Gold (7 page)

“
Diego!” Selena, her heart thudding, pushed
Pamela’s arm aside and stepped past her. “This
is not my mother’s doing,” she said.

“
Selena.”

Diego
’s voice was suddenly so soft, so tender,
she felt an echo of the passion that had stirred in
her such a short time before. “Selena.” His hand came up in supplication and she remembered that same hand on her breast.

“
Selena,” said her mother quietly, with a quaver
in her voice. Selena knew what she must do.

“
Diego,” she said, “listen to me. You did not
ask for my hand in marriage. You never asked
me. Never.”

“
I asked your mother.” Diego seemed confused.
“Your father is dead. I asked your mother who
promised you to me.”

Selena looked quickly behind her. Pamela
’s
heightened color told her Diego spoke the truth.

“
You never asked me,” Selena insisted. “Per
haps in Spain or in Mexico a mother speaks for
her daughter but not in my country. Not here in
California. You must ask me.”

“
I will ask you then. Selena, will you ride with
me for the rest of your days? Will you be my
wife?”
Selena kept her eyes on him, resisting the urge
to glance away.

“
No, Diego, I will not. I cannot. It is not what I wish.”

Diego removed the pistol from his belt. Selena
stepped back. Pamela gasped.

Diego flipped the pistol in the air, caught it by the barrel, and extended the gun to Selena.
“Take
this,” he said.

Puzzled, she accepted the gun. Trimmed in silver, it had a shorter barrel than most of the pistols
she had seen on the trail or in San Francisco.

“
There is but one bullet in the chamber,” Diego
said. “It is for me. Shoot me, Selena, take my life.
If you deny me your hand, my life is over; if you
scorn me, I will become like a rider of mares. So
you must kill me, Selena.”

Selena tossed the gun to the ground. She had a
sudden nervous compulsion to laugh, but when
she looked at Diego’s desperate face she almost
reached out to comfort him. Yet she did not.

“
Diego,” she said. He looked at the ground at
her feet. “Diego,” she said again, “the horse I rode
from the rancho
has been returned to you. You
will always be in my heart.” Still he would not look at her. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Selena turned to her mother, who stood staring
down at the inbound clipper ship rounding the
point at the entrance to the cove. “Pamela,” she
said, “it’s time we went home.” She took her
mother’s arm and together they walked past Diego
to the path leading down the hill.

Diego watched them go. He was very tired. His
rage was spent--a cold hatred had taken its place.
He knelt to retrieve his pistol and thrust it under
his belt. He picked his hat from the ground,
brushed the brim with his sleeve, and placed it
squarely on his head.

I will have her, this Selena, he promised him
self. I will have her again and again until she begs
for mercy and I will not give her mercy. I will
send other men to her and I will watch when they
are with her and I will laugh. She will become a
puta,
a whore, and worse, and I will watch and
laugh.

The older one, the mother, I will kill. But not
until she sees what I have made of her daughter.

As the two women descended the hill, Pamela walked slower and slower, often stumbling. Her
eyes were moist and every so often she had to stop
to dab at her nose with a handkerchief. To Selena,
she looked ten years older than the thirty-eight
she knew her to be.

“
The fever,” Pamela said when Selena asked if
she was ill. “The after effects of the fever. The doc
tor said it sometimes takes months before you re
cover.”

They came to
Portsmouth Street, opposite the
first wharf, where workmen were shoveling sand,
rocks and dirt from a wagon into the water to re
claim the tidelands. From the town they heard the
pounding of hammers and the rasping of saws.

“
Pamela,” Selena said, “you told me Mr.
Rhynne offered to advance us five thousand dol
lars.”

Pamela nodded.

“On the condition that we allow gambling.”

Pamela nodded again.
“We’ll see him later today and we’ll tell him we
accept. We’ll open a store and a gambling hall but
we will not countenance . . .” Selena paused. “We
will not tolerate harlots. We will draw up an agree
ment to that effect.”

Pamela took her daughter
’s hand and for a mo
ment their eyes met. Pamela’s fell away first. “Per
haps that’s what we should do,” she said slowly.

“
Not perhaps. We will.”

Pamela hesitated. At last her head dropped.
“All right, we will,” she said.

Selena walked on toward the hotel, her mother a step behind. I
’m no longer following, Selena
thought. She was frightened. Her mother was ob
viously wary of Rhynne, and so was she. Yet,
anticipating her future in the brawling camps to
the north, she did not slow her pace.

CHAPTER FIVE

Arm in arm, Danny O
’Lee and his father swung
down the track from their lodgings at the foot of Telegraph Hill. The abandoned ships in the cove
were dark but lamps were being lit in the canvas
tents and wooden shanties on both sides of the road
as they walked.

The two men turned onto
California Street,
heading for the bay front. Soon they were sur
rounded by its hubbub. Chinese wearing long
queues pushed past them, mingling with Chilenos,
Peruvians, Mexicans, an occasional Kanaka from
the Sandwich Islands, Indians. They heard the
twang of New England, the slow drawl of the
South, the flat accents of the Midwest.

“
Would you look at that?” Michael said to his
son. They went over and joined the men in front
of the Parker House. The men were watching two women, one on either arm of a frock-coated man,
coming toward them from Whittaker’s Restau
rant. The older woman, dressed in black, was
veiled, but the younger one wore green, a deep
midsummer green. Golden curls fell from beneath
her matching green hat to her shoulders. Her face
glowed with animation as she talked to her escort.

“
That’s Rhynne, the gambler,” someone next to
Danny said. “Lucky devil.”

Rhynne held the door to the hotel
’s private en
trance and then followed the two women inside.
The crowd of men lingered after the women were gone, shuffling their feet, then slowly dispersed.

“
That lass was as lovely,” Michael said, “as your sainted mother in the bloom of her youth.”

Danny said nothing. When he had seen the
golden-haired young woman something had
leaped inside him. He closed his eyes trying to re
call the exact tilt of her nose, the precise shade of
her hair. She was the most beautiful girl he had
ever seen.

“
Come along, Danny, we can’t be dawdling
here all of this night. Ah, the colleen. It’s out of
your mind you are to be still thinking of her. For
it’s the gold in the ground we’re after, not the gold
in a lass’s hair.”

They stopped in front of a pitchman who stood behind a blue-painted board laid across two bar
rels.

“
Ah, temptations on all sides of us,” Michael
said.

“
Gentlemen,” the pitchman cried. “I can tell by
your looks you’re sporting men willing to risk the
coin of the realm or a pinch of dust to prove your
eye is quicker than the hand. Look here.” He
lifted one of three large silver thimbles on the
board to show them a shriveled pea.

“
Now,” he said, “keep your eye on the thimble
with the pea.” After shifting the thimbles hither
and thither on the board, he raised his hands,
palms out. “Now, who can tell me which thimble
hides the pea?”

“
Why,” Danny whispered to his father, “it’s
clear it’s under the middle one. This fool and his money will soon be parted.”

A bearded miner put a pinch of gold dust in
the pitchman’s open pouch. “That one,” he said,
pointing to the middle thimble.

The pitchman raised the thimble
. There was
nothing underneath. “We’ll try the others,” he
said, “to prove the game is on the up and up.” He
found the pea beneath the right-hand thimble.

“
Sure, and it’s one of the devil’s own games,”
Michael said, frowning as they walked away.

In front of an auction house a plug-hatted man
had mounted the bottom rungs of a stepladder to
harangue a semi-circle of men.

“
Only a single dollar,” he was saying as Danny
and his father joined the throng. “One dollar for
the opportunity of a lifetime. The chance to win
a lot on Market Street certified to be eighteen
varos wide and forty deep. Last month exactly the
same size lot next door sold for one hundred and sixty dollars. Yesterday it brought five hundred. You heard me right, gentleman, five hundred
American dollars. Next month they’ll be selling
for a thousand and more.”

“
And what may a
varo
be?” Michael wondered aloud.

“
Three feet,” someone in front of them said without turning around.

“
The drawing’s in one week’s time,” the man on
the ladder was saying. “Only a week to wait before you make your fortune. No digging in water up to your knees, no cradling, no panning. Remember the words of the immortal bard, ‘There
comes a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fame and fortune.’ The tide’s
rising, gentlemen, the crest approaches. For one
dollar, fame and fortune can be yours.”

Danny and Michael moved off. From Bidwell
’s
Saloon came laughter, the clink of glasses, voices
raised in a wavering chorus of Auld Lang Syne.

“
We’d best be off to bed soon,” Danny said, “if
we’re to be up and away to the diggings in the morning.”

“
Listen a moment, first. Do you hear the selfsame heavenly music I hear?”
A man’s voice was raised in song:

‘‘The summer’s gone and all the roses falling
It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide”

The music wafted toward them from the open door of a narrow, dimly lit saloon beyond Bid
wells.

“
We’ll just go in and listen a wee bit,” Michael
decided. “We won’t tarry long in this place.
Danny, as I’ve oft told you, your mother sang that
very song to you as a lullaby.”

“
It’s I’ll be there in sunshine or in shadow
Oh, Danny Boy, my Danny Boy, I love you
so.”

Still, you left her, Danny thought. Left me and
Burke as well. Nothing his father put a hand to
ever came quite right. And yet, though mother
had been a saint, Danny had always loved his
father best.

They wedged their way to the bar, Danny jostling the arm of the man to his left. The man, big
and burly with a bushy black beard, looked down
hard at him.

“
Are you serving babes not yet weaned from
their mother’s milk?” he asked. The barman ig
nored him and set a bottle of whisky in front of
Michael.

Danny sipped his drink. He had never learned
to tolerate spirits. A drink, two at the most, and
he fell asleep. His father, on the other hand, could
drink for hours. In fact, he was already refilling
his glass.

When the fiddler started
Old Dan Tucker some
of the men joined the chorus while others hunched
silently over their drinks.

“
We came by way of Panama,” Danny’s father
was saying to two men on his far side. Danny en
vied his father’s ease with lies when he needed
them, also his capacity for hard drink and his non
chalance with women. He did not envy him his
temper. It’s what had gotten them into trouble in
St. Louis. A man had been killed in a saloon
brawl, and though Michael hadn’t killed him, he’d
been part of the fight. With the reputation of a brawler pursuing him, he’d thought the time op
portune to leave for California and start life anew.
He wasn’t the only one--
many were doing so, for various reasons.

Michael was spinning a good yarn.
“The black
natives poled us up the Chagras while all the
time we were battling the mosquitoes. We stayed
at a hotel, a tent it was, and we had to wait for
our coffee to be ground and I looked from the
window and saw a girl chewing the beans and
spitting them into the pot. Then it was by mule
train we traveled to Panama City where we weren’t
allowed to shoot the vultures because the great
birds cleaned the filth from the streets. When
first we saw the sea I says, ‘Begorra, ‘tis the spitting image of the Atlantic.’ And all the while I’d
been expecting a different breed of ocean.”

“
You and the lad are just off the boat, I ex
pect.”

“
This morning and none too soon, after waiting two weeks offshore for a breeze to blow us here. And that after sitting a month and more in
Panama before we shoved our way aboard the
California.
And would you believe it? We crossed
the Isthmus from west to east.”

“
You’re ass backwards,” the burly man next to
Danny said.

“
Pa, maybe you’ve said enough,” Danny cau
tioned Michael.

“
You tell him, Duke,” another said to the
burly man.

“
As ass backwards as the day you were born,”
Duke went on. “If you’re a-coming from the east
coast to the west coast any jackass knows you travel east to west.”

“
Sure now, and I’m begging to differ,” Michael said across Danny. “That steaming hell of a coun
try is most peculiar, with more loops and bends
than a shillelagh. So it was from west to east we
went.”

“
And I say you’re a liar.”

Michael placed his whisky glass on the bar.
Danny nudged him, saying in a low voice, “Leave
it alone now, pa. No trouble, please.”

Michael picked up his glass and saluted Duke.
“I acknowledge the error of my thinking,” he
said. “Sure and I must have been standing on my
head when we made the crossing to believe we
went one way when in truth we went the other.”

Duke grunted.

There was a murmur farther along the bar.

“
One drink, no more,” the barman was telling an Indian. “Niggers and Indians, one drink, then
vamoose.”

“
Damn all these foreigners,” Duke said. Sev
eral of his friends muttered agreement. He rapped
his empty bottle on the counter until the barman
exchanged it for a full one. “They come here and make off with all the gold that rightfully belongs
to us Americans.” A murmur of assent came from
the men along the bar. “They come here with
their fancy French sashaying and their strutting
Spanish ways and try to take our women as well
as our gold. It’s not right.”

“
Seen the two women at the Parker House?”
someone asked.

“
I have. Two of the best-looking pieces I ever
laid eyes on,” Duke said.

Danny began to protest, then subsided.

“
That filly,” Duke went on, “I’d like to get my hand under her skirt for just two minutes. She’d
soon lose her nose-in-the-air hoity-toity ways. I can tell a bawd when I set eyes on one.”

“
She’s not a bawd,” Danny said quietly.
“Neither of them are. They’re respectable ladies.”

“
Respectable and in league with Rhynne?” Several of the men joined in Duke’s guffaw.
“Rhynne, the premier whoremaster of San Fran
cisco?”

Danny swung around to face Duke.
“Take it
back. Take back what you said about her.”

Duke smirked, put down his glass, and drew
himself up to his full height. He was six inches taller than Danny. “And look who’s talking,” he
said. “A little black Irish mick. And what do you
know of women, sonny? I’ll wager you’ve never
bedded a woman in your life. Not a woman of
any sort, whore or otherwise.”

Danny felt the color rise to his neck and face.

Duke put his head back and laughed. “You
see, mates, I was right. Nineteen-years-old and
never been kissed.”

“
I’m twenty-one,” Danny muttered.

“
Twenty-one!” Duke unfastened a pouch
from his belt and dropped it on the bar. “Duke Olmsted is standing a round,” he called out in a
slurred voice. “To celebrate this here boy’s
twenty-first birthday, since, by God, it must have been yesterday or today, he’s so green behind the
ears.”

The men at the bar roared their appreciation;
those at the tables around the room got up and
crowded over. Danny gritted his teeth and
hunched over his drink.

His father
’s hand touched
his wrist. “It’s not a man’s size,” Michael said
gently, “nor the bombast in his voice that makes
him a man. Nor is it the gratification of his lusts.”

Danny tried to grin at his father. But he found
little value in Michael’s words. It was Duke’s
words that rang in his head. How had the man
known? He asked himself. How did they always
guess? It was the shame of his life that he had
never been with a woman, never kissed a girl with
passion. Never.

“
No,” the bartender was telling the Indian, “not
you. You had your drink. Vamoose.”

Danny looked along the bar. The Indian
’s lank
hair hung to his shoulders, on his head was a
battered black hat, his face was brown and lined,
his oversized nose was squashed almost flat. The
Indian said nothing—Danny had not heard him
speak at all—but held his glass out over the bar
to be filled.

“
You’re drunk,” the bartender told him.

Taking his last two coins from his pocket, Danny tossed them on the bar.
“I’m buying him
a drink,” he said. The bartender looked from the
coins to the Indian, all the while shaking his head.

Duke
’s hand grasped Danny’s shoulder and spun him around. “He said no more drinks for
the fucking Indian.”

Danny took his almost full glass from the bar
and threw the whisky into Duke’s face.

Duke, surprised, released his hold and wiped
his sleeve across his face. Danny stepped back.
The crowd at the bar shrank from the two men,
all except Michael and the Indian, who still held
his glass extended over the bar.

“
Get away,” Danny said to his father. “I’m for
it, pa. There’s no need having all of them onto
both of us.”

His father nodded just as Duke swung a wheeling ham-handed punch. Danny ducked but caught
the blow on his shoulder. He was flung against
the bar and staggered back into the Indian. His shoulder stung as though he’d been hit by a club.

The Indian threw his glass over his shoulder,
pushed Danny aside and weaved toward Duke.
He tripped on a fallen chair, lurched to one side
and fell face first to the floor. A miner prodded him with his boot. “Dead drunk,” he said. Two
men lifted the Indian from the floor and carried
him out of the saloon.