Gold

Gold!

By

Jane Toombs

ISBN: 978-1-77145-140-6

Books We Love Ltd.

Chestermere, Alberta 

Canada
 

Copyright 2013 by Jane Toombs

Cover art by Michelle Lee Copyright 2013

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Chapter
One

It began, for some, during a poker game on
the second floor of Bidwell’s Saloon on Mont
gomery Street.

W.W. Rhynne, his face expressionless, had
finished glancing from the two kings in his hand
to the stacked pile of coins in the pot on the
green baize table. W.W. had played a patient
game, betting on his good hands, folding quietly on the bad. Now he’d bluffed for the first time,
risking his entire stake, and he’d been called.

“
Let’s see the color of your cards,” McDowell demanded.

Rhynne shrugged. He figured McDowell for
three of a kind.

“
What’s that?” Garrison, on Rhynne’s left,
looked up, startled.
What he’d heard was a shout from the street below,
and it was quite loud.

“
It’s Sam Brannan,” a man at the window
reported shrugging. “Appears he’s back from Sutter’s Fort.”

A burly man threw open the saloon door and
came running upstairs. His black hair was tan
gled, his clothes disheveled.

“
Gold!” Sam Brannan shouted. “Gold! Gold
from the American River!” Waving a whisky
bottle above his head he pushed his way back
through the small, curious crowd that had fol
lowed him up. A few seconds later Rhynne heard his booming voice downstairs again. “Gold! Gold
from the American River!”

All the poker players rushed down after Brannan, leaving their drinks unfinished, their cards
scattered on the tables.

All, that is, except Rhynne. For perhaps five
minutes W.W. sat quietly smoking his cigarillo.
Then, unblinking, he scooped the silver coins
from the table and dropped them into his money
belt. One by one he turned over McDowell’s cards. Three tens.

He stood up then, smoothing the short cloak
he favored over the money belt, nodding to him
self as though in confirmation. All you needed
was patience. Patience and a little luck.

Lady Pamela Buttle-Jones, her daughter Selena on the wagon seat beside her, drove down dusty
Market Street toward the cluster of canvas-and-wood structures of San Francisco, she wiped her
eyes with a handkerchief. Was it worth the effort?
She asked herself. Should we have given up the
place in Monterey? Yet the
money was almost
gone and she was worried about Selena.

“
We should have stayed another week in Santa
Clara,” Selena said, a bit petulantly. “You aren’t
well enough to travel.”

“
When I die, I promise you it will not be of
the intermittent fever. Did you want to linger at
Santa Clara because of my health or was Don
Diego the actual reason?”

Her daughter stared down at her hands, saying
nothing.

Pamela took a deep breath and gazed around
them. “Isn’t it beautiful, Selena? Look at the ships in the bay, the blue water and the green hills beyond.
They’re almost as green as the hills of England.
But here the sky’s so azure, so enormous.”

Selena looked at her mother.
“I feel there’s
something wrong. Something odd—don’t you
sense it?”

“
The people,” Pamela said slowly. “Where is everybody? Eleven in the morning and the streets
are deserted.”

They both turned toward the water.
“The bay’s so quiet, no lighters coming from the ships,” Se
lena said. “And look at the ships themselves, there’s no
one on the decks.”

Pamela gasped.
“Could it be the cholera?
Could we be entering a city of the dead?”

“
We’d smell the cholera.” Selena’s nose crin
kled. “Remember the terrible odor when the men
died on the overland trail?”

“
Well, at least there’s one survivor,” Pamela
said dryly. She pointed to a bewhiskered man sit
ting on a bench in front of a general store with a
brandy bottle in his lap. As they approached in
their wagon, the man carefully set the bottle on
the ground beside him, grasped a cane, and hob
bled into the street. They saw then that he had a
wooden right leg.

“
Mary, Joseph, and Jesus,” he said, staring up
at the women. “Have I died and gone to heaven?
There could never be two such angels in San
Francisco.”

Selena blushed, but Pamela only shook her
head impatiently. “Where is everyone?” she asked
him.

“
Gone to the diggings, the diggings on the American River. John Marshall’s found gold at
Sutler’s Mill and now they’ve all packed up and
bolted. There’s maybe a score of us left here in town. I’d be up on the river myself but for this.”
He tapped his peg-leg with the end of his cane. “A
wound I suffered chasing Santa Anna,” he added.

“
More likely you got drunk and shot yourself,”
Pamela told him.

The man squinted up at her.
“I knew ‘twas too
good to be true,” he said. “‘Tis hell I’m in after
all.” He hobbled back toward his bench.

“
The Parker House,” Pamela called after him.
“Where do I find the Parker House?”

The one-legged man waved his hat in the direc
tion of the bay. “On the plaza,” he muttered,
barely loud enough for them to hear.

He sat watching them until they turned onto
Montgomery Street and disappeared from view.
He shook his head. What were two such lovely col
leens doing in this hell-hole? They wouldn’t last a
month, if that long. Yet the older one, she was sharp as a Bowie knife. How could she have
known how he’d lost his leg?

***

Danny Kennedy rapped once on the door,
waited, knocked twice, waited, knocked three
times. The bolt slid back and the door of the small
house in St. Louis opened a crack.

“
Ah, Danny.” His father, hidden in the shad
ows, opened the door just wide enough to let the younger man slip into the room. The shades were
drawn and a single gas jet glowed yellow on the wall.

“
Did you sign us on the wagon train?” Michael Kennedy asked.

“
I did.”

“
And signed the names we agreed to?”

“
That I did. Michael O’Lee and Daniel O’Lee.”

“
Good. In another week we’ll be far from this
city of tribulation.” Michael poured an inch of
whiskey into a drinking glass. “Danny?”
The boy shook his head.

“‘
Tis the inspiration and the curse of the
Irish,” his father said, wiping his lips with the
back of his sleeve. “Danny, read the letter again.”

Danny went to the bed where he lifted the mat
tress and brought out three creased and tattered
sheets of paper. He smoothed the letter on the
table. “Shall I read from the beginning?”

“
No, just the one part.”

Danny
nodded and began reading: “Men re
turning here from the mines report persons have collected as much as a pound of gold in a single day valued at over two hundred dollars. The gold
is so plentiful it lies mingled with the sand in the
beds of the rivers. During bright days it glitters so as almost to dazzle and blind the eyes.”

Michael Kennedy, now Michael O
’Lee, nodded
to his son. “I can almost see it, Danny,” he said,
“a shining mountain of gold waiting for us. Wait
ing for us at the end of the rainbow in California.”

Kingman Sutton spread the Augusta Chronicle
and Gazette on the table beside the lamp. “Betsy,”
he said, “let me read you the correspondence from
Washington.”

Betsy Sutton turned from him with tears in her
eyes.

“
Here,” King said, ignoring her tears for the
common occurrence they were. “Listen to Presi
dent Folk’s report to the Congress:

“
It was known that mines of the precious metals
existed to a considerable extent in California at
the time of its acquisition. Recent discoveries render it probable that these mines are more extensive
and valuable than was anticipated. The accounts of the abundance of gold in that territory are of
such an extraordinary character as would scarcely
command belief were it not corroborated by the authentic reports of officers in the public service, who have visited the mineral district, and derived the facts which they detail from personal observa
tion.”

Betsy folded her hands on the table, laid her
forehead on them, and sobbed.

King Sutton walked around the table to stand
behind her, placing one hand on her shoulder. “Is
there anything you want?” he asked. “Is there any
thing I can do?”
When she shook her head, King bent and kissed her auburn hair, then smoothed it with his fingers.
When he felt the tug of her hair catching on the
setting of his opal ring he carefully untwisted the
strands before taking his hand away. Betsy didn’t
seem to notice.

For a long while he stared down at his wife,
then at the wavering light of the lamp. The reflection of the flame in his eyes was the color of gold.

CHAPTER TWO

Selena twisted and turned on the narrow bed.
She ran her hands over her nightgown along her
thighs, upward over her hips to her waist, up to
the swell of her breasts, then hugged herself.

What if the hands on her body were not her own
but Don Diego’s?

Selena shivered pleasurably, wide awake now.
It was about midnight. She stared at the only
light in the room, the dim rectangle of the room’s
single window. Outside a man shouted drunkenly
on the street, his wild howl reminding her of the coyotes on the trail.

There were so many men here in
San Francisco,
so many kinds—dull and exciting, short and tall, fair and dark, coarse and genteel, and in every
combination thereof. During the night, Selena
had dreamed she sat on a throne, berobed and
crowned like young Queen Victoria
, while men
came to her, kneeling one by one at her feet, some
requesting boons and largesse, others to be
knighted.

Don Diego had been one of the men. In her
dream, Selena had stood, raising a sword in both
hands, and laid the blade on his shoulder. When
he looked up at her with his piercing brown eyes,
her hand on the sword trembled.

One man refused to kneel in her dream. He
stood apart, in its shadows, watching her, and,
though she saw his features only darkly, she knew
he was smiling scornfully at her. Then, as more
men came to pay her homage she became impa
tient, hastening the ceremony until at last there
was no one left except the man watching from the shadows. Yet when she handed her sword to a
courtier and approached the man, he was gone,
leaving only the echo of his laugh and the impres
sion of mocking blue eyes behind.

Selena frowned, striving to shut out the noises from the street. When they
’d arrived in San Fran
cisco the town had been almost deserted, the men
at the gold fields. Day by day they had trickled
back—some from the American River, others ar
riving from the south, from the capital at Monte
rey and from the City of the Angels. Now the
town was livelier than ever. She wished the Parker
House didn’t have gambling rooms on the first floor. There was no quiet until long after mid
night.