Past All Dishonor (15 page)

“When Caskie sees me—”

“Say hello and act natural.”

“Hold me tight, Roger. I’m so excited.”

The local stage I had to take to Placerville was slow and I didn’t get there till three o’clock in the afternoon. I went to the Pioneer stables and bought me a couple of horses with money she had given me, with bridles and Mexican saddles, for easy riding. I left one there, got on the other one, and rode back the way I had come, so I could use the last hour of daylight to check up things I had to know. Placerville is in the first of the foothills, and below the town is rising ground, where anything pulled by horses has to slow down to a walk. I put the horse up the bank and skirted the edge of the woods at a walk, until pretty soon I found what I wanted. It was a bend, where I could stay in the trees, yet at the same time have a view of the road, not only what was coming up but what was going down. Then I rode into the woods a way, and found out there was no timber-cutting, charcoal-burning, or anything like that going on, though here and there were places where they had been doing plenty, and not so long ago. But right now anybody in those woods pretty much had it to himself. I rode on up in the hills a mile or so, and saw there was clear passage over to the river without having to follow any trail where people were likely to be. Then I rode right down to the river and saw there was pretty good footing along the bank, but by that time it was dark. I rode back, had some dinner at a chuck wagon, then went to bed.

Next morning, after I had something to eat and went back to the hotel, waiting around for that wire was an awful long time. I had given the telegrapher at Wells, Fargo the name of Bob Davis, which I was using at the hotel, and which she was to use when she wired me, and told him if anything came in I’d be over to pick it up. Finally, when it was time to go over there, he was just copying it down when I came in the door, and it said: “Sorry darling unable to make it today better luck tomorrow.” I went out and had a drink. When I walked back to my room my legs felt light. When the liquor wore off I wanted more. And then I knew why I felt like that. I was glad it was called off, even if it was for only a day.

I did some more riding around in the afternoon, partly to get a better line on the upper stretches of the river, partly to get acquainted with both horses. They weren’t either one of them really good, but they weren’t so bad either. They were Western mustangs, small but tough, and why I wanted them for what we had to do was they could probably get along on light rations, and, if they had to, forage up what they needed at night. That was one reason I was following the river. At least, somewhere along the way, there’d be grass and some kind of life I could shoot, or catch in the water, or something.

Before eating that night, I had the stable put me up four sacks of oats, ten pounds apiece. I wanted more, but kept remembering the weight of the gold that had to go on those saddles along with us. I weigh a hundred and eighty, and even if I put all the gold on her horse, we’d be traveling awful heavy. And yet I had to have something for the horses to eat. No way to feed rabbits to them.

“Leaving now by Pioneer dying to see you Josie.” I had about an hour. I went to the stable, saddled up, paid my bill. They had done like I said, fixed up the oats so they’d ride back of the saddle, and given me a halter to lead with. I started out. On the streets people turned to look at me, though a rider leading another horse was about the commonest thing you could see at that time in the West. Or maybe I just thought they were looking. The horse I was on acted all right, but the other one didn’t want to be led, and he kept hanging back and fighting me. And then when I came to the hill, and the spot where I wanted to go into the woods, my horse would go up the bank and the other one wouldn’t. It took me ten minutes, getting off and fighting them both, to get them up, and another five minutes to get them both quiet. Going through the woods it was worse, because the second horse would take a dive on the other side of some bush, and I’d have to wheel and back up to get him clear. I meant to tie them both up to trees, but I couldn’t have them too near the road. They might nicker, for one thing, and I had to have room to make a quick dash after we got the money.

At last I was at the bend, and behind a tree, with my red bandanna handkerchief ready to slip over my face, but my heart almost went through my heels when I looked at that road. It was crawling with traffic. I don’t think I ever saw so many freight wagons, not only loaded ones going up, but empty ones coming back, and not only wagons, but long strings of mules, where they could pull the empty wagons back with six and eight, and saved brake-men if they sent the mules on down in strings. And just to make things worse, a fellow showed up with a snatch team wearing the tassels of Pioneer, and it was easy to see he was there for the day. Unless it just happened that he and his six mules were at the bottom of the hill hooking on to a wagon, or up at the top, casting loose, he’d be in the way all the time. I began to feel cold in the feet. And then, down the road, I saw a spot of red. It got nearer, and sure enough it was an Overland coach, coming along behind six grays, and she was on top, with no hat and the red coat that was to be the danger signal. I could slip off through the woods, get my horses, and ride back to town without having to throw down on anybody at all. I was so happy I could sing.

“Roger, did I do wrong to get scared?”

“You got to think fast and decide.”

“I did everything, exactly as you told me, and it seemed funny that it was all coming out the way you said it would, from the porter getting worried I would miss the coach, to the driver doing all he could to accommodate a girl that was asking a favor, to the old telegraph operator that had jokes about how anxious I was to see my husband. And all that time I hadn’t run into Caskie. But when I came out of the station to climb up to the top, he jumped out of the coach, where he had already gone aboard, and looked at me without speaking, and then told the driver to go back to the company office. They looked like they thought he was crazy, but they did what he said and he went in there. When he came out he had two more guards, with rifles, and they climbed up behind me and I didn’t know what to do. But that meant three rifles up there, and I thought it was too many. I took off the hat and put on the red coat, and—did I do wrong, darling?”

We had got to Placerville almost the same time, and she was in front of the Cary House coming off the coach when I got there with my two horses. We lay down after lunch and she started to talk, and I listened like I was a brave hombre that was a little disappointed but would forgive because I really had a big heart. But her eyes were so black, and she looked at me so serious, that pretty soon I had to laugh. She laughed too. “If you love me I’ll tell you something.”

“I’ve always loved you, Roger.”

“I was scared too.”

“But you’d have done it.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“I am.”

“Then I’d have made a mess of it.”

“I wish I’d worn the hat. I could have cried when I saw that coach drive on, with him in it and all that gold, that lovely money.”

“I laughed, I was so happy.”

That night we lay close, but we didn’t have much to say. On her end of it, she had lost the money and the chance to get hold of the mine, and I guess I cared about that part, too. But mostly I hated it that I wasn’t doing anything for my country at all. If I was grabbing gold that the North needed, all right I was a hero. But if I wasn’t, I was nothing but a gunman laying up with a girl, and not much of a gunman at that, because I hadn’t even done what I figured to do. She began running over it again, how it had all happened: “It was all so wonderful. There he was, stepping out of the baggage car with the Wells, Fargo man, and in a minute there went the money over, and I knew which coach it was, and—”

“Out of the—
which
car, did you say?”

“The baggage car. Where they had the money.”

“Not a passenger car?”

“No, the front car.”

I thought and I thought, and then I really told her how crazy we had been to think we could do it the way I had laid it out. In the first place, we were right on top of it and we still had no way to carry the stuff, even if we got it. In the second place, we were foolish enough to think we could face armed men that were always expecting trouble, and get away with it. In the third place and the worst place, we had made no provision for a real getaway, beyond riding up a river we had never seen, headed for what we called the “cattle country,” with no idea how we were going to get out of it once we were in it, or with anything worked out better than faith, hope, and guesswork. “Go on, Roger, I’m listening.”

“We’re getting that money. Next trip.”

“But how?”

“We’re stealing that train.”

“But the people—”

“Won’t stop us for one second.”

“Oh if we only could!”

“And the key to the whole thing, the getaway, we make a real one. That’s the trouble with these punks out here, these fools that think they’re bad men. They don’t know how to shoot, and they don’t know any geography, so they can start some place and have some kind of a chance of getting there. But me, I do. I studied it all the time I was sending those dispatches, I know how the land lays and I know every little thing that goes on. You know how we’re getting out of here?”

“Tell me.”

“Mexico.”

“But we can’t get there!”

“Why not?”

“Either we have to head south and travel over all the southern part of the state, where there’ll certainly be word about us, or we’ve got to go back to San Francisco, and that’s terribly dangerous, or—but
how?”

“The Colorado River.”

“... Where’s that?”

“Not too far away. We grab that gold just a little the other side of Folsom, and we light out toward Sonora. Then we hit the Stanislaus River and go up over the pass to the Owens River country and go down to the lake. No trouble so far. Game, water, grass for the horses, everything we need. Then we got it bad a few days because we’ve got to cross the Mojave Desert. But probably that’s really good, because there’s hardly any communication across that part of the country, and nobody’ll be looking for us, or know who we are. Then we hit Callville and a steamer.”

“For where?”

“Port Isabel.”

“I never even heard of it.”

“It’s there. Then the C. S. A. Later, our silver mine.”

“Oh, it’s wonderful!”

T
HREE DAYS LATER WE
were back in the shack on the Yolo side of the Sacramento River, but I think we learned more in that time than either of us had ever learned in any other three days of our life. We sent her trunks down by express, and then I made her ride back to Sacramento with me just the way she’d have to ride for the Colorado, in a man’s dungarees, with man’s boots, hat, and shirt, and we got them all in Placerville for her, in boy’s sizes, fairly cheap. She could ride a man’s saddle all right, because she’d ridden that way in Venezuela, except she had a riding mule there, and held the reins out wide in each hand, besides cocking her feet up front in a short stirrup, so she looked funny but rode fairly easy. But what we ran into, that first night out of Placerville, almost made your blood run cold when you stopped to think it would have been our second night in the open if we’d gone ahead with what we had started to do, and no way to have done anything about it. To begin with, it rained. And then we woke up that we had nothing against rain except blankets, and no food or things to cook food in, or anything to drink. The horses ate, and I watered them in the river. But we went hungry, and lay on the wet ground, and shivered. She wanted to go to one of those teamster places for the night, but I was bullheaded. If this was what we’d elected ourself to, we might as well get started on it, and if there was plenty we had to learn, we’d better learn it now than later. We were a sick-looking pair when we trotted into Folsom, but we knew what we had to buy. The first thing we got was two oilcloth pack covers, that we could lay on if that was all we needed, but could put up for a tent if we ran into nights like last night. Then we got a skillet. It’s the California tool, and they got jokes all over the place about it, and yet we’d forgotten it. Then we got canteens. Then we got bacon, flour, sugar, salt, and beans. Then we had something to eat, and felt better.

The second night, coming from Folsom into Sacramento, we found out we didn’t really know anything about horses. My family had had a horse in Annapolis, and I had taken care of him a good bit of the time, but watering and feeding and bedding a horse in your own backyard is one thing, and watering and tethering and feeding him on a long ride is completely different. You got to figure how much feed he needs, that you’ve got to carry, how much he can do for himself on the pasture you find for him, how much line he’s got to have, how far you can ride him in a day, a whole lot of things that don’t come up with a horse and carriage around a nice little town like Annapolis, with brick houses and nice green lawns. We worked and cussed and watched and got acquainted with our animals and finally began to get it down better, so it was easier. I learned one thing too I was to use several times later.

The night we left Folsom we pitched by the river, I staked out the horses, found wood for a fire, then went looking for a rabbit. So of course, when what you need is a rabbit, all you see is a crow. But then, from a boulder over the river, I happened to notice a pool, and down in it were fish. I could see them, where they’d flash silver in the sun. And once more I began to cuss, because of course that was one more thing we forgot, a hook and line. But I climbed down there with my gun and stuck it in the water. I was pretty nervous, because I couldn’t remember if that made it explode, or what it did. It pretty near jerked my arm out of the socket, but that was all. In a minute, floating all around, were my fish, and I hooked them out with a stick and went running back to where she was frying bacon over the fire. So instead of bacon and beans we had fried trout and greens that she found, with strips of fried bacon. We weren’t really good yet, but we were getting a whole lot better.