Gold (21 page)

“
This is a second box, identical to the first. In
this one I’ve put one hundred lottery tickets. When
the drawing is held, this will be the box we use.
And every ticket will have the same number on it.”

“
And who is this lucky winner?”

“
The Reverend James Colton. Who will
promptly request a cash prize in lieu of the adver
tised award, the money going to his church.”

“
Rhynne, someday you’re going to outwit your
self.”

“
Not with this lottery. We’ll end up with nine
thousand dollars to divide between the two of us.”

“
One hundred times one hundred comes to ten
thousand.”

“
There are certain expenses. I made a donation
today to the Reverend Colton’s church. And
there’ll be the second one when he wins.”

They heard hoofbeats approaching on the street
outside. Pamela went to the window and peered
between the curtain and the frame.

“
Only some miners,” she said after a moment.

“
You seemed worried.”

“
I was and am. About Diego de la Torre.”

“
Wasn’t that the last name of that Mexican gal?” he asked. “Who is this Diego?”

She told him of Selena
’s elopement, not concealing her part in it. “I admit I misled Diego,” she admitted.

“
And you think he means to harm you or Selena?”

“
He lost Selena. And now his sister’s dead. I don’t know what he might do. I’m afraid, W.W., I’m afraid.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The man who called himself Pike threw his pan
to the ground. He had found nothing to repay him
for his ten hours of panning, not a gold nugget,
not a flake, not even a bit of dust. Another day
wasted.

Bad luck had dogged Pike all his life.

Back home in Missouri he had tried farming
and failed. He had clerked in a grain-and-feed
emporium. He had not failed there. Six months
after he was hired, the store failed. After his wife left him, he stole horses and made a tolerable liv
ing at it for a time, only to be caught red-handed.
Faced with a hangman’s noose, he escaped from
the county jail and fled Pike County in ‘47.

The run of bad luck wasn
’t his fault. Was he to
blame for two years of drought, for the hardscrabb
le Missouri soil, for all the damn foreigners?

The bad luck followed him west. Even before
his wagon train reached the mountains he’d come
down with the scurvy, his hands and feet swell
ing. Then he was caught borrowing a few cans of
food to keep himself going, caught only because
the swelling by that time was so bad he could
hardly walk, much less run. That bastard of a
wagonmaster had abandoned him at Fort Bridger.

California
, so far, had been more of the same.

After finally making his way to Sutter
’s Fort,
he suffered a fierce attack of diarrhea and didn’t
get to the diggings until October. The winter rains
started the next week and so he had to wait till
spring. In March he started panning, working
fifty pans or more of dirt in a ten-hour day. He’d
shoveled the dirt, sorted it, panned the best of the lot, his hands in the ice-cold water for ten minutes
and more at a time as he whirled the gravel to
wash away the lighter sand and separate the gold
from the remaining heavy sand.

Pike wouldn
’t have minded the hard work, he
was used to hard work, if he had found gold. He
hadn’t, only enough to keep him in salt pork,
bread and dried beans. So he’d teamed up with an
other Pike County man, helping him work a
cradle—a box on rockers—one of them shoveling
dirt into the hopper while the other added water,
all the while violently rocking the cradle. The
gold, what there was of it, lodged behind the
cleats along the cradle’s bottom. They made a few
dollars, no more, before Pike’s partner drifted off after hearing news of a strike to the south.

Pike could always hire out, of course. He could
make five or six dollars a day working for some
body else on a Long Tom, shoveling dirt into the
coffin-shaped trough, washing it along the trough
to a sieve, then into the riffle where the gold parti
cles were caught by wooden bars.

He could have worked for others but he didn
’t.
He knew better. Every time he hired himself out,
whether in Missouri or at Sutter’s, he had been
cheated. He knew that employers, for whatever
reason, saw him as an easy mark.

The grain-and-feed boss hadn
’t paid Pike the
wage he’d been promised, blaming the lack of business. At Sutter’s, they said he was too slow.
Who in hell wouldn’t be slow when they had diar
rhea? The day after he was fired he saw a Mex
doing his old job. Talk about adding insult to
injury! Everybody knew how slow they were.

Bad luck piled on top of bad luck. Now, back
on his own again, any change in his luck would have to be for the better.

Pike walked up the hill to the oak where he had
made his camp. His morning’s fire was a black
circle on the ground. Beyond the dead fire his
blankets were spread on pine boughs. Should I
break camp, he asked himself, and move on? Or should I stay? He worried the question, turning it
this way and that in his mind. He had just decided
to give this claim another day and was heading
for the woods in search of fuel for his fire when he
heard the hoofbeats.

With one hand on the butt of the gun in his
belt, Pike looked down along the creek. A hun
dred yards below him three horsemen, dressed in
the black and silver of Californios, were dis
mounting to
water their horses. Pike watched as
one of the men pointed down the creek and another shook his head, gesturing on along the
trail they had been following. The third man
listened, looking from one of his companions to
the other as though undecided.

Lost. The damn greasers were lost. You might know, Pike told himself, relaxing.

One of the horsemen, the undecided one, saw
Pike. Saying something to the others, he left them
and started to climb the hill on foot. Probably
wanted to know the way to Coloma. All they had
to do, Pike knew, was follow the creek downstream to the town.

Hands on hips, Pike waited for the Mexican, a thin, wiry man with a small black moustache, to reach him. When the Californio was still twenty feet away he removed his black hat and held it respectfully in front of him.

“Lost?” Pike asked.

“
Si.
We are strangers in search of Coloma.”

Pike pointed across the creek into the hills,
smiling to himself. They’d end up twenty miles
out of their way, maybe even get lost in the mountains.

“
Are you Senor Pike?” the Mexican asked.

“
I’m Pike,” he said, surprised.

The Mexican took a pistol from beneath his hat
and shot Pike in the right shoulder. Pike spun
back but did not fall,

“
I am Diego de la Torre,” the Mexican said.

Diego shot Pike again, in the left shoulder this time, the force of the bullet knocking him to the ground.

Pike grunted with pain, trying to reach the gun
in his belt. Diego stepped on his hand with the
heel of his boot, took the gun from Pike’s belt and
tossed it into the brush. He slid a knife from Pike’s
boot and hurled it away.

“
I am the brother of Esperanza de la Torre,”
Diego said.

Pike stared at him through a haze of pain.
Esperanza. He recognized the name. That was the greaser girl who had killed English Bob in Hang-
town two weeks back. Her brother. This was her
brother.

Diego thrust his pistol in his belt and removed
a long knife from its sheath. Bending down he
grasped the top of Pike’s trousers and pulled them
toward him, slitting them with his knife, the blade
slicing through belt and fabric, the buttons ripping off. Pike reached for Diego, tried to reach for him.
He couldn’t move his arms.

Diego peeled Pike
’s trousers down to his
knees, then gripped Pike’s sex in one hand. Pike
screamed. Diego held the point of his knife inches
from Pike’s eyes. When Pike tried to scramble
away, Diego twisted his hand. Pain seared through Pike. All he could see was a jagged red mist. He
screamed again. He couldn’t move. The pain
grew, became unbearable, then grew worse.

Pike screamed again. And then he fainted.

Fainting was the only good luck Pike was to
have that day.

Danny O
’Lee whistled as he rode his new two-hundred-dollar mule down the trail toward Hang
town. What a glorious day! Even with the morning sun still behind the Sierras, he knew the day
would be clear and hot, yet not unbearably hot for
already a breeze stirred at his back. A grand day
for a man to go into town for provisions. And
perhaps stop by the Empire for a bit of sport.
He started to sing:

“Did you ever hear tell of Sweet Betsy from

Pike

Who crossed the wide prairies with her lover
Ike?”

Wouldn’t anyone sing on such a day? Espe
cially a man whose claim was even richer than he’d supposed at first, a man with a whole day
ahead of him with nary a cloud in the sky, a man
heading for town with a bit of gold dust in his
poke, a song on his lips, and a beautiful colleen
waiting at the end of his journey?

Today he would speak to Selena. No longer the inexperienced lad of a few weeks back, he would march up to her and ask her to walk out with him.
What else could she say but yes on such a day as
this?

Surely she no longer held a grudge for his high
handed doings on the night of Matt Murphy’s
wake. Already he could feel her tiny hand on his
arm, see her blue eyes looking up at him, hear
her lilting laugh as he told her the story of his
luck at the diggings.
To think that Pamela was her mother. Why,
Pamela must be old, possibly forty, the age of his
own mother when she died. She didn’t look that
old. He would never forget Pamela and he’d always
admire her. There’s be a corner in his heart for her
always. But she wasn’t Selena. Golden-haired
Selena!
He came down the hill into town, the tents and
shacks on both sides of the road only outlines in
the grey dawn. There were more of them then he
remembered seeing when he’d left just two weeks
before. Soon Hangtown would be the biggest city
in California if not in all the West.

Only one blight marred Danny
’s happiness. He
had not found Duke Olmsted, the man who’d mur
dered his father in cold blood. Wherever he had gone he’d asked after him. He’d not found a trace
of the man. Duke seemed to have vanished from
the face of the earth.

At the bottom of the hill, Danny turned into the
town’s deserted main street. Soon the mules,
horses and men on foot would stir the dust into a
haze and fill the air with their oaths and shouts,
but now in the early morning the town lay unsullied before him, the only movement the smoke
drifting from an occasional chimney.

“
Whoa!” he called to his mule.

Something had caught his eye. There, on the
great oak just ahead, the hanging oak. Danny dis
mounted and peered up. A body dangled from one
of the lower limbs of the tree, twisting and turning in the wind.