West of Washoe (3 page)

Either Ross had quickly become used to the noise of Virginia City, or he was exhausted when he went to sleep. He didn’t wake in his hotel bed until 4:00 p.m. From beneath his slightly open second-story window came the low rumble of street noise—voices, laughter, hoof beats slopping through mud,
squeaking
of ungreased wagon wheels, the wheezy chords from a music box in a nearby saloon, a steam whistle in the distance. Underlying all other sounds was the monotonous, never-ceasing
clanking
and
thumping
of the stamp mills.

After he’d left Martin Scrivener this morning, he’d gone down the street to a tonsorial parlor for a haircut and shave. Following that came a soak in a hot soapy tub of water at a Chinese bathhouse while his clothes were washed. By the time he reached the six-story, brick International Hotel, checked in, and gotten to sleep, it was 9:30 a.m.

He swung his feet to the floor, stood up, and stretched mightily, his muscles stiff and sore from rattling around in the stage all night. Splashing water from the pitcher into the bedside bowl, he doused his face, raking wet hands through his hair. Wiping his face on a towel, he glanced outside through the wavy glass. The sun, dulled by a haze of high cloud, rested atop nearby Mount Davidson. He had the strangest feeling he’d wasted the day in bed. Normally a daytime person, he was now rested and ready for work, but had nothing
to do, and a long night stretched before him. It would be tomorrow before Martin Scrivener, as he called himself, would introduce him to the mine superintendents so he could begin making surveys of their operations.

As he buttoned his shirt, he smiled at his reflection in the mirror. Much of his data gathering could be done above ground from ore samples, records and statistics, and interviews with mine owners. But any written records could be exaggerated, if not purposely falsified. The contents of ledgers had to be verified by first-hand evidence when he descended hundreds of feet into torch-lit tunnels, talked to miners, and examined the diggings himself. The miners made good wages, but worked under trying conditions—dependent on topside blowers to force breathable air into the shafts and drifts, where poison gas, cave-ins, explosions, scalding, and flooding were ever-present dangers. The steamy heat was so debilitating in some areas, the shirtless miners worked only a half hour at a stretch before resting in an underground room supplied with ice and water.

He checked out of the International Hotel; the rates were too rich for his government salary. One day of luxury was all he allowed himself. Then it was back to reality. A block away on C Street he ensconced himself comfortably in the Algonquin, a two-story hostelry that was reasonably clean and apparently free of vermin. After he dumped his duffel and returned to the street to find an eatery for an early supper, he was struck again at the appearance of the town. It had taken on a look of permanence with many brick buildings replacing the wooden shanties that had been here four years earlier. Even the wooden stores and saloons seemed more substantial, interspersed with the taller
brick and stone structures. He passed
Scholl & Roberts Gunsmiths, Young America Saloon, Light and Allman’s Livery Stable.
It seemed nearly every other building was a saloon, and they never lacked for customers, any time of day or night. Wells, Fargo must be doing a healthy freighting business just to keep this town supplied with beer and liquor. He heard two gunshots, muffled by the walls of a building. No one on the street paused or even looked in that direction. Just part of the normal cacophony.

The two main streets of Virginia City ran fairly straight, paralleling the steep hills on the west. Evidently the town wasn’t planned; it just happened, with everyone building wherever he could secure a lot. The result was a hodge-podge of buildings. Viewed from a high window or a hill, the shingle roofs looked like a dropped deck of cards. Many of the streets branched off at acute angles in search of open space. They apparently were not laid out, but rather followed the dips, spurs, and angles of the Comstock veins. There was nothing level about the town. The streets tilted up and down. Buildings on one side of the street were set against hillsides, their second or third stories at ground level in the rear.

Still, in late afternoon, the streets were blocked by immense freight wagons with ponderous wheels, heaped with mountainous loads of ore for the mills. Axles
squealed
and groaned with piles of merchandise in boxes, bales, bags, and crates. Eight to sixteen horses, mules, or oxen were required to haul each wagon. Even with the teamsters
cracking
their long whips and swearing mightily, the draft animals, sweating and steaming in the chill air, could barely drag their cargos up the slopes and through the deep ruts.

Ross found a café and had a sandwich and a beer for
supper, then set off to find Martin Scrivener at the offices of
The Territorial Enterprise.
He had no problem following the editor’s directions, and spotted the sign on the building from a half block away. The newspaper was located on the ground floor of a two-story brick building, tall windows looking out on the beehive city.

Ross walked in and saw two men with composing sticks setting type. Judging from the speed with which their fingers worked, they were very experienced, and didn’t look up when he entered. The place had the peculiar smell of printer’s ink, along with the faint aroma of cigar smoke.

Just then, Scrivener came out of his office in the rear of the room, a sheaf of copy in his hand. “Ah, Gil, glad to see you. Have a good day’s sleep?” The editor looked as if he hadn’t slept much. He slipped off his wire-rimmed glasses and dropped them into his vest pocket.

“Tolerable. Stayed at the International.”

“High-toned lodgings.”

“Had to move. My pocketbook couldn’t stand it. I’m at the Algonquin now.”

The editor nodded. “Not a bad place. But, if you’ll be here a couple of weeks, I recommend my boarding house.”

“Show me the way,” Ross said. “Guess I just assumed you had a house here.”

Scrivener guided him into his own office since the pressmen were making too much noise for conversation. “No. Thought about it,” he said, gesturing for Ross to take a chair. “Virginia City was more than my wife could put up with…wide open, day and night, shootings, stabbings, me coming home from work about the time she was getting up.” He shrugged. “Bought a little place for her and the daughter over in Sacramento.
I take the stage over every chance I get…maybe once a month or so.” Placing a lumpy paperweight of silver ore on his stack of papers, he smiled. “The arrangement seems to work,” he said as if he had to further explain his domestic situation. “Fact is, I think maybe she was tired of me, rather than of all the constant hullabaloo in this mining town.”

Ross thought it better not to comment.

“Oh, by the way,” Scrivener said, putting on his glasses and locating two sheets of paper. He handed them across the desk. “Here’s something for you to read. It’s the account of your stage trip from Placerville last night. See if it comes close to what happened. If you told it to me accurately, it needs no embellishments.”

At first glance, Ross thought the editor’s desk a cluttered chaos. But all stacks and sheaves of papers and advertising handbills were carefully arranged in some sort of order. Scrivener’s handwriting was neat and legible, although written with a dashing flair, as if the writer were enjoying himself. He quietly scanned the piece.

“Accurate to the last detail, and you’ve even dramatized it by shaping up my English when quoting me.”

“I’m glad you approve because it’s being set in type right now for tomorrow’s edition. I got the jump on
The Gold Hill Clarion.
”

“That bit you added about me being here to survey and report on the mineral resources might help me get a foot in the door at some of the mines.”

“No doubt.”

“These people know and trust you.”

He nodded. “Some of these mine owners are closemouthed about what they have or haven’t discovered,” Scrivener said, leaning back in his chair and looking over his spectacles. “Word always leaks out from the miners themselves if there’s a new vein, or if they’ve
broken through the face of a drift and hot water’s flooding in. News like that can’t be kept secret. But in that short interim of a day…or even a few hours before the shift changes…thousands of dollars in stock stand to be gained or lost, depending on who has the earliest inside information. So don’t expect to be let in on anything new. The superintendents or foremen will show you what they want you to see.”

“Fine. The daily fluctuations are not what I’m after, anyway. I want the long-term, general picture.”

“I forgot, you’re not here for your own financial gain or to speculate in hot stock.” The editor smiled, giving the impression he really knew better.

“It actually bores me,” Ross insisted. “If I owned a fistful of stock in the richest mine on the Comstock, I’d throw it in a drawer and probably forget where I put it.”

“You’re one of those who could go sound asleep in a raucous stockholders’ meeting.”

“That’s about it. I have to be out in the field doing something physical in order to take any interest, or get any satisfaction from a job. Fortunes won and lost on paper are not as exciting as reading a good adventure novel.”

“You’ll be in the field tomorrow. We’ll take my buggy and drive down to Gold Hill and Silver City toward Carson. Unless you have a preference, we can start with the Crown Point on the divide between here and Gold Hill.”

“Good enough.”

Scrivener stood up and stretched, covering a yawn. “I’m going to make an early night of it. Be in bed by two.”

“They won’t be going home early?” Ross jerked a thumb toward the men working in the next room.

“Naw. My associate editor, Silas Bonner, will keep
’em at it till the paper’s put to bed. Most of the younger men are single and like the night life. But…” He paused. “I’d fire anyone who leaves without finishing.” Then he grinned. “I also give them an added incentive to stay here and get the job done night after night.
The Enterprise
furnishes up to ten gallons of beer from Chauncey’s Saloon next door.”

“Ten gallons
per day?
”

Scrivener nodded. “Gets pretty hot and dry in that composing room on summer nights. It also helps fire the imaginations of some of my reporters when they’re writing up their articles. Makes for some very creative prose.”

Ross whistled softly. “A lot of men I know would like to have a job with those fringe benefits.”

“Helps make up for the marginal pay. Keeps some of the more wild-eyed ones from plunging over their heads into stocks, or quitting and going off prospecting themselves…especially now that all the good ore deposits are owned by big companies. No more surface placer mining where a man can sluice out the gravel and come up with anything more than a few grains of gold. The silver ore is hundreds of feet underground. Hard-rock miners make a better salary than my men, but it’s tough, dangerous work, and they generally don’t live as long.”

The two men walked into the large room with the high ceiling. One of the men in an ink-stained apron came over to Scrivener, holding a wet proof sheet, and said something that Ross didn’t catch. The editor glanced at the sheet.

“Don’t rewrite the head. Reduce the type to make it fit,” the editor said.

The man nodded, and moved away.

“I’ll look for you in the morning,” Ross said, reaching
for the door handle. The twilight had deepened to dusk and C Street was lighted by the glow from several dozen stores and saloons.

Silhouetted against the lamplight of many businesses, a lone horseman came galloping down the street, weaving in and around the wagon and horse traffic. The rider held a flaming torch in one hand, wind whipping the flames over his shoulder.

Ross opened the door and stepped out onto the boardwalk. He heard
thrumming
hoofs just as the horse veered to his side of the street, nearly galloping up onto the sidewalk. Ross instinctively dived sideways. The rider’s extended arm came up, flinging the blazing torch end over end. It crashed through one of the tall front windows of the newspaper office, and the interior of the room burst into flame.

Ross ducked flying particles of glass, then sprang into the street, yanking his Colt. Thumbing back the hammer, he brought up the weapon and held his breath.
Steady…don’t hit anyone else,
he thought. Horse and rider were receding down the darkened street when Ross fired. The Navy Colt bucked and roared, a yellow tongue of flame darting from the long barrel. He fired again, and saw the rider reel in the saddle just before a bend in the street screened him from view.

“Somebody get the sheriff!” he yelled, holstering his gun and dashing back inside where the entire staff was fighting the fire. The torch had struck a container of type cleaner and the flames were licking up the wall.

“Fossett!” Scrivener hissed as he grabbed up a cuspidor and flung its contents on the blaze. One of the compositors had been splashed with the burning liquid and his co-workers were rolling him in a coat to smother the flames.

Ross snatched up a heavy container of sand near the door and, face averted from the heat, threw it at the base of the blaze near the wall. The flames instantly dropped, but the fire still burned. Thank God the inside of the wall was rough brick with no paneling or wallpaper.

A fire bell
clanged
somewhere outside, apparently summoning a volunteer fire company.

One of the men ran to the edge of the flames, kicking bales of paper out of the way. Another grabbed up two small buckets of beer and flung them on the burning wooden floor.

Ross stripped off his coat, doused it with beer, and began beating the edges of the spreading flames.

It was less than ten minutes, but it seemed like a stretch in purgatory before the
clanging
of an approaching bell signaled the arrival of the horse-drawn fire wagon. The volunteers had drilled themselves well and took over with no confusion or wasted motion. Two men grabbed the pump handles on each side of the tank while two others unreeled the hose and another secured the big draft horses. Within a minute, the brawny men had the hose spraying the fire through the broken front window. As they beat back the blaze, they advanced, stepping through the window frame, playing the stream of water at the base of the fire, then on nearby flammable furniture.