Gold (39 page)

Flames shot skyward from the shed
’s roof and
licked up the side of a house in front. A bucket
brigade had already formed to throw water on the
nearby buildings. The shed and house were
doomed. With a great clatter a fire engine arrived,
eight men pulling the four-wheeled vehicle.

“
Knickerbocker Five,” one of the firemen
shouted as they stopped on the street in front of
the burning buildings. “First again!” The volun
teer firemen unrolled their hoses while two men
leaped to man the pumper.

Duke Olmsted ran to the uniformed fire cap
tain, who clapped him on the shoulder and
pointed at the burning house. Duke ran to the
porch and disappeared inside. Danny followed,
dodging past restraining hands. Inside, he saw
Duke at the top of the stairs. The other man
paused, looking right and left, and Danny recalled
Rhynne doing the same a few hours earlier at the
top of the ramp leading to the Argonaut.

Danny looked around him. Smoke seeped into the hallway from one of the doors leading to the
rear of the house, but the air was still comparatively clear. He raced from room to room, open
ing doors, calling out, looking to see if anyone
was left in the building. He found no one.

When he came back to the front hall, Duke was just coming to the top of the stairs holding a hand
kerchief to his mouth. Danny positioned himself
at the bottom of the staircase, took out his Colt and pointed it at Duke’s chest. The other man
stopped and stared down at him.

“
Lay that gun aside,” he said. “Are you mad?”
Olmsted took a step toward him.

Danny fired to Duke
’s left, the bullet splintering
the stair rail. Olmsted drew back.

“
You killed my father,” Danny told him. “And
so I’m going to kill you.”

“I never killed a man in my life.”
Duke looked at him, puzzled. A kind of com
prehension cleared his face, but it was not the
same understanding that Danny desired.

“
I might have roistered a bit in my time,” Duke
said. “I may have been in a brawl or two be
fore I married. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you
in my life. I know I never killed a man. Why
do you think I joined the Vigilantes? I want an end to all that.”

Danny cocked the pistol. He would shoot Olm
sted and leave his body here in the burning house.
No one would ever know he hadn’t perished in
the fire.

The moment stretched endlessly. Olmsted stood
on the stairs, his eyes never leaving the Colt in
Danny’s hands, while the smoke drifted around
them, the flames crackled in the rear of the house, and the men shouted in the street outside.

Danny remembered that fog-shrouded night
when he and his father were set upon outside the
saloon, remembered the duel with Sutton, the gun
spinning from his hand, the fearful moment when
he thought he’d been hit, Rhynne kneeling beside
him, and now today, Rhynne, a prisoner of the
Vigilantes, climbing the ramp to the Argonaut.

If he shot Olmsted, he
’d be doing exactly what
the Vigilantes intended to do to Rhynne. He’d be
killing him out of hand, without proof, without a
fair hearing. Without a hearing at all.

Danny eased the hammer of the pistol forward
and tucked the gun into his belt.

“
Perhaps I made a mistake,” he said. “I’m not
sure you’re the man I’m looking for after all. If
you are, may the death of my father be on your
head for the rest of your days.”
Olmsted drew a deep breath, coughing when he breathed in the smoke fumes. “We’d best be leav
ing here,” he said. “There was no one upstairs.”

“
Nor down,” Danny said.

They walked out of the burning house together.

Later, Danny downed a whisky at the bar of
the Golden Empire. He put down his glass,
nodded to McSweeney, and they climbed the stairs
to Rhynne’s office.

“
We have two days, maybe three to free
Rhynne,” Danny said. “No more, perhaps less.”

“
Who’s to lead us in the attempt?” McSweeney
asked.

Danny went around the desk and sat in
Rhynne’s chair. “I am,” he said.

“
You think you’re the lad for the job?”

“
No,” Danny said quickly. “I’m not the lad for
the job. I’m the man.”

He never saw Duke Olmsted again. Yet he
knew that it was Duke and the way he had been
able to handle the situation with Duke that let him call himself a man.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

Pamela put the handkerchief containing the
lump of camphor up to her nose and inhaled be
fore approaching the next pallet. What had the
coroner’s jury called the first case? Death by visitation of God? Even now, with the overcrowded hospitals turning away cholera victims, the Calif
ornian persisted in claiming that the fear of
cholera was as bad as the disease, itself able to
kill, and that thinking cholera contagious was
ridiculous.

Back home, Dr. Graves had claimed just the opposite
-- Asiatic cholera was definitely contag
ious, he said. And Dr. Graves was one of En
gland’s most prominent physicians. Perhaps the
camphor wasn’t as much of a protection against
miasma as Dr. Gunn had suggested in his Home Book of Health, but the aromatic fumes were preferable to the stench around her.

Pamela bent over the sufferer, a bearded
man with eyes sunk so deep she was reminded of two holes in a skull. His skin was cold, his lips blue. He desperately needed to be cleaned—she could smell that without looking under the blanket. But she shook her head and left him. No use, he was as good as dead.

The next patient was a boy in his teens who stared fearfully up at her.
“How do you feel?” she asked. “Can you swallow?”

He nodded weakly. Carefully she measured a teaspoonful of laudanum and inserted the medicine between the boy
’s cracked lips. She’d had to pay Charlie Sung a fortune for the last shipment. Although she’d tried to stop taking the opiate herself, she found she couldn’t. Not if she wanted to be capable of anything beyond turning and tossing in bed.

“
Water,” the boy whispered.

Pamela went to the pail in the center of the room, stepping around the patients. Almost every foot of the room was
crowded with the sick and dying. Using the tin dipper, she poured water into the cup she carried in her canvas bag. She’d learned not to look too carefully at the water or to object to the green scum in the pail. At least someone still bothered to bring water regularly.

The next patient was past all human help. Pamela closed the young woman’s eyes and pulled the blanket over her face. She took a square of
yellow calico from her bag and laid it on top of
the blanket so that the undertaker’s assistant
would spot the dead body quickly. Inhaling the
camphor fumes, she moved on.

When she could take no more, Pamela went
outside to let cold wind from the bay dissipate
the lingering odors of sickness. The sky was over
cast but the rain held off.

Last night she had dreamed of the Orient,
warm sun, brilliant colors, soft silken cushions.
She had been in the harem of a sultan who found
her the most desirable of all women. Even the
eunuch guard had gazed on her with dark lustful
eyes. It had been a wonderful dream at first--
she’d often had such erotic dreams since she’d
started using laudanum.

But then, when she
’d been summoned to the
sultan and went to his glittering, jewel-studded
chamber, the dream went awry. For as she ap
proached the curtained bed, one very much like
the Louis XIV bed W.W. Rhynne had given
Selena, her anticipation turned to dread, know
ing what she’d see when she drew aside the cloth-
of-gold curtains.

She saw the same sight every hour of every day.

Cholera. The sultan obscenely dead in his own
wastes. And the horror of it was that the sultan
was no stranger. He was W.W.

Pamela bit her lip, remembering. No use to
try not to think about W.W.he appeared in her dreams anyway. He wasn’t dead of cholera, of
course. He didn’t even have the disease, but he
was as good as dead and she could do nothing.

Damn Barry Fitzpatrick for interfering!

Not that Rhynne wasn’t capable of shooting a man. At first she’d thought he probably had shot King. Then when she’d learned the opal ring was missing she dismissed the idea. W.W. was a capable gambler, yes. He took other men’s money by his skill and luck. But he wasn’t a common thief.

Tears filled her eyes. W.W. wasn
’t common in any sense of the word. She’d done her mourning for King even before she knew of his wounding. In a way he’d be better off dead. But not W.W.

If only there was some way to save him. She was so tired, so exhausted from caring for cholera victims. But if she didn
’t come to the hospital every day, there’d be no one to take her place.

“
Oh,W.W., she said aloud, “what can I do?” A drop of rain struck her upturned face, then another, and she fled back into the hospital to escape the downpour, nearly colliding with with a young man in the entry. He was holding a sick child.

“
Can you help her?” the man asked in a hoarse voice.

Pamela glanced up.
“I’ll try.” She blinked, peering intently at him. He had a familiar look, but she couldn’t place him.

“
Ain’t there a doctor here?” he asked. “I know it must be the cholera for I had it myself and like to have died.”

“
One of the doctors comes in ever few hours,” she said, trying to look unobtrusively at him. He was a giant bear of a man, though gaunt-faced from illness.
And she’d known him somewhere, she was certain.

He didn
’t seem to recognize her, though. But
she must look quite different from Lady Pamela
in her plain brown cotton without any crinoline.
And she had a brown cotton cloth tied over her
hair, too. No, he wouldn’t be likely to connect
her with Lady Buttle-Jones.

Turning her attention back to the child, Pamela saw the little girl was desperately ill. She
sprawled on the cot like a rag doll, her eyes
closed. When Pamela put the teaspoon contain
ing a few drops of laudanum to her lips she whimpered but didn’t move.

“
She’s very bad,” Pamela said.

The young man clenched his fists.
“She’s only
been sick a few hours,” he said. “God in His
mercy spared me, but I fear for her.” He lowered
his head.

All at once Pamela remembered. The wagon
train. So long ago. Howard Tedder. Then she
shook her head. This man was too young to be
Howard. Nazareth, of course, now the image of
his father. Her eyes widened in shock. If this was
Nazareth . . .

She dropped to her knees beside the cot, gently
pushing the girl’s dark hair back from her fore
head. She leaned close to the small face. “Lydia,”
she murmured so low Nazareth couldn’t hear. “Lydia May.”

The girl opened sunken blue eyes, then closed
them as if the effort had been too great.

Pamela scrambled to her feet.
“I’ll heat some
bricks,” she said. “She needs to be kept warm.”

Nazareth
Tedder. A boy when Selena had lain
with him in a wagon and conceived Lydia May.
And now, the little girl, the little girl was . . .
Pamela choked back her sobs.

Despite the warm bricks at her feet, despite
massage with cayenne pepper dissolved in brandy,
despite the laudanum and Pamela’s desperate at
tention, Lydia May grew steadily worse. Pamela
saw no hope for her, it was just a matter of time,
and there was precious little left.