Mackinnons #02 For All the Right Reasons (25 page)

“I’m too old to start out at something new. Farming and housekeeping is all I know.”

“You could get a job keeping house for someone in Waco,” Karin said.

“With my mouth? Lord girl, I’d be fired in a week. I couldn’t work for anyone else. I can’t hold my tongue.”

Karin looked at Katherine. “Why won’t you come?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I’m just not ready to call it quits.”

“What will it take? We’ve lost everything!”

“We still have our land.”

“Our land,” Karin scoffed. “You speak of it as if it were part of the family, when in truth it’s nothing but a cold, heartless pile of dirt—dirt I’d just as soon never lay eyes on again. Go ahead. Stay here killing yourself. It’s just a matter of time until it’s gone too,” Karin said. “What will you do then?”

“I don’t know,” Katherine said.

“Starvation drives one to extremes,” Karin said.

“I know,” Katherine said.

“God has moved in stranger ways,” said Fanny. “He never closes one door that He doesn’t open another. Why, just look at you. You’re going to Waco, something you’ve always wanted.”

“Something will come along, I’m sure of it,” Katherine said.

“Katherine Simon, you’re a bigger fool than I am. Nothing is going to come around this godforsaken place but more drudgery and hardship.”

“You may be right,” Katherine said, “but this is my home and here I’m going to stay. It would be a grievous mistake for me to leave here.”

“Well, we all make mistakes,” said Karin.

“And you may be falling victim to one right now,” Katherine warned.

“Or perhaps you are,” Karin said.

Chapter Eleven

In spite of $l,000.00-a-month rooms and eggs that sold for ten dollars a dozen, Adrian and Alexander Mackinnon were suddenly richer than they ever imagined. Being the most conservative of the Mackinnon brothers, and seeing too many miners lose all they worked so hard to gain, they decided to quit while they were ahead.

“I’ve been thinking,” Adrian said to Alex one afternoon, as he took a break from shoveling dirt into the sluice.

“God help us!” Alex said, giving his brother a side glance and taking a bigger bite out of the dirt with his shovel.

“I’m serious, Alex. I’ve really got some ideas worth listening to.”

“So far, your ideas have landed us in the middle of the Mexican War, sent us traipsing across half the continent to come close to starving to death, and gotten our asses frozen off in California. I pray to God you haven’t come up with another idea for a wild goose chase. I’ve been homesick since the day we came here. I’m more than ready to go home. Almost two years! That’s two years too long for any man to spend with a shovel in his hand, especially when he’s salted away a fortune in the Sacramento bank.”

“And don’t forget that it was one of my wild ideas that put that fortune in your hands.”

“I’m not forgetting. It’s just that I wasn’t born with wings on my heels. I’ve got a wee bit o’ the farmer in me, laddie,” Alex said, breaking into the Scots brogue that sounded so much like their father, John Mackinnon.

Adrian couldn’t help grinning. “And you can’t help that any more than I can help having a bit o’ the rover in me.”

“True.” Alex took another swipe at the rich earth.

“Alex?”

“Now what?”

“What if I said I had an idea that would help us double, even triple our money? What would you say to that? Would you still want to go home?”

“What do you have planned this time? Robbing a bank?”

“Alex, I’m serious. What would you say?”

“All right.” Alex sighed and stabbed his shovel into the dirt and left it there. Holding his hat, he wiped his forehead with the crook of his arm, then turned to look at Adrian. “I’d be a fool not to consider it, but I’ll tell you now, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life out here. Texas is our home and farming is in our blood just like it was in Pa’s.”

“Pa had a bit of the rover in him too—that’s where I got it. That’s what made him leave Scotland to come to Texas.”

“I know, and I haven’t minded all this moving around—up to now—no matter how much I prod you about it. But I’m ready to settle down, put out some roots. I know we had no choice. But now things are different. We’ve got money. Lots of it. I say, the Mackinnons have been homeless vagabonds long enough. I’m ready for a home and family, to…”

“I know, to put down roots.” Adrian said it like he’d heard it often enough, and he had.

“Yes, and to do that I have to stop this gallivanting around. I can’t do both. You know what they said about the pig that had two owners.”

“No, what?”

“He starved to death.”

Adrian laughed. “Only you would think of something like that.” His face turned serious. “Alex, I want you to listen carefully to what I have to say. You may change your mind about going home straightaway.”

Alex looked at the sky. “It’s almost quitting time anyway. Why don’t we go into Grass Valley and have ourselves a nice, juicy steak?”

Adrian looked at Alex like he’d lost his mind. “Have you forgotten what a steak dinner costs?”

“No, but you seem bent on words and pestered with a head full of ideas, and I figure if I’m going to have to listen to it, the least I can do is listen with a full stomach.”

Over a steak dinner that cost over two hundred dollars, Adrian enlightened Alex on his idea. For the next hour or so, he outlined a plan that would use their newly acquired riches to buy land in California.

“California!” Alex almost choked. “I’m a Texas boy, Adrian, a farmer. What could I grow out here? Gold dust?”

“Hear me out, Alex.” Adrian went on to say how the gold fields had filled many a head with dreams of money, realistic or not, and that had meant a continued influx of people, and people needed houses, and houses were built primarily of wood, and wood came from trees, and the land in Northern California, being covered with trees, would be a wise investment.

“Lumbering?” Alex croaked, his throat suddenly dry. “The two of us in the lumbering business? Why, we’d be fools to…no, not fools, we’d be plain
crazy
to put all our money into something we don’t know anything about.”

“We’ve done crazier things,” said Adrian.

“And damn near lost our asses doing it.”

“But this won’t risk our lives,” said Adrian.

“No, just every penny we’ve broken our backs for. To risk it would be fool-headed crazy.”

“What’s so crazy about us getting into the lumbering business, buying land, and building a mill? What’s crazy about doubling, even tripling our money?”

“We don’t know a damned thing about lumbering, that’s what,” Alex replied.

“We didn’t know anything about mining either,” Adrian pointed out.

“That’s different.”

“Lumbering would be easier than anything we’ve ever done.”

Alex looked at his succulent steak. “I knew this was too good to be true,” he said. With a sigh he laid his fork down. “Okay. How do you figure that?”

“We’re rich men, Alex. We can afford to hire the best lumbermen available to help us get started, to build our mill.”

Alex looked thoughtful—not hooked on the idea but thoughtful. “What if I said I didn’t want to do it?”

“First, let me say that I need you, Alex, I need your levelheadedness, your steady hand at the helm when I get my sheets too full of wind.”

Alex grinned. “Are you admitting that you’re a little impulsive, that you get a bit carried away?”

“I am, but I’m also saying that I’ll go on alone with this if you aren’t interested, and that would mean we’d have to split our money now, each of us going our separate ways.”

“Why? We have what we came for. Hell! We have more than we came for. About a hundred and fifty thousand more. You can overdo everything, Adrian, even lovemaking.”

“I know that. And you may have all you want,” Adrian said, “but I don’t. I want more than money, more than a run-down old farm that will take all I have to give and give chicken feed in return.
No one
gets rich farming, Alex. You and I both know that. You get comfortable, that’s all.” He put both hands on the table and leaned closer to Alex. “To build the kind of place you’re thinking of will take a powerful lot of money. Right now, all you have waiting for you is a piddly little piece of land with a run-down house on it. You need more land, Alex, not just acres, but sections, not to mention breeding stock, equipment…” He looked Alex straight in the eye. “You know what I’m saying, and believe me, our goals aren’t so far apart. I want a new life too, one with some security, something I can build for my children so they won’t be left with nothing like we were.”

And that was true. Adrian’s dream was to build a lumbering empire so big that he would have enough money to build a mansion and fill it with the finest things that money could buy, and when he did, he hoped to tell Katherine Simon it had all been for her.

After giving it some thought, Alex pondered a spell upon what Adrian had said. His thoughts ran something like this: So far your roaming has benefitted you more than it’s hurt.
I agree, but on the other hand, an ass can roam the world over and still come home an ass.
You have a point there, but on the one hand, you have to lose the worm to catch the fish.
That’s right, but on the other hand butter spoils no meat, moderation no cause
. This is true, but on the one hand, to hit the mark you must aim a little above it, and don’t forget, love might be sweet, but it tastes best with bread.

Necessity, they say, turns the lion into a fox.

“All right,” Alex said. “I’ve got to be crazy for saying this: When do we trade our shovels for saws?”

Adrian laughed, taking his brother’s extended hand in a firm shake. “What made you change your mind?”

“Necessity,” said Alex.

“Necessity?” repeated Adrian.

“I’m not saying any more,” said Alex with a grin.

“You won’t be sorry,” Adrian said.

“I’m already sorry,” Alex said. “My steak is as cold as a widow-woman’s thighs.”

Adrian laughed. “You’ll have enough money to eat steak three times a day, if that’s what you want,” he said. “I promise you won’t be sorry.”

Alex snorted. “As the Bible says: ‘Answer a fool according to his folly.’”

“At least you’ll be a prosperous fool,” Adrian said.

Alex remembered those words a few months later as he crouched, trying to build a fire out of wet cedar shavings in pouring rain. He didn’t feel very prosperous. He felt like a fool. He watched Adrian disappear inside a tent, and looked around the small camp—a crude affair that consisted of little more than seven or eight tents, a pit, and a platform where he and Adrian worked an eight-foot whipsaw. A rather pathetic start, he surmised, for two men determined to make their mark in lumber.

But a few months later, after the first shipload of much-needed supplies reached their small camp north of Humboldt Bay, things looked more promising. This was largely due to the arrival of their first logging crew and their foreman, Big John Polly, who brought along his wife to help the cook. The cook was a feisty little import from China lured to California by the gold rush, who, faced with starvation, quit the gold fields for a steady job as a lumber cook.

Big John Polly was a sturdy, awesome fellow, a self-reliant lumberjack with a barrel chest, powerful arms, and a thick neck who had learned his trade in the Talbot mills in his hometown, East Machias, Maine. His wife Molly was even sturdier.

“My God!” Alex said, when he first saw her coming off the ship. “Would you look at that! A man wearing a dress!”

“It’s a dress all right, but that ain’t no man. That’s my wife,” Big John said with a laugh as he came toward them and shook hands. He went as far as to admit Molly was “a bit of a full-blown wood nymph”, but Alex, who was staring at the biggest woman he had ever seen, slack-jawed and too awed to speak, thought Molly, who weighed a little over two hundred pounds, was more tree trunk than wood nymph. But regardless of what anyone thought, she was a powerful woman who smoked cigars and kept order in the cook tent with torrents of profanity and barrages of well-aimed kindling wood, as often as not aimed at Wong, the cook, during one of their epic arguments. He decided to call her M.P. because a name like Molly Polly was a bit much for anyone.

Alex and Adrian’s investment turned out to be a wise one as far as lumbering prospects went. It took a lot of back-breaking work to get their business started and the sawmill built, but it was a money-making endeavor right from the start.

Once their prospering lumber empire was on its way, Alex found his mind occupied more and more with thoughts of Karin, the foremost of these thoughts being that she was a beautiful woman any man would want for a wife. Alex wanted to be that man.

“It’s a little premature, don’t you think?” Adrian said. “Our house isn’t too grand. Do you think she could be happy living there?”

“She’ll love it up here.”

“Perhaps,” Adrian said, “but I think you’re rushing things a bit.”

“You’re entitled to think what you will,” Alex said, “but I’m ready to send for Karin and I won’t be put off much longer.”

Alex was right about that, for it was just a month later that he and Adrian had an argument that was as epic as the ones Wong and M.P. frequently indulged in.

Although Alex and Adrian were older and more mature than they were as young boys growing up in Texas, they had never outgrown their tendency to settle their arguments with fists. One such argument stemmed from a disagreement they had over whether or not they wanted to buy more land farther north, near the Canadian border.

“It’s prime land, a good place to build another mill,” Adrian said.

“I agree, but we haven’t gotten this mill completely finished and on its feet yet. It’s too early to think about expansion.”

“If we wait any longer, the land may not be available. Too many people are coming up to this neck of the woods with the same ideas we had. I say we buy now.”

“I say we wait.”

This argument went on for days, until Big John Polly, who was sick of it all, suggested they “sit down and sensibly discuss the matter over a drink like civilized men”.