Memories of Gold (13 page)

She put her hands on her hips, glaring daggers at him. “Is that what you think of me now? That I am some trollop whoring myself for a few pretty baubles? I’ve got responsibilities you know nothing about, Mister Parker.”

She had only called him by his last name three times in all the years they had known each other, each time when her temper was hot. He remembered the last time she had said it, back when she was eight, right before shoving him into mud.

He wanted to stop the whole thing and let them both calm down, but he couldn’t stop himself. He stood up and looked down into her eyes. He wanted to strangle her and kiss her at the same time. Why was she so stubborn and willful? Didn’t she realize how much this hurt him?

He spoke through gritted teeth. “Well, Miss Mary, feel free to explain it to me. What is so important that you would rather stay at the saloon instead of with me?”

“Right about now, it’s because you are being a pompous ass.”

She turned and began storming away. He was lucky she hadn’t shoved him into mud again. If there had been any around, it would have been tempting.

Within a few moments, she regretted the things she said, but there was nothing she could do to fix it for the moment, and trying to speak to him would only lead to more angry words and more hurt for both of them. She kept walking, tears streaming down her cheeks. She let them fall.

Jimmy watched her go, waves of anger and despair washing over him. She had lied to him, and she was going back to the saloon as if it was fine. As if they weren’t in love. What if it was just him after all? What if she hadn’t meant what she said?

His heart protested the idea
.
He could not believe that was true. He remembered the sound of her voice as she whispered against him, the way her blue eyes stared into his as they had kissed. There was something there, so why did she decline his offer? He watched her as she marched away, already small with distance, and knew that within moments she would be hidden by buildings.

His anger disappeared and misery took over. All his plans and dreams for the future he had planned over the past few days had crashed around him. He tried to tell himself to go back to San Francisco without her and continue on with his plans as if he’d never seen again, but that did no good. She was a part of him, and the loss was too great to just go on like it hadn’t happened.

He sat back down and relived the conversation, feeling the words tear at his heart again. The second time through, though, he hit on something he had hardly noticed in the heat of the moment. She had mentioned responsibilities. But what responsibilities could she possibly have? She had no family to tend to.

And why did she start working at Daisy’s in the first place?

He had lived in mining camps outside of these towns long enough to make a guess. She had been left alone with no money, no skills—she hadn’t even been able to read, for God’s sake—and would have starved without work. He knew that her father never exactly ingratiated himself with others, meaning there were no friendly families she could stay with.

Empathy welled within him, tangling with his depression. After taking a few moments to think about her situation with a cool head, he realized that she had simply taken care of herself in any way she could. As independent as she was, she would never ask for help even if it had been waiting nearby for her. And here he was, demanding that she live off him and expecting her to rely solely on his generosity for her livelihood. The Maria he knew would not have done that.

The lying was more difficult to overcome. He thought about the time they had been together over the past days, hundreds of moments in which she could have told him the truth, and yet he had found out from a stranger.

He understood why she kept it a secret at first. After all, he hadn’t been thrilled to hear the news and could imagine how difficult it would be to share it. In fact, he could now see she might have come over that morning for that express purpose. Perhaps, he let himself think, she had realized how deep his feelings ran and wanted to set things right. Or, and this was a thought that sent electricity through his spine, perhaps it was because of
her
feelings for
him
.

After thinking for a few more minutes, he realized that he needed to find her and apologize. He was unsure if their relationship would be the same—or even if he wanted it to be. This changed far more than he cared to admit to himself; after all, what would this do to his position at the bank?

But he needed to tell her, at the very least, that he understood. He could do that much.

He stood up, prepared to at least speak to her calmly about the situation, even though he wasn’t exactly sure what he should do. He only knew that he needed to talk to her. He began striding back into town, aiming himself towards Daisy’s saloon; though he’d never been there, avoiding it to help keep his reputation in the town as spotless as possible—an irony that wasn’t lost on him—he knew where it was. It was time to step foot inside, find Maria, and try to convince her to let him be part of her life.

As he walked past the bank, however, there seemed to be a problem, so he turned toward it. He could see through the windows that a small number of people were standing awkwardly around in a group while others were moving quickly from one area to another. The bank should have hardly opened, and it seemed strange to have that kind of activity happening so early, even with an earthquake.

He had no desire to stop, but he was the manager for the time being, and that made it impossible to walk blindly past the building. His mind still on the situation with Maria and what he would say to her, he walked through the large door of the Shasta bank.

It took him several moments to realize that the place was being robbed.

How could he have been so stupid?
He silently berated himself as the employees stared at him. The gunmen, faces covered with ragged pieces of cloth, trained multiple six-shooters on his chest.

If he had been paying attention as he walked by, he would have realized the situation immediately and recognized that it was a robbery. He would have been free to get help. Now, however, he was inside and had lost his chance to stop the events that were transpiring.

The situation with Maria was shoved to the back of his mind as one of the men walked closer to him, a gun aimed directly at Jimmy’s heart. Jimmy sighed and put up his hands, nodding as he did so. He was very aware of what he had gotten himself into.

Everyone in the banking business had a plan regarding these types of situations; Tallent and Wilde trained every employee on bank robberies, even though they were rather rare, and Jimmy could see that the employees had followed the directions well so far. They were staying quiet, following the orders of the gunman. But he could see into the large vault which took up most of one side of the building, and he noticed with some relief that the people who had been working closed the safe before the outlaws had gotten in there.

Three of the robbers stood around the safe, clearly unsure of what to do. It was an older model, a ball-on-a-box design, and the men clearly hadn’t planned out how to separate the heavy metal box of the bottom—which contained letters and paperwork, important to the customers and bank, but useless to these men—from the large iron ball on the top that contained the paper money, gold, and silver they were after.

All the men seemed confused, and nobody stepped forward as the leader. This hadn’t been a planned robbery, that much was obvious. They also didn’t seem in the mood to do any killing, which helped calm Jimmy a little. He needed to find out more about exactly what was going on and what made this group suddenly decide to rob a bank.

As the man who had closed in on him ushered him towards a small group of employees standing together with their arms raised, he began speaking as casually as he could. “Looks like I walked in at a bad time, huh?”

The man, a grizzled big fellow who looked like rough times had been his constant companion, chuckled a little. “Yeah, I’d say so.”

“You fellows must be pretty clever, because I have no idea how you even got in here. There aren’t any horses out front, and you seem to have taken control of the entire place quite completely.”

His flattery and casual manner were incredibly affected and seemed false even to his own ears, but it was enough to get the man talking. Jimmy figured the man wasn’t all that intelligent and was quite proud of his group’s accomplishment.

“We were camping outside of town, low on funds, you know. Planned on taking a stagecoach or something when we could get the chance. Then this big earthquake happened and we figured it might do to take a look aroun’ and see if it opened up any opportunities for us.”

He paused and laughed as if he’d made some kind of joke, and Jimmy waited, silent, for him to continue. “Walking through the alleys between the buildings, we found some that seemed promising, and we might go back to those later, but then we saw the bricks in the back of this here bank had fallen loose, so we gave it a shot and started pulling them out. What do you know but we ended up being able to climb right on through.”

The man pointed to the back corner of the building, and Jimmy saw a hole near the bottom, large enough for even a heavyset man to climb through. Jimmy shook his head in astonishment, unable to believe the bad luck he’d had that day, and returned his attention to the rest of the men as they studied the safe. He was still trying to think of what to do with the information he had and how to turn it to his advantage, but he could invent no way to stop the men without endangering lives. He ran through a mental list of possibilities.

Because of the mayhem caused by the earthquake, most people in the town were either trying to get their houses in order or were gawking at others while they did so. The sheriff and his men were all scattered through town trying to keep things civil during the aftermath, most likely. There was nobody to count on for a chance interruption.

Except me,
he thought,
and I ruined that chance pretty badly.

As he was reliving his idiocy, he watched each of the masked men try to pull off the iron ball of the safe, drag the entire thing, and a myriad of other efforts, each as pointless as the one before it. They’d clearly never done this before and knew nothing about the safe.

At this point, all he could do was pay attention and see if he could gain any valuable information that would help in capturing these outlaws. He sized each one up, noting all the information he could. Despite their lack of experience with bank robberies, apparently the men weren’t all as stupid as the one whose gun was trained on him. “Come on,” one of them stated firmly, “We’re never going to get this thing off, and the longer we try the more likely we are to get caught. We got the money from the drawers, and that’s the best we’re gonna do here. It’s time to head out.”

The rest obeyed immediately, realizing the wisdom in the words. They gathered their small leather bags, at least a little bit heavier from their day’s work, and headed back out through the crack, never looking away from the employees and Jimmy or lowering their guns until they were hidden by bricks.

Jimmy immediately began to move, giving orders to the other men in the bank. “We need one person to stay here with me that can tell me exactly what they took, two of you go search the central area of town for the sheriff, and the rest start combing the outskirts for him. We need to move quickly if we want to catch them. Where is the accountant?”

Because he had been there so short a time, he hardly recognized the small man with pitch black hair that raised his hand in answer to the question, and could not remember his name. “Will you be able to figure out how much we lost?”

At the man’s nod, Jimmy told the others to spread out around town and return within a half hour with any lawmen they might find. Most were only too happy to get out of the building, still shaken by the situation. The accountant walked quickly over to Jimmy’s side as Jimmy started towards the room that held the ledgers.

“What’s your name again?” Jimmy asked the accountant, in too much of a rush to mince words.

“Will, sir.”

“Will. Name’s Jimmy, not sir. How long will it take you to figure out exactly how much money we had in those tills?”

“Well, I’ll need to add up the information against how much we had out at the beginning of the day, see if anything got moved to the safe, and see if there was any coin left behind. Should take no more than fifteen minutes, and I’m guessing it’ll be around a hundred dollars, all told, unless someone made a big deposit. We had just opened when the earthquake hit, so that’s unlikely.”

Will grabbed the ledger as they entered the side room and moved quickly back out to the teller stations so he could start adding up the various accounts to get an exact number. Jimmy was relieved it happened so early in the day and prayed none of the opening clerks had taken any large sums out of the safe before it was locked down. He looked again at the crack in the wall, still astonished at what happened.

The opening was low enough and far enough from the main area of the room that the bandits would neither have been heard nor noticed, even if they took some time extricating the loose bricks. There was even a tall decorative vase near the corner that partially blocked the hole from view.

Jimmy left the accountant to his numbers and went outside, walking around the building slowly as he looked for other cracks in the exterior. There weren’t many, but enough that the bank would need to close for a few days to get them patched. When he came around to the hole, he saw a large fissure moving up the wall from the opening to nearly the roof. He walked around the pile of bricks, looked for a few seconds at the footprints scuffed into the dirt, and continued on his journey around the bank.