hurt cries—leaving the hoarse roar of the fire. It consumed the entire building now. Mack’s shoulders sagged. Johnson stepped away and shoved his Peacemaker into its holster.

“ ’Least there’s no wind. Fire’ll just burn itself out. It won’t damage the trees.”

It was true. Spark-laden flames shot straight up, and the large cleared area all around would keep them from spreading.

Mack searched for Swampy. Relieved, he saw him sitting like a fat-legged infant, right there in the dust in his fine white suit, the S&W resting on his thigh. He was still panting.

Movement near the windbreak drew his eye. He saw three Chinese huddled together, watching the fire. Mack rushed toward them.

“You can come back, they’re all gone. Come back, you’re safe…”

When the Chinese saw him, they fled into the windbreak and disappeared.

Mack stopped in the middle of the dirt road, all the strength and fight having left him. The fire roared, overlaid with a new and louder grinding sound. He didn’t turn around until after the upper floor crashed down.

After Mack had posted men to watch in case a sudden wind shift fanned the fire, Johnson came to tell him the picket had been found. Mack trudged after the Texan and gazed down at the young Chinese who lay near the roadside boundary stone, his rifle gone, an empty plum-wine jug in his lap. Perhaps he’d fallen asleep; they’d never know, because someone had smashed open the side of his head. Mack had never seen the human brain before. He walked off with vomit in his throat and tears of fury in his eyes.

In the morning a deputy took Mack’s statement. Grimy and exhausted, Mack saw the man to the door as Johnson returned. The Texan looked equally tired and dirty.

Mack poured two cups of coffee and Johnson sank down on his spine in a deep chair. “I got Billy Biggerstaff cleanin’ up down there. He took some of the houseboys.”

“What about the tramps?”

“They either crawled off or got carried off. The camp across the road’s empty. The tramp I shot was left behind. He had this in his pocket.” He handed Mack a folded and stained scrap of paper.

Mack’s mouth turned to a grim slit as he read the terse message. “Someone promised him a cash reward if he got rid of me. Someone who signed himself with the initial
F.
As in ’Fonso.”

Swampy walked in with his usual mug of morning beer, his color normal again. Mack nodded to acknowledge him and said to Johnson, “How many of our Chinese are left?”

“Not one. They all lit out and I expect they’re still runnin’. You blame ’em? It makes me sick. They were good boys.”

Mack pounded the desk so hard that papers and the guidebook fell off.

Swampy took a chair and blew into the beer foam. “Johnny, I got some advice you don’t want. You got the wrong attitude for a man of property. You care about the wrong people. Gonna keep getting you in Dutch.” After a considered pause he added, “Could get you killed one of these days.”

Mack simply stared at him defiantly.

Johnson sipped coffee and stretched his legs. “I think it’s time I got out of here for a while.”

Later that day he gathered his gear, saddled a horse, and disappeared.

Carla had slept through the night’s commotion. Drunk, Mack assumed. Not that it mattered much. When she woke, her regrets about the barracks were perfunctory. So was his thank-you.

That afternoon he strapped on his snub-nosed Colt and rode down to Riverside. There he asked for some directions and then rode west to a small adobe house in a dusty bight of the Santa Ana. He pounded on the plank door of the house. A stout Mexican, middle-aged, answered, and then quickly stepped back, recognizing him.

Mack asked in Spanish, “Where can I find Alfonso Vicente Blas, sir?”

“Gone,” blurted the other, as if relieved. “Gone to see his relatives in Mexico City.”

“He lives here, though.”

“He does, sir. I am his cousin Carlos.”

“Can you get a message to ’Fonso?”

The heavy man took his hand off the door frame he’d been gripping so tightly. “Ah,” he said with an unctuous smile. “You want to hire some men?”

“I want to tell your cousin not to come back to Riverside. If he does, I’ll put a bullet in him.”

’Fonso Bias never returned to the district.

A week later, cantering into town again, Mack came upon half a dozen ragged tents at the roadside. Without thought he dropped his hand to his belt. But of course he usually didn’t wear his pistol. His mouth set in a tight line as he rode toward the seedy camp. All at once he spied two children rolling a hoop back and forth, and the tension left him.

An emaciated old man, beard like snow, skin like milk, shuffled to the roadside and waved a feeble greeting. Mack nodded. The man started to cough. Not a light cough, but deep and phlegmy. He coughed some kind of glistening lump into the weeds.

Silent as phantoms, other squatters stepped from their tents. The old man grabbed his belly and kept coughing. The hoop fell over and the children let it lie. They stood quiet and sad-eyed like the older people. Even a yellow hound that padded into sight looked feeble. Till now Mack had only heard of these tent camps, full of people sick with consumption who had come to California for its curative climate but couldn’t afford a sanitarium or a boardinghouse. How many of them would die, disillusioned and still diseased?

The consumptives stood for a long time, silently watching the healthy man ride away.

Mack trotted past the boundary stone and up the foothill road. In the groves to either side, new men, white and brown, worked in the sunshine. Billy Biggerstaff had recruited quickly, efficiently, and cheaply. Mack booted his horse into a gallop, his face stony, his eyes straight ahead.

Mack traveled to Carson City with Clive Henley for the championship fight on March 17. Clive was generous with his expressions of sympathy about the fire. “I must confess that your new, ah, labor arrangement pleases the other chaps.”

“Fine, but I don’t really care. I’m in business to make money, not friends.”

Clive covered his dismay by clipping a new cigar.

The outdoor arena, against a spectacular backdrop of snowy mountains, held more than twenty thousand. They sat behind Gentleman Jim’s corner. Mack was excited about the fight, and nearly as excited over three boxy cameras set up outside the ring. “Veriscopes,” he told Clive. “I read about this.”

“What the deuce is a Veriscope?”

“A camera that takes pictures on a moving strip of film. For the first time, they’re going to photograph a prizefight.” He pointed to the ring. Along the edge facing the cameras, bold painted letters announced:
COPYRIGHTED BY THE VERISCOPE COMPANY
.

Clive popped his monocle out and shined it. “Wait a moment. They’ll be taking still pictures?”

“Yes and no.”

“Come on, my dear chap, which is it?”

“The camera takes a series of still frames in sequence. But when the film’s developed and run through a peep-show machine like Edison’s Kinetoscope, you see the action. The pictures move—or appear to move. I saw Governor Stanford demonstrate the principle years ago—”

“Scope this, scope that. Sounds ridiculous, old boy. Ridiculous and useless.”

The opponents paraded into the ring amid great applause. Corbett had weighed in at 180, Fitzsimmons at 172. Gentleman Jim was favored 10-7 over the Cornishman, and just from appearances, it was understandable. Fitzsimmons was balding, knock-kneed, freckled as a schoolboy. While Corbett danced lightly around the ring, Fitzsimmons lurched and shambled. In the first two rounds he hardly touched Corbett, who kept hitting him with left jabs.

By the end of five, Fitzsimmons’s face was cut and bleeding badly. When he slumped in his corner after the bell, his wife, Rose, could be heard urging him, “Hit him in the slats, Bob.” In the opposite corner, Corbett’s manager, old Delaney from Oakland, was smiling and whispering to his man in a smug way.

In the sixth, Corbett knocked Fitzsimmons down, but the Cornishman clutched Corbett’s legs and the referee didn’t start the count immediately. Rose Fitzsimmons screeched, “Get up, Bob!” and finally Fitzsimmons lumbered to his feet on the count of nine. Furious, Corbett shouted that he’d been down for a count of fifteen. The referee ignored him and the fight went on.

By the end of the thirteenth round Fitzsimmons was clearly desperate, flinging clumsy punches at Corbett’s head and torso, few landing. But in the fourteenth, Gentleman Jim grew careless for a moment, and Fitzsimmons suddenly unleashed a left hook to the midsection. It flung Corbett to his knees for the ten-count, ending the fight. A solar-plexus blow, Delaney called it afterward. Corbett’s partisans left the arena shaking their heads. Their man had clearly outpointed his opponent, and had scarcely been touched until the last round.

The hotel party, meant to be a celebration, became a wake. Corbett and his second wife, a fair and buxom young woman named Vera, wandered through the crowd like people suffering a sudden bereavement. When the defeated champion saw Mack, he gave him a quick squeeze of the shoulder. “Thanks for being here. It meant a lot to me. I’m just sorry it came out the wrong way.”

“You gave it everything, Jim.”

Corbett averted his eyes as if to say otherwise.

“Look, when you’re rested and feel up to it, I want you and your wife to come for a visit in Riverside.”

“We’ll see,” Corbett murmured without enthusiasm. “Thanks again.” He moved on, a beaten man. Mack recognized the signs because, lately, he shared the feeling.

H
ELLBURNER JOHNSON STAYED AWAY
two months. “Went out to Death Valley,” he said the afternoon he returned. “Plenty of gold fever out there—Randsburg, Joburg, Atolia. But my God, the desolation. Big spires of this stuff they call
tufa.
You’d think you was on the Moon. Cross it off the list of places you think you need to visit, ’cause you don’t.”