TWO

Wednesday Morning

BONG!

“This is the captain speaking. We’re in for some turbulence, folks. So please return to your seats and keep your seat belts fastened.”

Peter lifted the flap of Evangeline’s jacket.

They’d lucked out and gotten a row where the third seat was empty. Plenty of room to spread out. Evangeline took the window. Peter wanted the aisle. She’d been sleeping. He’d been sipping coffee and reading on his iPad.

She woke up. “What? What are you doing?”

“Checking your belt. Don’t want you flying around like Sandra Bullock.”

She yawned, stretched, lifted the window shade, looked out. “Where are we?”

He tapped the screen in the seatback and brought up the animated airplane crossing the continent. “Somewhere over Nevada.”

“All desert down there.”

“The great Humboldt Sink.” Peter leaned over and gazed down onto the brown, sun-baked nothingness.

They had not been this close in months. She leaned back to give him a better view. He pretended not to be enjoying the proximity. She pretended not to be aware of it.

He said, “Imagine walking from Missouri, across the grasslands, along the Platte River, over the Rockies, then you have that facing you.”

“With the Sierras still to come.” She angled her head so that she could see the silver and white mountains, rising like a wall before them.

“That’s why New Englanders went by sea. No mountains. And—”

She gestured to his iPad. “Where are the Sagamores now?”

“Getting close to San Francisco.”

“Like us.”

“It takes us just over six hours. It took them over six months. The second half of their passage has been pretty uneventful, but rounding the Horn … man, that was brutal. It starts with a black cloud on the horizon, then a wave almost washes Spencer overboard. Then he says, ‘In minutes a heavier sea was raised than I had ever seen, and our ship became no more than a bathing-machine, plunging half-submerged, then rising, then plunging again into the ice-green water.’”

“A bathing machine in brutal cold,” said Evangeline.

Peter kept reading, “‘The sea was pouring in through bow-ports and hawse-holes and over the knight-heads, threatening to wash everything and everyone overboard. But the crew, including novice Michael Flynn, sprang aloft with a kind of bravery that on land would defy description, and…’

“It goes on like that for four pages, eleven days, ‘a relentless pounding misery of snow squalls and sleet in a hatch-battened coffin so clammy and wet, some men sprouted boils and carbuncles while others saw their very skin slough off with their clothing. When word passed that First Officer Hawkins had gone overboard and was riding the black sea toward his everlasting reward, there were those in our saloon who spoke with outright envy rather than sorrow.’”

Peter looked up, “A man can write like that, we owe it to him to reconstruct his journal.”

The plane hit an air pocket. Evangeline smacked her head against the window. Peter grabbed his coffee cup. They dropped, then rose, then dropped again. Whatever wasn’t strapped down went flying, including the coffee, which sloshed out of Peter’s cup, floated for an instant in the air, then splattered all over his trousers.

“Peter puts on khakis … stains sure to follow,” she said when the plane settled.

“At least it’s not red wine.”

“No red wine snark. If not for red wine, I’d have stayed in New York.”

“It’s not the red wine I’m worried about. It’s the red winemaker.”

“Manion Sturgis has set out to grow the best Zinfandel in the Sierra foothills. So if I’m writing about Zins, I’m interviewing him. He’s a master vintner.”

“Master vintner, master womanizer, major asshole.”

Evangeline pulled a clump of Kleenex from her purse and gave it to Peter. “Sop up the coffee. It won’t stain as much. And you’re breaking a personal rule.”

“What rule?”

“Never speak ill of someone who does your kid a favor. If not for Manion, LJ might never have gotten a job with Van Valen and Prescott.”

“He might’ve come back to Boston or New York. Plenty of work there.”

The plane hit another rough patch and vibrated like a pickup pounding on frost heaves. Everything rattled, the seatback trays, the overheads, even the window shades.

When it stopped, Peter said, “Besides, Sturgis only did it to get back into your—”

“Don’t say ‘into my pants.’ That never happened. He’s just a friend.”

“But he’d still love to get into your—”

She raised a finger. Don’t say it.

“—good graces.”

The plane hit a sinkhole in the sky and dropped right into it, dropped as if the engines had stopped. Someone screamed. Something banged in the galley. A flight attendant hurried aft to stop the banging, lost her balance, and landed on a passenger.

Evangeline reached across the open seat to Peter.

He took her hand and held tight.

They were dropping like an elevator, which was better than nosediving. If they started nosediving, he might scream himself.

Then the plane bounced off another layer of air, rose, dropped again, then seemed to go up like a glider and vibrate a bit more until finally it found a cushion of air. The ride settled, then smoothed.

Captain Intercom crackled: “Now you see why the seat belt sign is on, folks. We’ll be keeping it on all the way to San Francisco.”

Evangeline let out a deep breath and tried to pull her hand away.

But Peter held it a moment longer.

She said, “This is a business trip, Peter. Separate beds.”

*   *   *

“SEPARATE BEDS.” PETER SAT on his and bounced a few times, then tried hers. “Not as soft. You can share mine if you want.”

“It should be separate rooms, but the hotel is full.” Evangeline was standing at the window, bathed in tones of peach … walls, bedspreads, carpet, draperies, all subtle complements of the color peach. “And I like the hotel.”

They were in the Mark Hopkins, on the seventh floor, enjoying one of the few things they still agreed about—San Francisco.

After their own cities—Boston for him, New York for her—they loved San Francisco. Small enough to navigate, like Boston, grand enough to rival New York … innovative but a bit hidebound, like Boston, brimming with big money and big ideas for spending it, like New York … built by a lot of the same people who built Boston—Yankee shippers, Irish and Italian immigrants—but more cosmopolitan, like New York, with an Asian influence that you couldn’t find anywhere on the East Coast.

The truth was that San Francisco wasn’t like anywhere else. It was all its own.

And for those who had first seen it as young lovers, it was all theirs. Even lovers who’d never been west of Cleveland dreamed about the City by the Bay. The hills, the fog, the romance … no chamber of commerce flack had ever come up with a better pitch.

Peter and Evangeline had been in their twenties the first time. They had just lived through the crazy Back Bay business and didn’t know where they were headed, alone or together. They stayed across the street in the Fairmont tower, in a room with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Way too expensive but worth every penny. When they raised their heads from whatever they were doing between the sheets, they had the glorious sensation of floating, floating out the window, floating across the hills, floating over the Bay and into the fog. And when they took a break from bed and got dressed and went for a walk, there were all those great vistas … and beautiful buildings … and amazing restaurants.

And they fell in love.

Then they fell out of love, married other people, divorced, and fell back into love of a more mature sort. Now they were having … difficulties … growing apart, living apart, spending more time apart because sometimes apart just seemed like the best thing. So a San Francisco weekend could go either way. They might push the beds together, or one of them might move over to the Fairmont.

Down on the street, a cable car bell clanged.

Peter said, “I love that sound. Reminds me of our first afternoon here, back in—”

“Even if I was inclined to stir up memories, Peter, we’re due at Arbella House.”

“So … no time for a quickie?”

She growled and stalked toward the bathroom door. “I need to freshen up.”

“We’ll take the cable car,” he said. “I hear that after it stops at Arbella House, it climbs halfway to the stars.”

She tried not to laugh, but he could always make her laugh. If he was hoping she’d leave her heart in San Francisco again, getting her to laugh was a good start. And she laughed. Then she said, “Dream on, boy. Dream on.”

He heard the shower. He undressed and threw on one of the hotel robes so he could jump in after her. Always good to go to a meeting steam-cleaned and sharp.

He sat on the bed to check his iPad, and the hotel phone rang.

What? Who used the hotel phone anymore? Old school, hard-wired, no caller ID? He let it ring again, picked it up, said hello.

“Mr. Fallon?” The voice was a male.

“Who’s this?”

“A San Francisco friend. Just want to warn you to watch out for white panel trucks and hit-and-run drivers. This is a dangerous town.” Click.

The guy sounded friendly, like he might even grab Peter and pull him out of the way if that panel truck swerved around the corner. But when it came to money, especially gold, everybody was friendly … until they weren’t. So the game had started. Someone was already playing Peter Fallon. That meant they were playing his son, too.

He glanced at the bathroom door. Shower was still running. Let it. And let this go a bit longer before raising red flags … with Evangeline or anyone else.

*   *   *

IN THE LOBBY, A young woman was reading the paper on one of the settees. As Peter and Evangeline came by, she got up, put on her sunglasses, and followed them out into the cold wind that was pumping wisps of fog along California Street.

Peter noticed her because she was a redhead, five-ten, trim, chic, red lipstick, pricey shades. Evangeline noticed her because Peter did. As they crossed the street, the woman turned down the hill with her phone at her ear, and Evangeline gave Peter the eye.

“What?” he said innocently.

“You can never not look when a redhead walks by.”

“Did you notice anything unusual about her?”

“Her lipstick was too bright? Her legs were too long?”

“For a girl who looked so well turned out, that jacket was awful loose. Like she was wearing something on her hip.”

“A gun? Don’t start, Peter. You’re here to appraise an old book collection and reconnect with your son.”

“And find a journal that may start another California Gold Rush.”

The bell clanged, and the cable car stopped in front of them, with the whole city framed behind. He almost took a picture.

Evangeline noticed someone rush up, an Asian guy wearing a hoodie over a Giants ball cap. She elbowed Peter. “He looks like a guy at airport baggage today.”

“And you recognize him because?”

“That hat.”

“Half the people in this city wear that hat, like Red Sox hats in Boston.”

“So now I’m imagining things?”

Peter gave the guy a sidelong glance and whispered to Evangeline, “Maybe it’s the same guy. Or maybe it’s just some guy, some guy running for the cable car.”

“I’m just trying to think like you, Peter. Seeing the world through your eyes.”

Not many people riding west. So Peter and Evangeline got seats on the outside platform.

The guy in the SF cap sat on the other side, took out his phone, started texting.

The gripman threw his big lever, and the gears grabbed the cable running under the street. The car jerked, then rattled on past the Pacific Union Club.

Peter pulled out his phone. “Let’s put ourselves in the history, with the P.U. Club and the Fairmont for background, the only two buildings left up here after the fire.”

“Oh, Peter, no selfies.” She pretended to be annoyed, but when he held out his arm, she gave the screen a big smile.

He angled the iPhone so the guy in the Giants cap wouldn’t be in the picture, but the guy moved his head just as Peter pressed the button. Accidental photo bomb. But a re-shoot? Peter didn’t even ask. Evangeline would only tolerate one selfie at a time.

The cable car rolled past the Grace Cathedral, then down, past apartment houses and businesses, into the swale between Nob Hill and Pacific Heights.

She said, “Can you see the history here? The Earthquake history?”

“Smoking ruins. Broken sidewalks. Twisted cable lines. Once the Great Fire got going, it burned from downtown, up and over Nob Hill, all the way to Van Ness.”

That was also where the cable line now ended. The guy in the Giants cap jumped off and hurried toward Polk, making a call as he went.

Peter and Evangeline walked to the corner of Van Ness, three lanes on each side of a tree-lined median, the most direct route from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate, always jammed with commuter traffic. Add local businesses—car dealerships, restaurants, groceries—and it was always jammed with local traffic, too.

Peter pressed the “Walk” button on the traffic light. “This is where they set up the dynamite line.”

“Dynamite?”

“To create firebreaks. They made a last stand at Van Ness. They’d declared martial law by then, so soldiers from the Presidio just came in and threw people out of their houses and started blowing them up.”

“The poor always get screwed,” she said.

“Poor? Not on Van Ness. This was a street of dreams in 1906.”

Evangeline stepped into the crosswalk, and Peter grabbed her elbow.

“What?”

“Be careful. Maryanne Rogers got run down a few blocks from here.”

“And got this whole business started?”

“The ‘lost journal’ business has been going on for longer than the hit-and-run business, I think.” Peter looked both ways, then up California Street, because the Rogers hit-and-runner had come down the hill and around the corner.

All clear. No white panel trucks, no speeding cars, just an Asian kid in a hoodie curb hopping on one of those small-wheeled Dahon bikes. So across the street they went.

“Did they stop the fire at Van Ness?” asked Evangeline.

“Two miles of fancy mansions made the supreme sacrifice to protect Pacific Heights, although the fire jumped Van Ness at California and burned up to Franklin.”

“Had to make room for Whole Foods.” She pointed up the hill, on the left.

But Peter and Evangeline were going farther, up to a block of rarefied old Victorians standing oblivious behind wrought-iron gates and hedges just above Franklin. Apartment buildings rose around them and the traffic roared like a ceaseless river, but that fantasy island of turrets, gables, pillars, and Palladians defined old San Francisco, a mythical place that had all but disappeared during those three awful days in 1906.

They passed the Coleman House, once owned by an Englishman who bought a played-out mine and built a fortune. Then they came to Arbella House, Queen Anne gone wild, with matching turrets on the front, little balconies, arched windows, and a bouquet of colors—yellow clapboards, mustard trim, red highlights. Evangeline hoped it was as beautiful on the inside. Peter squared his shoulders and rang the bell.

*   *   *

A MOMENT LATER, THEY were standing in a foyer as big as an indoor tennis court. A chandelier hung from the high ceiling. A staircase descended from the left, as if pursuing the rays of sunlight pouring through a stained-glass window on the landing. And at the foot of the stairs, an enormous gilt-framed mirror reflected the colors right back up.

Evangeline glanced into the parlor, all bright yellow. Her eye went to the portrait of a woman in green silk over the fireplace. And beyond, in the dining room, was the portrait of a man in a brown suit, butterfly collar, and red cravat.

LJ Fallon came up behind the stern-faced Chinese butler, Mr. Yung. Long past was the son’s resentment of his dad’s girlfriend. He gave her a hug and led them into the library, where a Tiffany pendant chandelier hung above a Mission-style table. Books lined the walls. Heavy draperies kept out the light. A desk filled the turret at one end of the room. At the other, an arrangement of leather furniture beckoned readers to the fireplace.

Johnson “Jack” Barber was admiring a painting above the mantel. He pivoted as they entered. The key light on the painting glinted off his bald head. He wasn’t tall—five-six, maybe—but his quick movements filled the space around him.

“One of my favorites,” he said. “‘The Mother Lode, Viewed from El Dorado.’”

“Looks like a Bierstadt,” said Evangeline.

“Very good,” said Barber. “Thought to be lost in his studio fire but right here the whole time. You must be the on-again–off-again girlfriend.”

Way to start off on a bad note, thought Peter.

Evangeline shot a look at LJ, who rolled his eyes as if to say, Sorry, he’s my boss.

Barber came around the sofa to offer a fake grin and dead-fish handshake.

Evangeline smelled Aramis, big stuff back in the seventies, when men’s colognes were a thing, along with double-knit suits and male permanents. She wondered if this guy ever had enough hair for the disco ’do.

Peter, however, was noticing the bespoke suit, a true fashion statement. And the statement was, I can afford a $3,000 suit. Can you? Gray glen plaid with subtle red stripes and a red tie to highlight them. Nice.

Barber offered the dead fish to Peter, who dead-fished him right back and said, “I have no skill at appraising paintings.”

“I do,” answered Barber. “It’s worth about seven million. It’s the view that the Gold Rushers had as they crested a ridge and looked across the Cosumnes River toward the Sierras. James Spencer actually saw that view. But … you’re here to appraise the books.”

“That’s what my son said.”

LJ stood by the library table and watched his father and his boss mark their turf.

Barber strolled over and patted LJ on the back. “Your son is a fine young man.”

Fathers liked hearing that, even from guys they had taken an instant dislike to.

Barber said, “He also assures me you’re the best in the business. Are you?”

“Am I what?” said Peter.

Beat. Beat. Evangeline watched Peter.

“The best?”

Peter’s eyes shifted. Beat. He licked his lip. Beat. He leaned forward, just to emphasize that he was taller than Barber, whose name was appropriate for a man who shaved his head on what appeared to be a daily basis.

Evangeline jumped in before it turned ugly. “Peter Fallon is the best or you wouldn’t have asked for him.”

“She’s sticking up for him,” Barber told LJ. “I guess she’s on-again.”

“So,” said Peter, “let’s get down to business.”

“Not until the executor gets here,” said Barber.

“But we can look at the books,” said LJ.

“An amazing collection,” said Barber.

LJ handed his father a copy of Roughing It. “Twain’s adventures in California.”

Peter looked it over. “Morocco with a gilt stamp. There are only two first editions of this book in this binding.”

“Three,” said LJ.

Barber gestured to the book. “Now, open it.”

Peter saw the inscription. “Very nice.”

“How much?” asked Barber.

“With a Twain signature, in a rare binding, a presentation copy inscribed to an old Gold Rusher? Sotheby’s would love it.” Peter closed the book and gave it back to his son. “Of course, there are a dozen Bay Area booksellers who could tell you this.”

Barber nodded. The light glinted on the place where his skull bones meshed.

Peter said, “I’m not here to appraise paintings or books, am I?”

Barber looked at LJ. “Your father is very sharp.”

“Tell me about the journal,” said Peter.

“We may not be able to determine who stole the transcription,” said Barber, “or why, but Maryanne Rogers believed that we owe it to California to reconstruct it.”

“Is Maryanne Rogers the lady in the portrait in the parlor?” asked Evangeline.

“That’s Janiva, James Spencer’s wife,” said Barber, “and Spencer himself is in the dining room … both painted by John Singer Sargent.”

Peter and Evangeline looked at each other and thought the same thing: Bierstadts, Sargents, Tiffany, and all those books? This was a museum, not a house.

Evangeline asked, “Is there a portrait of Maryanne Rogers?”

“In her sitting room, upstairs.” Barber flicked his eyes toward the ceiling and his voice dropped, as if she was still up there. “She married at twenty. A naval lieutenant, killed in Vietnam. Never remarried. Never had children. Became one of San Francisco’s leading citizens, patroness of the arts, prime mover in AIDS charities, dowager queen to a generation of descendants … a wonderful woman.”

“Too bad she had to die in a hit-and-run.” Peter threw that out and watched for a reaction.

“She died as she lived,” said Barber. “Enjoying her life in the city she loved.”

Smooth, thought Peter, as if Barber had said that before, maybe in a eulogy … or a witness report.

But Evangeline said, “Nice to hear you drop the smart-ass lawyer act.”

Barber looked at LJ. “She sees right through me. She knows I’m just a big softie.”

“Softie. Yes, sir.”

“And Mrs. Rogers would be unhappy if I didn’t offer you a bit of refreshment after your flight. Tea? Coffee? Something stronger?”

Evangeline said, “I’ll have a white wine.”

A voice entered the library: “It better be viognier from Manion Gold Vineyards.” In the doorway stood a tall man with silvering hair and a tan more suited to L.A. than the City by the Bay. He was wearing a double-breasted blazer and linen slacks, and he entered a room as if he expected that everyone knew exactly who he was and why he was there. He swooped straight for Evangeline, kissed her cheek, then held her at arm’s length. “As gorgeous as ever. And so dignified. So … so Boston.”

“I moved to New York almost twenty years ago.”

Manion Sturgis said, “You can take the girl out of Boston, but you can never take that strong Yankee bone structure and sharp eye out of the girl.”

She shot her sharp eye toward Peter.

Manion swung a hand in the same direction. “And you can take the Boston boy out of Southie, but”—Manion turned after the hand—“you can never take that chip-on-the-shoulder attitude out of the boy.”

Peter gave the hand a long look before he shook it. “I’d say it’s a pleasure, but we pride ourselves on honesty in Boston, too.”

“Don’t confuse ‘opinionated’ with ‘honest,’ Peter,” Sturgis said. “Now … I hear you’ve come to put the humpty-dumpty journal back together again.”

“Maryanne Rogers had a different opinion,” said Barber. “And who invited you?”

“Sarah Bliss. She should be here soon.”

As if on cue, the doorbell rang, Mr. Yung answered, and in came an old San Francisco hippie. That’s what she looked like: about sixty-five, frizzy gray hair, long peasant skirt, just as gray and almost as frizzy, striped socks and Birkenstocks encasing wide feet, backpack over an orange hoodie with the SF logo on the front. She dropped the backpack and announced, “I am executor of this will, and I call bullshit.”

Barber pressed the intercom to the kitchen. “Mr. Yung, I think we’ll need something stronger than white wine.”

“I’ll bring in the whole cart, sir,” answered the disembodied voice of the butler.

Sarah Bliss waddled a bit when she walked and filled the room with a presence quite different from Sturgis’s. He was a polished surface. She was all lumps and bumps, and she made the leather club chair sigh when she sank into it.

Barber sat down next to her and flipped open the folder on the table. “You’ll have to sign these documents so we can hire Mr. Fallon.”

Sarah Bliss twisted around and looked at Peter. “I’ll bet you’re expensive.”

“You’re getting my friends-and-family rate,” said Peter.

She looked at Evangeline. “And the pretty lady? Does she work cheap?”

Barber offered her the pen. “Your signature, please, Mrs. Bliss.”

Manion Sturgis said, “That’s probably how he did it with poor Maryanne. Just shoved the pen at her when she didn’t know what she was signing.”

Barber said, “Maryanne’s will was witnessed and notarized.”

“Any undo influence by her lawyer?” asked Manion.

Barber said, “You’re giving our visitors the wrong impression.”

“No,” said Peter, who had drifted over to one of the bookshelves and was perusing the volumes, “I’m finding it entertaining. But I’m easily entertained.”

“You mean easily distracted,” said Evangeline.

“Ooh, banter,” said Sarah Bliss. “I love banter.”

“Families squabbling over leatherbound books,” said Peter, “a laugh a minute.”

Sarah Bliss said, “This is no little squabble. This ‘find-the-journal’ codicil is signed in May, and Maryanne is killed in June.”

“In a traffic accident,” said Barber. “I witnessed it. It was terrible. But these things happen.”

“Damn fishy to me,” said Sarah, “and to my Benson, and he’s a lawyer.”

“Your Benson.” Barber scoffed. “Defending enviro-radicals who link arms around eucalyptus trees to protect them—even though they’re an invasive species filled with so much oil they explode in fires—that’s not estate law.”

“Those trees are living things,” said Sarah. “They have rights.”

Peter and Evangeline looked at each other. One look said, We are now on a fast train to crazy town. The other said, And it’s gone off the rails.

Barber said to Peter, “I hope your son gave you fair warning.”

“My lawyer agrees about undue influence.” Sturgis leaned against the mantel, as if trying to improve the Bierstadt. “Especially since my brother was the signing witness.”

“See what I told you,” said Peter to Evangeline, “family squabbles.”

Barber said to Sturgis, “We know you don’t trust your brother. What about young Fallon here? You recommended him. And he’s all-in on this journal hunt.”

“A smart boy,” said Sturgis. “No need, however, to drag his father way out from Boston to appraise the books.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” said Peter.

“Reconstructing a family journal when you can’t get the heirs to cooperate is a waste of time. So”—Sturgis picked a book off the shelf and put it into Peter’s hands—“while Evangeline comes out to Amador County to taste my wines and write a nice article, stay and play with these.”

Peter looked at the book, then at his son, then at Evangeline. He had decided on cool as the only way to play this, for LJ’s sake. Cool and closemouthed.

Mr. Yung wheeled in the liquor cart: tea, coffee, bourbon, an ice bucket with the neck of a bottle poking out of it.

Sturgis walked over and lifted the bottle. “Sturgis Napa Chardonnay.”

“Your brother makes fine wines, too,” said Barber.

“You drink it, then.” Manion looked at Evangeline. “The helicopter is under repair, so a car service will get you at nine tomorrow. A two-hour drive, a nice tour, a even nicer vineyard lunch.” Then he said to Peter, “You can come, too, if you behave.”

After the door closed behind him, Peter said to Evangeline, “Pick you up?”

“Banter’s getting heavy now,” said Sarah Bliss. “Mellow out, people. Have a drink. Or”—she pulled out a neatly rolled blunt—“smoke a joint.” She fished for a light.

Mr. Yung appeared under her nose with a flame in a Bic.

The others watched her inhale, then she offered a toke to Evangeline, who shook her head. “Munchies make me fat.” So, to Peter. He said no and gestured to LJ. “None for him, either, not in front of his dad.”

“Or his boss,” said Barber.

Mr. Yung poured Chardonnays, except for Barber, who took a tumbler of Wild Turkey and said, “If the executors don’t authorize it, Mr. Fallon, we can’t hire you.”

“And the executors don’t,” said Sarah Bliss. “So … nothing to do but go home.”

“Glad we didn’t get a suite,” said Evangeline.

Barber said, “The estate discretionary funds can pay for two nights at the Mark Hopkins, three if you decide to work pro bono on behalf of your son. But if you decide on doing some vineyard hopping or touring, you’re on your own.”

Peter said, “I may stick around for the entertainment. And”—he took a sip of wine—“the Chardonnay.”

“Or the viognier,” said Evangeline.

“I was hoping you’d say that,” answered Barber. “There were seven notebooks for seven sections. Spencer had six children, spread around the country.”

“That’s why I was in Boston,” added LJ, “tracking down a descendant who had the second notebook, the one who called me while we were in the Arbella Club, Dad. It’s still being transcribed.”

“Some of the notebooks are easier to find than others,” said Barber.

w“But we need to find all seven,” said LJ.

“Otherwise?” said Peter.

“Otherwise”—Barber rattled the ice in his glass—“the estate cannot liquidate. This house and its amazing contents cannot be sold. The proceeds cannot go to the charities selected by Maryanne Rogers.”

“And the second Gold Rush cannot start,” said Sarah Bliss. “That’s what you’re really after, isn’t it, Barber? A mythical river of gold up there somewhere in the Sierra foothills.”

Barber rolled his eyes and took a sip of bourbon. “I am just doing my job.”

Sarah Bliss grabbed her backpack and headed for the door. “Come and visit me over in Sausalito, folks. We live on a houseboat. We call it the Tree Hugger.”

“The Tree Hugger,” said Barber. “She calls her boat the Tree Hugger. Is it any wonder she’s such a pain in the ass?”

*   *   *

CHINATOWN. IN SOME CITIES, an afterthought … but in San Francisco, the center that held, right on the flank of Nob Hill.

After the 1906 fire burned the city to charcoal, they tried to push the Chinese out and grab the real estate. But the Chinese would have none of it. The enclave they had built in those first wild years—when white men sought the favors of Chinese courtesans or the muscle of Chinese laborers—that Chinatown was the place where Asian roots sank deepest in America. From there, the Chinese had gone forth to become part of the national story. And nothing, not the 1906 disaster, not the eternal greed of white men who coveted those streets, not the thuggery of Chinese tongs who fought to control the neighborhood, none of it could move the people off their turf.

Peter and Evangeline arrived at the Hunan Garden House on Washington Street a few minutes ahead of LJ and his fiancée.

A classic Chinatown dining palace. Foo lions flanked the front door. A big aquarium—featuring the fish featured on the menu—separated the reception desk from a high-volume dining room with big booths along the sides and two rows of tables in the middle. Chinese prints in red lacquered frames covered the walls. Painted screens covered the service areas. White cloths covered the tables and deadened the sound.

“Lots of tourists.” Peter slid into the booth. “But lots of Asians, too.”

Evangeline glanced at the menu: Chinese characters, a little English. “Good odds for a good meal, especially if one of those Asians is your future daughter-in-law.”

LJ and his girlfriend were arriving now.

Her name was Mary Ching Cutler. Chinese on her mother’s side, Anglo on her father’s, with slender height inherited no doubt from Dad, long black hair and almond-shaped eyes from Mom, a confident gait that was all twenty-first-century American girl.

Evangeline whispered, “Nice-looking couple.”

Peter had decided to let the afternoon business simmer. Meeting Mary was more important. So it was hugs and chitchat and a welcome from Howard Ching, Mary’s cousin and owner of the Hunan. Then came a chef’s choice banquet of pork belly dumplings, sizzling rice soup, lobster steamed in ginger scallion sauce, Hong Kong dry-cooked shrimp, lamb chops in hoisin, garlic green beans. And with every course, they drank Tsingtao beer and small talked and got to know each other.

The flight from Boston?

A little bumpy, but we had an extra seat.…

The weather in Boston?

Hot for October. Nice to be back in the blowing fog again.

And how did you two meet, exactly?

At AT&T Park. Interleague play, Red Sox against the Giants. LJ wore his “hanging Sox” Boston cap, Mary her Giants cap. They came with friends. They left with each other, each wearing the other’s cap. Very cute.

“Opposites attract,” said Peter, especially since Mary had nothing to do with the law. She was a budding fashion designer.

“It shows.” Evangeline admired her blue silk jacket decorated with gold Chinese characters, set off with a white silk blouse and black slacks.

Mary said that she had started her own mail-order house, a small operation that had taken off after some good online reviews.

Yes, they were living together … in an apartment on Jackson, in the same block as the Cable Car Museum, in one of those San Francisco sweet spots where you could walk a few blocks downhill for a good meal in Chinatown or climb a few blocks up for a fancy night at the Top of the Mark. A big apartment, LJ boasted, with an option to buy. Two bedrooms, Mary added. One for sleeping, the other for an office, LJ’s desk on one side, Mary’s design table on the other. And …

 … conversation went so well that it was pay-the-bill time before Evangeline asked Mary about her father.

As Peter snatched the check, Mary said, “My father is in the gold business. A geologist. Cutler Gold Exploration.”

Peter raised his head from calculating the tip. “Gold business?”

Evangeline saw the look that Peter shot at his son. She said, “Pay the bill, Peter.”

He gave it another glance. “They didn’t charge for the drinks.”

“A courtesy,” said Mary. “Cousin Ching always buys drinks for family guests.”

“But make sure you tip for them,” Evangeline said.

“Of course I’ll tip for them.” Peter went back to calculating. “Sometimes, it’s like we really are married.”

“You’re too much of a loner.” Evangeline looked at the kids. “He’s too much of a loner.”

“And you’re too much of a wanderer,” said Peter.

“So we won’t be settling down anytime soon,” added Evangeline.

Mary gave LJ the corner of her eye, as if she wasn’t quite certain what to make of this. LJ gave her just the slightest shake of the head, as if he had seen it all before.

Peter signed the check and asked Mary, “Where does your father live?”

“Placerville, the crossroads of the Mother Lode country.”

Then Peter asked LJ, “Have you told him about this journal? This Spencer project that’s supposed to trigger a new gold rush?”

“Jack Cutler knew about it before I did.”

“Oh?” Peter searched for a word. Interesting? Too bland. Suspicious? Too … suspicious, for the moment.

LJ nudged Mary to take over.

She explained, “There was a woman named Ah-Toy, who arrived in 1849 from China as the concubine of an American sea captain. She made a lot of money satisfying the needs of the Gold Rushers, including an Irishman named Michael Flynn.”

“Wait a minute,” said Peter. “Flynn’s the Irishman in the journal. This is getting very—”

LJ said, “Just listen, Dad.” And he nodded for Mary to keep talking.

She said, “Ah-Toy lived to be a hundred. She died in 1928. My great-grandmother took care of her at the end. Ah-Toy would talk of her customers, including the Irishman. She liked him because he liked to talk. And he talked about ‘the Chinese gold of Broke Neck, the first trickle from the lost river of gold.’”

“What’s Broke Neck?” said Evangeline.

“An old Gold Rush camp,” said LJ.

“And your father is looking there for the Chinese gold?” asked Peter.

“He’s a geologist, so he’s always looking,” answered Mary.

“This Chinese gold,” said Evangeline. “Is it a real river or a big bag of it?”

LJ looked from Peter to Evangeline, as if gauging how much to tell. “Either one … or both. That’s what the journal might tell us. That’s what the ‘second Gold Rush’ means.”

Peter said, “So my son finds himself at the end of not one but two streams of historical memory about the Gold Rush, and they both seem to be leading to the same place. Why didn’t you tell me all this before I flew out?”

“It sounds a little coincidental, I know, but you’re always looking for the connections, Dad, the bridges, the things that tie us to history. That’s what I’m doing.”

“It sounds like you’re courting conflict of interest, too.”

Evangeline noticed that Mary was blushing. Uncomfortable conversations should be conducted away from the eyes of strangers or cousins who ran restaurants. She elbowed Peter, “We ladies need some fresh air.”

*   *   *

OUTSIDE, EVANGELINE WENT TO work changing the subject. She said she wanted to see Chinatown through Mary’s eyes and find a new angle to write about.

So Mary led them down Washington Street toward Portsmouth Square.

But Peter took LJ’s elbow and stopped in front of a Chinese market. Dead chickens hung in the window, above trays of spices, roots, and crinkled brown mushrooms. Peter said, “You have some explaining to do.”

“There’s a lot going on, Dad. Just go with the flow.”

“Are you planning to give your future father-in-law inside info if we find this journal about some dead Irishman’s river-of-gold tall tales?”

“Of course not.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“Challenge, Dad, not trouble. And like you always say, challenge means opportunity. I can’t say more. So just do what I ask, okay? That’ll be a big help.”

Peter tightened his grip on LJ’s elbow. “Somebody called my hotel today and told me to be careful crossing streets. Who would be doing that?”

“There’s an old joke, Dad, where they ask you a question and you say, ‘If I told you, I’d have to kill you.’”

“Old joke,” said Peter, “seldom funny.”

“But sometimes appropriate. We’re all on a ‘need to know’ basis here.”

“What kind of trouble are you in?”

“There are dangerous people in this town.” LJ looked at the girls, who were half a block ahead, chatting away. “Maybe you and Evangeline should go back to Boston.”

“Not happenin’. Not now.”

“Dad.”

“You asked me to come out here and help you. So I’ve come. Evangeline, too. She even got an assignment. But she really came because she likes you.”

“I like her.” LJ pulled away and started walking down Washington Street. “But it was a mistake to get you involved.”

“Well, mistakes happen.” Peter went after LJ, grabbed him again by the arm, turned him around, studied those eyes, and saw that look again, the one that said the kid was protecting something deep down—a hurt, maybe, or a disappointment, or a dark secret. It was plain that LJ didn’t want to say, “Dad, I fucked up” or “Dad, I let the schoolyard bully push me around.” It was also plain that he wanted help, but on his own terms. So Peter decided to be a dad, which meant supporting his kid, no matter what.

He said, “Mistakes happen, son, and I am involved. I’m not going back to Boston. I’m not leaving you out to dry. I’ll help you find these seven installments. Just promise me you’ll tell me what I need to know when I need to know it and that you’ll be careful.”

“You be careful, too.”

*   *   *

THEN THEY HURRIED TO catch up to the girls.

At the corner of Washington Street, Mary stopped and made a sweeping gesture: “They call this Chinatown’s Living Room. Portsmouth Square, cradle of San Francisco.”

A wide, paved plaza opened before them. Traffic grumbled on the surrounding streets where tourists studied menus in restaurant windows. Locals trundled along with shopping bags and little kids in tow. And just down the hill loomed the worst and the best of American architecture: the postmodern neo-brutalist tower of the San Francisco Hilton and the gloriously futuristic fancy of the Transamerica Pyramid.

All across the plaza, on the benches, beneath the big red pagoda-style gate, under the little trees and the lantern-shaped streetlamps, groups of Chinese—mostly men—talked, smoked, played chess, dealt cards, did business, sometimes in the open and sometimes in the deeper shadows where things always looked a little suspicious.

Mary gave her group of Anglos a quick history as they crossed:

Here, in 1846, a U.S. Navy captain named Montgomery, commanding the Portsmouth, rowed ashore, marched up the hill to the ramshackle quadrangle of wood and adobe, and raised the American flag to claim the whole peninsula from Mexico.

Here, on a May day in 1848, a Mormon merchant named Sam Brannan started the worldwide insanity when he held up a jar of yellow dust and shouted, “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!” But Brannan didn’t care about the gold. He sold picks and shovels and meant to sell a lot more of them once he got everyone headed for the diggings.

Here, the entertainers and gamblers and “soiled doves” went to work in 1849. Here, on an October afternoon in 1850, Californians celebrated statehood, achieved more quickly than any territory before or since. Here the Vigilantes hanged their first victim in 1851, and San Franciscans built their first city hall, first school, and first post office.

The Chinese who settled on the surrounding blocks had adopted Portsmouth Square back when it was a gently sloping greensward. Now an underground parking garage accommodated the tourists and commuters. The locals got restrooms, trees, shrubberies, a pretty playground, and a nice bricked footbridge over Kearny Street to the Chinese Cultural Center in the Hilton.

By the time Mary was done, they were halfway across the square, and most people were paying them no mind at all. But wherever he went, Peter tried to tune himself to whatever frequency was vibrating in the air, and he noticed eyes cast in their direction. An indifferent gaze, a sidelong glance, an outright glare. An old guy on a bench never took his eyes off them.

Maybe they looked like some kind of high-end walking tour, since the girl doing the talking was Chinese. But tourists didn’t spend much time in Portsmouth Square at night. Maybe that’s why people were watching.

The only other non-Asian that Peter noticed was a woman in black sweats, ball cap, and pricey shades. She had jogged into the square from Washington Street right after them, went past, and … shades at night … odd.

Then that old guy on the bench was getting up, coming toward them, in and out of shadows, past a table of mah-jongg players, past two old women arguing in Chinese. He was wearing the basic uniform of the Chinatown elder—sneakers, khakis, windbreaker, plaid shirt. And he was moving with purpose, maybe even anger.

“Hey! Mary Ching Cutler!” The old man pointed his finger.

Other people looked up from their games and conversations.

Two young guys got up from a bench. One was tall, all in black, with long hair down the back of his neck like a mullet. The other was big all over and wore a traditional Chinese mandarin hat pushed down over his wraparound sunglasses. Young guys watching their turf, oozing attitude.

The old man said, “I told you don’t come around no more. Where you father?”

LJ grabbed Mary by the elbow and said, “We have to go.”

They tried to step around the old man but he got in front of them and called to a group playing chess under a streetlamp. “Mary Ching Cutler. Her father Jack Cutler. He cheat me. He cheat you. He cheat everyone!”

“He never cheated anyone, Uncle Charlie,” said Mary.

“Let’s just go,” said LJ, “straight into the Hilton.” He pointed to the footbridge beyond the big red gate with the pagoda roof.

Peter said, “I don’t want to be caught on a footbridge.”

“Caught?” said Evangeline. “No one is catching me.”

“There’s Tong Boys all around,” said LJ. “Like the guy with the mullet over there. If they want to catch you, you’ll be caught.”

A few more old-timers were getting up, coming toward them. Others were gawking.

“You father promise us gold!” said Uncle Charlie.

Mary said, “You invested and lost. It’s like gambling.”

“We’re sorry, Uncle Charlie. We really are,” said LJ. Then he whispered to Mary, “I thought he went back to Hong Kong.”

But Uncle Charlie was right there. LJ tried to move around him, but Uncle Charlie kept blocking the way, saying, “I no got money go Hong Kong. I broke ’cause of Jack Cutler. Me and half the peoples in Chinatown. So you and your friends, go. Go. Get out.”

Peter put his hand out to hold off the old man and pushed Evangeline forward.

Uncle Charlie looked at the hand as if it had struck him. “You no touch. No touch!”

“I’d be careful, mister.” Mullet Man sauntered up. “Uncle Charlie knows kung fu.”

“Get lost,” said Mary to Mullet Man. She wasn’t backing down.

LJ tried to push everyone toward the footbridge, with the growing crowd of Chinese following him.

Then Mullet Man stepped in front of them. “Hey, these people are pissed. They want some talk. So”—he folded his arms as if this were the last word on the matter—“you stay and talk … or pay to leave.”

“I’m a tourist.” Peter stepped around Mullet Man. “I don’t owe them anything.”

The guy in the wraparounds joined in. “My pal wants you to talk to the people who been screwed by Jack Cutler.”

“If they read the prospectus,” said Mary, “they knew what they were getting into.”

Uncle Charlie shouted, “Tell them go. Tell them get out Chinatown.”

Wraparound looked at LJ. “What about it, big boy. You gonna run?”

“No” Evangeline pulled out a can of Mace and pointed it at the sunglasses. “We’re gonna walk, right out of this square.”

Wraparound said, “Whoa, lady. We’re bein’ friendly here. Or we were.”

“I’m friendly, too,” she said, pushing past as Peter, Mary, and LJ quick-stepped after her.

They were halfway over the footbridge, with the traffic on Kearney roaring beneath them, when another Chinese guy got up from a concrete bench and blocked their way. He wasn’t too big, but his slick black suit, black shirt, black tie, and dark sunglasses announced that he was the biggest man in Chinatown, or thought he was.

Mary stopped, then the others did, and the crowd caught up.

But this guy gave a little gesture with his walking stick and jerked his head to Mullet Man—get them out of here—and the whole crowd began to retreat. Uncle Charlie stood a moment longer, then even he backed off.

This guy said to Mary, “You pretty stupid, comin’ down here ten o’clock at night.”

“It’s my neighborhood, too. I live three blocks up the street.”

“Not your neighborhood no more, not after your father get all your relatives to go for bad gold stock. You think they know better. But they stupid, and he cheat them.”

“That’s an unfounded rumor,” said Mary.

The guy grinned at Peter and flashed a gold tooth. “Feds call it affinity fraud, like what Madoff do to his Jews. Now, who the hell are you?”

“You first,” said Peter.

“Your someday-daughter-in-law, she know. She know Willie Ling. Everybody know Willie.”

Mary told Peter, “They call him Wonton Willie, which his grandmother named him because he liked to eat fried wonton so much.”

Wonton Willie nodded, as if he took no offense at the nickname. “I come from Hong Kong. Little boy. Now I the new mayor of Chinatown.”

“Who elected you?” asked Peter.

Willie studied Peter, then asked LJ, “This you father? From Boston? He some kind of wise guy?”

“Not sure he’s wise. But he’s smart,” said LJ. “The original smart-ass.”

“Well, he not smart enough to know Chinatown, if he don’t know the mayor.”

LJ leaned closer to his father and stage-whispered, “He’s self-appointed.”

“Yeah. Self-appointed, hey. You come America, you say what you are, then you be what you say.” Willie pointed his walking stick at Peter. “What you are?”

Evangeline was getting annoyed. She said, “He are with me. And I are holding this.” She showed him the can of Mace.

Wonton shook his head. “No, no, no. You no point that at me. Point at Wraparound. That okay. But Wonton get mad. You no want to make Wonton mad. Just ask Chinatown peoples. They know.”

“We’ll do that,” said Peter.

Wonton stepped out of the way. “But tonight, you get a free pass.”

*   *   *

THEY HURRIED ACROSS THE footbridge and took the Hilton elevator down to Montgomery Street. Only after they were walking down Washington Street, did LJ start to talk:

“Wonton Willie is a small-timer trying to go big. The Feds took down the Wo Hop To Tong a few years ago, indicted twenty-nine people, including a local legend named Raymond ‘Shrimp-boy’ Chow. Wonton has been building his power ever since.”

“He’s a punk,” said Mary.

“A punk with muscle,” said LJ.

They went past the Transamerica Pyramid, heading for the Embarcadero. Peter slowed at every intersection and scoped out every car. There’d be no hit-and-running on his watch.

LJ kept talking. “Don’t piss Willie off. And stay away from Uncle Charlie, too.”

“Which brings me to this father of yours,” Peter said to Mary.

“Dad,” said LJ with a note of warning in his voice. Don’t upset her any more.

So they went another block in uncomfortable silence until something on the sidewalk caught Evangeline’s eye, near the park at Davis Street. “What’s this?” She pointed to a shiny curve of metal implanted in the sidewalk, like a giant outline.

LJ said, “It represents the bow of a ship. The original shoreline ran along Montgomery Street. Portsmouth Square overlooked a shallow bay called Yerba Buena Cove. Most of the financial district sits on landfill, and a lot of ships are buried in it. Whenever they build another building, they find another ship and put another outline in the sidewalk.”

He pointed to a nearby plaque: “‘Site of the William Winter, arrived from Boston, August 1849. Uncovered during excavations in 1969.’”

“That’s the ship the Sagamores sailed on,” said Peter. What a connection. He loved connections. He gazed up at the Transamerica Pyramid and all the traffic speeding past and said, “Imagine how it looked the day that ship arrived.”

LJ said, “You can read about it in the material I sent you a few hours ago. The second installment, all transcribed and ready.”

The Journal of James Spencer—Notebook #2

August 2, 1849
Hell on a Hill

Hard through the Golden Gate we sailed, chased by the fog that rode like a phantom on the cold Pacific wind, close-hauling past the headlands and the ruins of the old Spanish fort and into a bay the enormity of which was exceeded only by its beauty. All of us, Sagamores and sailors alike, crowded forward to set our eyes upon that expanse of blue water, bejeweled islands, and golden hillsides glimmering in the sun. And for a few moments, we forgot both the travails of the journey just ended and those that surely lay ahead.

Samuel Hodges had described it for us. But a man had to see San Francisco Bay to appreciate or perhaps even to comprehend it. It stretched five miles inland to a wall of hills that in New England we would have called mountains. It extended north and south for many miles more. And any who looked upon it would have to conclude that it was one of the wonders of the natural world.

A cannon shot from the fort startled us out of our contemplations and proclaimed our arrival. Then a sailor pointed to the top of a bald hill, where men with spyglasses were studying us and, by means of a telegraphic semaphore, were signaling our ship-type and other particulars to the city beyond.

With a few deft sail changes, Captain Trask rounded that hill—soon thereafter named for the telegraph—and warped the William Winter into Yerba Buena Cove, where we were presented with a sight such as no man could have imagined anywhere on earth before that time and place, in the month of August, anno domini 1849.

Hundreds of vessels lay bow to stern, beam to beam, none more than a cable’s length from its neighbor, a forest of masts and spars that surely held more timber than all the hills around us. We counted old whalers and new schooners, sloops and big packets. And amongst the larger vessels swam schools of longboats, lighters, cutters, and rafts, carrying cargo and men across the muddy shallows or up to the wharves that reached out from solid ground like long, rickety, wooden fingers.

San Francisco appeared to be the magnetic pole for half the world’s iron anchors and the ships tethered to them, but in truth it was no more than a plank-and-canvas collection of huts, board houses, and rope-staked tents, the most insubstantial city that ever erupted from the earth or crowded a shoreline or climbed to a little square where the American flag flapped in the wind. Spreading out from that square and onto the hills all around were more tents and shacks, some lined up orderly along wagon ruts that aspired to be streets, others plunked down wherever the plunkers found it convenient.

A pall of smoke and dust hung above it all, but fog was dribbling in over the hills, like a head of ale overflowing a mug, and it would soon drown smoke and city both. It might also deaden the noise that reached us even in the middle of the cove, the din of thousands of shouting men (for I did not see a single woman) and hundreds of clanging hammers (for San Francisco was a-building, even as we dropped anchor) and scores of banging pianos and banjoes and squeeze-boxes (for as many saloons and gambling tents were visible right from the ship).

“Goddamn,” grumbled Matt Dooling, “but it looks like a shantytown.”

“Or a boomtown,” said Jason Willis. “A good place for a blacksmith to set up.”

Dooling gave Willis a look, then moved farther down the rail.

Willis whispered to me, “A chap like that, I can understand. His main chance is in the diggings. But you’re from a mercantile family. You know what we could achieve here.”

I reminded him of the vote. In a contentious meeting the day before, the company had cast 61-39 in favor of holding together and retaining Hodges as president.

Willis looked at the men crowding the rail. “The company may be more fickle than you think, or more willing to listen once they see the opportunities right here.”

I was not so sure. Men were gazing at San Francisco with as much emotion as they had displayed upon leaving Boston. But it was not nostalgia for what they were abandoning. It was anticipation. They were swelling with anticipation. They were fairly bursting with it.

On the voyage, men had let their beards sprout, so facial hair was in full flower, but in the days before landfall, many had begun to spruce. Some had visited the ship’s barber for a shave or trim. (I shaved regularly, as was my custom.) Most had brought out their flannel shirts, a good choice in the surprisingly cold wind. And all had put on their heaviest belts to hold the pistols and Bowie knives that now they might wear in earnest.

Add to their anticipation their vigor. Captain Trask had kept a safe, disciplined ship. Though the first mate had been lost in the pounding misery of Cape Horn, no one else had been seriously injured. Moreover, Doc Beal had insisted that all Sagamores consume a daily measure of lime juice, with or without rum, to fight off the scurvy, while Samuel Hodges had ordered that we engage in at least six hours of exercise a week—fast walks around the deck and gyrations known as squat-thrusts, push-ups, and sit-ups—to preserve our muscle and wind.

But while we had fared well physically, the boredom of almost seven months at sea had allowed small conflicts to magnify and larger issues to fester, making the William Winter a floating cabinet of distrust, disagreement, and outright hostility.

Arguments and fistfights had erupted only occasionally and usually over small matters … a man taking too much space at the mess table or spending too long at the head when others needed to hang their bottoms in the bow ropes. But we had settled most disputes as civilized men will do, in a civil manner, so our competing factions had mingled cordially enough during the voyage, as they mingled now at the rail.

I could not understand why any of them would surrender the chance at a glittering gold claim to sit in a San Francisco tent, behind a pile of ledgers, with a cold fog seeping in, and do no more than they had done in Boston.

But our “halfway” adventurers seemed willing. They had come to a new place, where nature—both the divine and the human—would demand new attitudes. Yet they could not think like anything other than what they were: New Englanders who believed that cost defined value and value trumped experience. They reminded me of my father.

Everyone, however, obeyed when Mr. Kearns ordered them to the stern to hear the captain’s “arrival” speech.

Trask did not offer any eloquence. He jerked a thumb and said, “There it is. They call it San Francisco now. Used to call it Yerba Buena, whatever that means. Maybe they’ll call it somethin’ else next week … Hell on a Hill, from the looks of it. We’ll run the longboat till eight bells, midnight, so you can see for yourselves. But any Sagamore not aboard by noon tomorrow, we’ll leave you here. Any sailor not aboard by six bells of the morning watch, we’ll find you and hang you for a deserter.”

I glanced at Michael Flynn, who stood with the rest of the crew.

He was looking around at all the other ships, which should have been sailing back to Boston or New York but instead lay abandoned with crews gone, paint peeling, masts stepped down. Two vessels had been beached, and men were dismantling them for lumber. Another, anchored at the end of a wharf, was covered over with a shed that made of it a huge floating warehouse. Desertion seemed epidemic.

Samuel Hodges planned for the company to stay a day in San Francisco, hear the talk in the town, determine the location of the newest gold strikes, then take the William Winter as far as the inland rivers would allow, either north on the Sacramento to Sutter’s Fort or south on the San Joaquin. Then we would head overland for the diggings.

As for Trask, he planned to turn his ship around and sail back to Boston.

But if crewmen were tempted to jump now, how much worse would it be when we were just fifty miles from the mines?

Hodges stepped forward and opened his Bible. “As we left Boston with a prayer, let us arrive in San Francisco with—”

“Ahoy, the William Winter!”

Hodges glanced over the side at a man standing uneasily in the stern of a rowboat.

“My name is Jonathan Slawsby. I’m here to do business.”

Hodges ignored him and read: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’”

“I say ahoy the William Winter! I’m agent for Sam Brannan, biggest merchant in San Francisco. I’m here to buy whatever you’ve brought.”

Now half the company was looking at the man in the black suit and beaver hat.

“‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death—’”

“Say, are you deef or somethin’?” shouted this Slawsby, who threw a glance at half a dozen other boats rowing fast in our direction, then said, “I’m here to do business.”

Hodges looked up from his Bible and shouted, “Not interested!”

“I’ll pay triple for whatever you’ve brung, whatever you paid for it in”—Slawsby looked at the transom for the name of the port—“Boston. Triple. A fine profit, sir!”

Now it was Willis’s turn to shout: “If you can pay triple, you can pay tenfold.”

“Not interested!” shouted Hodges.

From another boat, a man shouted, “Ahoy, there!”

“Go back to your whorehouse,” said Slawsby to the new boat. “We’re doin’ honest business here.”

“‘Whorehouse’?” whispered Michael Flynn. “Did he say ‘whorehouse’?”

The man in the second boat shouted, “Do you got any women aboard? Marryin’ women, loose women, young women, old, pretty, ugly, it don’t matter—”

“There’s no women aboard this ship,” said Trask. “Now move away.”

“Hey, Mr. Captain,” answered the man, “you may be king cock on that quarterdeck, but in San Francisco, you’re just another bearded dick. So damn your orders. We need women and we’ll pay plenty for ’em!”

“You’ll need more than women if you don’t get away from my ship,” said Trask. “I’ll turn the four-pounder on you.”

“We need goods!” shouted Slawsby. “Goods and women. Here’s the prices.” He pulled a sheet of paper from his pocket. “Pork, fifty dollars a barrel. Flour, twenty-five—”

“Fifty dollars for pork?” whispered Collins. “We only paid ten in Boston.”

“We pay in gold!” shouted Slawsby. “But them prices won’t last. There’s more ships comin’ in every day, carryin’ smarter men than you, and if they sell, prices’ll go down faster than your Boston breeches in a Frisco whorehouse.”

Collins whispered to Hodges, “Half the pork is spoiled. We could sell ’em that.”

“Such a fine Yankee gentleman,” muttered Michael Flynn.

A man in a third boat shouted, “If you’ve brung shovels, we’ll top any price! Especially Massachusetts shovels! Ames shovels! Best damn shovels made!”

Willis looked at me and said, “Are you not related to the Ames family of Easton?”

I was. But I did not say so. It would only encourage him.

A man on a fourth boat asked if we had egg-laying hens and offered seventy-five cents for every egg. A man on another boat topped that with a dollar.

“A dollar for an egg?” muttered Thomas J. Lyons, attorney-at-law. “Impressive.”

Another topped that with fifty dollars for every hen.

I could see men making eye contact and whispering. These were powerful inducements. Perhaps we really had brought the gold.

Hodges shouted to the Sagamores, “Remember your charter, men!”

While this was happening on the starboard side, another boat was bumping up to the larboard. No one noticed until a grappling hook snagged in the mainmast shroud.

An instant later, a broad belly of a man sprang onto the rail with all the skill of an acrobat. He balanced himself, then shouted, “I’m Big John Beam, and I’m lookin’ for men who can work!”

“Get off my ship!” cried Trask.

Big Beam ignored the captain. “I ain’t talkin’ about prospectin’. I’m talkin’ about honest work. Real work. I need blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers. I pay an ounce a day, sixteen dollars, more than you make in a week back home.”

Matt Dooling whispered something to Jacob Foote, a carpenter from Dorchester. Was Dooling tempted? Or Foote?

Trask came down from the quarterdeck, pushed through the company, and growled up at Beam, “Get off my ship.”

“Give me another minute, Cap, and I’ll save your boys from the perdition of the mines altogether. So”—Beam shouted to the company—“come find me at my sign-up table in Portsmouth Square, and I’ll take any women aboard, too—”

Trask pulled a belaying pin from the rail, drove it up into Big Beam’s belly, and sent him pinwheeling into the water. The splash reached as high as the mainsail spar, but Trask never even looked down. He slammed the belaying pin so hard on the deck that it bounced. “No one boards my ship without permission.”

Meanwhile, the shouting continued on the starboard side as more boats arrived, more promises of fast money filled the air, more Sagamores moved to the rails to listen.

Trask ordered Kearns, “Fetch the four-pounder! Now!”

“Aye, sir!” Kearns scurried to a deck box and, with the help of another crew member, lifted the little cannon onto a mount at the stern.

“You don’t frighten me,” shouted Slawsby. “That thing ain’t even loaded.”

“It will be.” said Trask. “Loaded with grape enough to clear all you gulls in one shot.”

“I’m agent for the biggest merchant in California!” answered Slawsby. “Do business or be damned!”

Hodges nodded to Sloate, who pulled his Colt, and—BAM!—Slawsby’s hat flew.

The report of a pistol stunned everyone—on the boats and the ship—into silence.

Except for Hodges. He shouted, “If it’s a choice, we’ll be damned.”

“Damned for sure!” cried Slawsby. “That hat cost ten damn dollars.”

“It cost a dollar and a half,” answered Willis.

“Not here.” Slawsby fished the hat from the water. “Ten dollars, gold.”

“See that?” said Willis to the company. “Even the hats are overpriced here.”

However shocking the gunfire, it was not nearly as shocking as those prices. I actually noticed one man take off his hat and inspect it, as if he might offer it for sale.

*   *   *

NO ROWER RELEASED FROM the slavery of a Roman galley was ever as happy debarking from a ship as I was leaving the William Winter. To feel solid ground beneath my feet, to escape that vessel, that cauldron of competing interests, that increasingly odiferous refuge for Horn-rounding Boston rats? That was like a cool draft of water after a summer hike up the side of Mount Monadnock.

I wanted nothing more than to get away from the men who had surrounded me for so long, to wander, to observe, to become the all-seeing eye for sights never yet seen. (Yes, I had read my Emerson.) And San Francisco was surely the grandest theater of the new to be found anywhere, a singular place if ever there was one.

So I declined invitations from Christopher Harding and Matt Dooling and let the men of the William Winter go barging off in every direction. I went alone.

And by nine o’clock that night, I had seen enough.

But I needed to set it all down because the mail steamer California was leaving on the morning tide. If I did not put a dispatch aboard, it would be weeks before I might send out news of our safe arrival.

So I wrote on a barrelhead in front of the solidest building in town, the three-story Parker House. It dominated Portsmouth Square, and at sixty dollars a night, its rooms were surely the most expensive in San Francisco, probably in America, and perhaps in the world. But the hotel did not put a price on the light falling from its windows. So I angled my notebook to catch some of it, pulled out a pencil, and with one eye on the swirl of humanity around me, I began to fill pages.

After posting, I would return to the ship, which seemed much the safest place to sleep, for while San Francisco simmered deliciously with life, bubbling pots often overflow. Everywhere were grifters, gamblers, rapscallions, scoundrels, whoremongers, drunkards, aspiring drunkards, and sharpers of every ilk, the kind of men who come to any conversation as if it were a financial transaction rather than a simple human interaction. And everything was for sale … at an outrageous price, of course, whether you hoped to buy a fresh-cooked chicken leg or glimpse a fresh-powdered female leg, which I admit to paying for in the Parker House Saloon.

The lady reclined as a living tableaux above the bar. She wore a satin dress slit at the side to reveal most of her leg and scooped at the neck to show the tops of her breasts. I bought a brandy at the outrageous price of fifty cents, I sipped, I gazed, and when she moved slightly, so that a bit more of her glorious breast revealed itself, I gasped, along with half the men in the room.

I put all this in my dispatch, for I had determined to tell all and let Sam Batchelder decide what to delete in deference to the delicate sensibilities of our Boston ladies.

Thus did I also report on Ah-Toy’s House of Happiness, a tent-and-shack arrangement on an alley off Clay Street, just above Portsmouth Square. A sign listed prices: one ounce of gold for “a two-bittee lookee,” two for a “four-bittee touchee,” three for a “six-bittee do-ee.” I was tempted. I had paid once or twice but had found the experience … disappointing. So I stood outside and observed others give their money to a Chinese man, then step under the flap.

When a miner emerged looking as if he had just seen the face of God, I asked him what—or who—was Ah-Toy. He said she was “a Chinese goddess in green and gold silk, prettier than color in the bottom of a pan.”

Her husband had died on the voyage from Canton. So Ah-Toy—twenty-one, tall, beautiful—had made herself paramour to the captain. In San Francisco, she had taken an old road to riches, selling something even more treasured than gold. Ah-Toy, however, never engaged in the “do-ee.” She left that to the women she hired. She remained, as the miner told me, “an Oriental mystery … givin’ up no more than a goggle of that silky black-haired China cooch ’fore snappin’ her fingers, bringin’ down the curtain, and settin’ you to diggin’ in your pouch for more gold to buy another look.”

Yes, women, or the lack of them, seemed to be on every man’s mind, including a lawyer named Reese Shipton.

He was a drawling, golden-haired South Carolinian with a trimmed goatee, a white suit, and a sullen Negro slave named Dingus. After reading a law book, he had written the words Lawyer, Justice of the Peace on a shingle and hung it on a post in front of a tent on Washington Street. He said that business was good because lawyers made their living off arguments, and human beings were an argumentative species, so business would only get better in a city filling so fast with so many. In July alone, the U.S. Customs House had recorded the arrival of 3,614 souls, bringing the population to almost 6,000. More importantly, only 49 of the new arrivals were female, and their scarcity guaranteed that they would become a lucrative source of argument.

As for religion, it appeared to play little part in the life of this place. I saw no steeples, although I listened to a preacher in Portsmouth Square call down hellfire on all who tempted the Lord’s anger. He did not proclaim heavenly displeasure at those of us who had been staring at women. Nor did he abjure against the sin of drunkenness, as common as women were scarce, as evidenced by a fellow who staggered up to him, deposited a bellyful of beery vomit at his feet, and staggered away. No. Greed was this preacher’s great evil … and this city’s great engine.

Greed was everywhere, in every form and every fashion.

So were rats, rats as big as cats, brazen rats scurrying and scuttling about in daylight and dark, rats from Boston and New York and South Carolina, and native rats, too. And many of these rats walked as upright as apes.

Consider Big John Beam, dried and fresh-dressed after his encounter with Captain Trask. He stood at his sign-up table in Portsmouth Square, looking like the big-bellied king of rats, and gave Matt Dooling and Jacob Foote his pitch, after which he dropped a pouch of gold before them, a “bonus” for whoever signed and brought two more along.

Seeing Foote waver, Matt Dooling said he was a fool to give up his share in the Sagamores. But Big Beam dangled another pouch of gold before his nose, telling him that he should have it when he brought four more men with him. This big scheming rat was happy to break our Boston company into pieces so that he could build his own in San Francisco. But Jacob Foote signed and promised to deliver.

Beam then asked them to say honestly if there were women on the William Winter. A boatload of women, he said, “would make us all rich.”

I drifted away from such base ambitions and wandered until I came upon the Brighton Bulls, all gathered around a miner who was saying that the biggest strikes were to the south, at a place called Sutter’s Creek.

The chief Bull, Fat Jack Sawyer, said, “Then that’s where we should go.”

I had already listened to a similar discussion between Samuel Hodges and two Spaniards in crisp, flat-brimmed hats. These Californios, as the original inhabitants were called, said that they had heard of great strikes in the north, near Mormon’s Bar.

Hodges had thanked them in Spanish and asked if there were wagons to let in Sacramento, for that was where the William Winter would head.

And in those two conversations, new seeds of dispute were sown.

All that afternoon and into the evening, I observed members of our company lurching from saloons to gambling halls to peddlers’ shops, drunk with excitement and rotgut. I watched Sagamores skinned in street-side games of three-card monte. Even sober Attorney Tom Lyons dropped thirty dollars.

I stopped on Kearny Street at a makeshift table—two boards on two barrels. The man behind the table wore a beaver hat, a fine cravat, and a paisley vest. I would have thought him a gambler until he tried to sell me a contraption made of wood and wire resembling a divining rod. He called it a gold finder.

“Guaranteed to point down at the least little glimmer of yellow in the ground, or your money back, friend. Just sixteen dollars.”

That amount, or rough multiples of it, seemed to be the cost for just about everything, perhaps because it was the value of an ounce of gold, give or take.

The peddler tried to put his contraption into my hands while looking into my eyes with a kind of forlorn desperation. He had once been someone … somewhere. The vest and cravat said as much. But the stains on the vest and the rum blossoms on the face told another tale. Then his eyes widened at something behind me.

A man was approaching, a walking bag of rags, a great mat of beard and hair. He smelled like a ship’s hold after the hatches have been battened and the vermin smoked to death. Without a word, he smashed the peddler in the face. The peddler’s hat flew off. His head flew back. And his feet flew into the air. When he landed, his wide eyes had rolled back to some faraway place … Connecticut, perhaps.

The puncher knelt and extracted a sack of gold dust from the peddler’s pocket. He measured out about an ounce and said, “Them things don’t work. This feller promised a refund, but he wouldn’t give it. So I’m takin’ it.” Then he disappeared into the crowd.

I looked around to see if someone would detain this man. Only one miner stopped and only to say, “Don’t trouble yourself, mister.”

I asked where the law was.

“There’s a sheriff. The Spaniards call him the alcalde, but he does his best to keep out of trouble. And a few judges who spend most of their time drinkin’ with the lawyers. Truth is, the only real law between here and Missouri is Miner’s Law, and by Miner’s Law, that peddler got what was comin’ to him. He was sellin’ bum goods.”

Thus ended my introduction to San Francisco and my first dispatch from California. I folded the sheets, stood, and was struck by the ethereal evening light, the glimmer of thousands of lanterns filtering up through the tops of the canvas tents, like votaries to the God of Gold.

*   *   *

IF THAT GOD WAS looking down just then, he saw a gang bursting into Portsmouth Square from the Clay Street corner: five men—an American, a Mexican, and three Chinese—chasing our Negro cook, Pompey, and a fast-moving Irishman whose fast-talking seemed to have failed him.

As they raced toward me, Pompey slipped in a puddle of beery vomit, flew into the air, and landed on his back with an ugly splash.

Michael Flynn stopped, looked over his shoulder, and shouted, “Get up!”

One of the Chinese was swinging a weapon over his head. It looked like a threshing tool, two long sticks held together by a chain.

Flynn glanced at me, and as quick as the glance, he grabbed a pistol from my belt and waved it in the air.

That stopped his pursuers in their tracks, and passersby turned to watch, not because they might intervene but because here was a new form of entertainment.

Flynn told me, “Pull the other one.”

“The other what?”

“The other gun. In your belt. Pull it.”

“It’s not loaded,” I said from the corner of my mouth.

“No need to shoot it. Just aim it. Aim it at the Chink with the sticks.”

As my hand went to the belt, the white man and the Mexican pulled their guns, too. Hammers clicked and cylinders clacked. Lines were drawn in dust and drunken puke.

I pulled the pistol out and pointed it in the general direction of the Chinese.

The white man put his pistol to Pompey’s head and said, “Stand up, nigger.”

Pompey did as he was told, professing his innocence all the way.

“You ain’t innocent if you run with that Mick,” said the white man.

Flynn pulled back the hammer on my pistol. “Just let my friend step away, and we’ll all be friends.”

“We’re friends now, Mick. ’Cept friends don’t cheat friends.”

The Mexican, shorter, darker, with a blanket over his shoulder, took two steps up to me and pointed his pistol right at my face. “I am nobody’s friend, señor.”

Flynn said, “Don’t let him scare you, Jamie.”

There was advice offered too little too late.

“Just make sure you shoot him first,” Flynn added, “not them ignorant Chinks.”

“Iggorant? I no iggorant!” said the Chinaman. “You thief!”

“You cheat Keen-Ho,” said the white man. “You cheat Miss Ah-Toy herself.”

The Chinaman said, “Twenty-four dollar! You gimme twenty-four dollar!” He wore baggy trousers and a long plaited queue down his back. I had heard these Chinamen referred to as “Celestials,” since they hailed from what was called the Celestial Empire, and they appeared so other-worldly on these dirty streets that it was as if they had come from some outpost in the heavens. But Keen-Ho Chow was worldly enough to know the value of an ounce and a half of gold.

While keeping an eye—and a pistol—on the Mexican, I said to Flynn, “You owe these men money? Because of a whore?”

“No whore,” said the Chinaman. “Courtesan. Too good for him. And he cheat her. So no touch-ee for him. And no do-ee. Never do-ee.”

The white man said, “If you cheat the Chinks at Ah-Toy’s, you cheat the man who sells ’em the whiskey they sell to you. That’s me. And you cheat the Mexican who sells ’em tortillas. That’s him.”

The Mexican grinned, as if he would consider it a pleasure to shoot me to pieces.

I did not grin back. I knew what whiskey was. I did not know what a tortilla was. Perhaps it was Mexican slang for what Ah-Toy was selling.

Flynn said, “I admit to spendin’ more than I come with. Some temptin’ games of chance around here. But—”

“No sad stories.” The white man pointed his pistol at Flynn. “Give over an ounce and a half, or twenty-four dollars in Yankee coin. Otherwise, it’s Miner’s Law that—”

“If I owe anything,” said Flynn, “it’s half an ounce. And if I give anything, I want to go back, ’cause I never got to touch her.”

“Look-ee one ounce,” said Keen-Ho. “Touch-ee one ounce plus one half. You pay one look-ee. You get one look-ee. You try sneak touch-ee, you pay again all over.”

“Why, you old swindler,” said Flynn. “I’ll see you hang.”

I feared that we might all hang—those of us who were left—if someone started shooting, so I lowered my gun.

Flynn said, “What are you doing?”

“What civilized men do. Negotiating.” I gave the Mexican a nod, but he did not lower his pistol. Then I said to the taller one, “If my friend gives you half an ounce and doesn’t demand the touch-ee, can we all be on our way?”

“I ain’t doin’ it,” said Flynn. “Besides, I got no more to give.”

“Yeah,” said Pompey. “Lost it all bettin’ on the game with the wheel. So he borrowed my money to get a look at that Ah-Toy. I was next in line when he come stumblin’ out the tent shoutin’ for me to run.”

Flynn shrugged, as if to say he was a weak man and the temptations were strong.

The white man shook his head. “Can’t let boys be sneakin’ free touch-ees, or the next thing we know, they’ll be sneakin’ free drinks.”

I swallowed the dryness in my mouth and offered a compromise: I would pay eight dollars, and Flynn would walk away, or I would pay twenty, and Pompey would get his look-ee.

All around us, drinkers and gamblers and walkers were watching, including a few familiar faces from our own company. The sight of them gave me an idea.

“It’s a good deal,” I said. “But on the other side of the square, there’s a man from Boston who’s mad at the world. He’d love to use his new gun on something other than a wooden target. He’s a friend of mine. Next to him is a man who’s nobody’s friend but can shoot the eye out of a needle and wouldn’t hesitate to shoot yours, just for sport.”

The white man looked over his shoulder at Christopher Harding and Deering Sloate.

I raised a finger in Harding’s direction, and he tipped his hat. Sloate put his hand on his pistol, as if anticipating a bit of fun.

The white man said, “Bostoños, eh?”

“Hard bargainers,” I said. “But fair.”

And we made the deal. I delivered twenty dollars from my pouch. Keen-Ho took it and went away grumbling in Chinese, followed by the white man and the Mexican.

As Pompey broke into a grin of pure reprieve, Flynn gushed out congratulations for a man who could so skillfully talk his friends out of trouble.

I suggested that it was my money and the danger of a Boston crossfire that proved more persuasive than my wit. I added that while Pompey could go back and get his reward, the now-penniless Michael Flynn would do well to return with me to the ship.

This Flynn counted a fine idea. So he gave back my pistol and got to talking. He talked all the way to the post office, extolling my skills as a negotiator, complimenting me on my willingness to back up my talk with threats, telling me I might make a good banker, one who carried a pouch filled with ten-dollar Gold Eagles to loan out on the spot.

At the post office, he stood beside me in a long line of homesick miners waiting to send letters that would assure loved ones far away that their Gold Rush adventure continued, even if it didn’t. I pulled out my coin pouch and paid the outrageous sum of ten dollars to post my dispatch and a single letter to Janiva. Then we made our way down to the water, where our longboat was arriving with Sean Kearns at the tiller.

Doc Beal stood aloof from a gang of waiting Sagamores, observing various stages of inebriation as if they were stages in the process of infection or healing.

Selwin Gore and Hiram Wilson, the schoolmasters, appeared as drunk as upright men ever had. Scrawny Selwin had a wet stain at his crotch. Wilson was bawling a saloon song: “What was your name in the States? Was it Thompson or Johnson or Bates?”

As soon as the boat bumped against the pilings of Long Wharf, about a dozen of us scrambled in, stumbled in, or fell in over the side.

Wilson was so drunk that he almost missed the boat. But he kept singing: “Did you try to abscond with a beautiful blonde?”

Doc Beal grabbed Wilson by the belt and pulled him aboard. “You won’t be singing in the morning.”

Wilson grinned and kept up: “Such minor offenses we tolerate!”

Kearns looked into the shadows and said, “All right, push off.”

“Wait,” I said. “Where’s Flynn?”

Kearns called out his name … but no answer.

I said, “He was right behind me.”

“He ain’t now,” said Kearns.

Michael Flynn had disappeared into the darkness.

Wilson groaned, “Oh, what was your name in the States?” Then he passed out.

As the longboat slipped through the fog, I looked up at the light dancing above all those glowing tents and wondered if I would ever see Flynn again.

As I undressed in my cabin a short time later, I felt for my coin pouch and knew that I would never see him again … or my coin pouch.

The Irish son of a bitch.

August 3, 1849
Rebellion

I slept fitfully. I had grown used to the rhythmic rocking of a ship under sail, but we were now at anchor. So the William Winter rode up slowly, then down, then up, then slowly down, down a bit more, then … a movement so intermittent and unpredictable that it vexed rather than soothed.

Add to that my anger at Michael Flynn. I had resolved before falling asleep that I would see him again. I would go through the town and find him before he boarded the boat for Sacramento with all the money I had.

And Hiram Wilson’s damned song kept running through my head. So what was my name in the States?

But each time one of these annoyances woke me, I sensed that something more was amiss. My instincts were no better than any man’s. However, the sighs and groans of a ship at anchor were augmented by other sounds … the creaking of grates, the clanking of oarlocks, the murmur of voices, the bumps, thumps, and thuds of small boats ferrying men ashore or bringing them back.

Then louder voices roused me from my penumbra: Sloate was saying something, and Hodges was answering, “Goddamn them. Goddamn them all.”

I pulled out the watch that Flynn had the decency not to steal and held it to the light slipping through the door slats: ten past six. I tugged on my breeches and boots, tucked in the flannel shirt that I had slept in, and stepped into the saloon.

Hodges loomed before me, looking uncharacteristically unmade, half-dressed, hair askew, nightshirt tucked into his trousers, stubble sprouting on his chin. He said, “We’ve been sleeping through rebellion, James. Arm yourself.” He reached into his cabin and pulled out a well-oiled fowling piece.

*   *   *

THE SKY WAS BRIGHTENING but the fog pressed upon us like cotton batting on a wound.

The cargo grate lay open, and a pallet of barrels, boxes, and hogsheads hung in the air. Three Willis men were holding a line that suspended it above a raft tethered to the side. Charles Collins was ordering that they lower away “and be quick about it.”

Hodges blasted his gun into the air, startling the men enough that they let the line slip and the pallet dropped onto the raft, just as Collins wanted.

Hodges shouted at Collins, “Stop! Stop now, or Sloate will put a hole in you.”

“Belay that.” Captain Trask appeared on the quarterdeck as a splatter of spent birdshot rained down.

Did Willis choose this moment, after the company had enjoyed a night in San Francisco, knowing that drunken stupor would have replaced sleep? Or did he think that the ordinary comings and goings on the ship would mask sounds of deceit? And was Trask part of it, a merchant captain ready to work with the budding San Francisco trading house? Or was he simply trying to maintain order? He said, “Take your disputes ashore or I’ll turn the swivel on you.”

Hodges looked at Collins. “Where’s Willis?”

“Ashore,” said Collins, “guarding supplies and waiting for you.”

Hodges spun back to the captain. “Who opened this hold?”

“Look to your own,” said Trask.

“It was Jacob Foote,” said Sloate.

“Foote was loyal to us.” Hodges seemed more perplexed than angry. “We counted on him to build sluices. We’ll need sluices.”

“San Francisco needs carpenters,” said Collins, “and Big John Beam pays in gold.”

Hodges goddamned Collins and Big Beam and appeared ready to goddamn everyone on the ship.

“When Foote and his friends opened the hold and took their supplies,” said Collins, “they opened Pandora’s Box.”

“Willis is waiting for me, is he? Waiting for what?” asked Hodges.

“To talk.”

“If I go ashore, I’ll do more than talk.”

Attorney Tom Lyons asked the captain, “Why didn’t your watch stop this?”

“Reduced watch in liberty port,” said Trask. “Only two on duty, plus your carpenters, supposedly protecting your goods. They tied up one sailor. The other one deserted with them. My second mate, Mr. Kearns.”

“Goddamn them,” said Hodges.

“I’ll see that God gets the opportunity,” answered Trask. “Kearns is a dead man.”

More Sagamores were coming on deck now. The Brighton Bulls emerged from the forward companionway. Selwin Gore and Wilson and several others were stumbling up amidships, rubbing eyes, holding heads, blinking stupidly in the brightening fog.

Fat Jack Sawyer came forward and said, “We breakin’ apart, Hodges?”

“No, goddamn it. We’ll put a stop to this and be on our way.”

“To where?”

“The gold fields, you goddamn fool.” Hodges said it as if he did not have time for travel planning when there was rebellion to put down. He looked around at the rest of us and said, “I’ll brook no opposition, here or ashore.”

“Well, sir”—Fat Jack put himself in front of Hodges—“there’s fifteen rivers up in them mountains, west-runnin’ rivers drainin’ along a line that’s two hundred and fifty miles long, north to south. A lot of places for diggin’. So I’m askin’ you again, which way is this ship goin’? North or south?”

“The big strikes are north,” said Hodges. “I have it on good authority.”

The conflict had germinated overnight and was already bursting from the soil.

Sawyer said, “We heard the big strikes are in the south. We seen gold nuggets from a place called Sutter’s Creek. And seein’ the truth is better authority than hearin’ it.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” said Hodges, “after I save your goods.”

“Mine ain’t been stole,” said one of the other Bulls. “And I’ll be fucked if they are.” He shoved two Sagamores aside and made for the hold. “I’m takin’ what’s mine and headin’ south.”

“Like hell, you are,” said Hodges.

At the same moment, Hiram Wilson got in front of the Bull. “I’m loyal to Sam Hodges, and I say you go no farther.”

This Brookline schoolmaster had been a companionable shipmate. The sun had browned his Boston-sallow skin. The sea air and exercise had invigorated him, which had caused him to grow more assertive. He had also drunk so much the night before that he was still drunk, which enhanced his assertiveness but made him weak-legged as well.

All it took was a shove and Wilson went stumbling backward, tripped on the hatch coaming, and fell into the hold.

Scrawny Selwin, standing nearby, took an ill-advised swing, missed, and spun halfway around. Fat Jack grabbed his collar and flung him into half a dozen Hodges men.

Hodges turned to Sloate. “Shoot that bastard.”

But Pompey skulled Sloate with a belaying pin. “You heard the cap’n. No more shootin’.”

Then another fist flew. It did not matter from whom, because everything was coming suddenly and completely undone. Another body tumbled into the hold. Another man went overboard. Everyone began to shout.

Christopher Harding took a swing at Fat Jack that missed and bounced off the side of Matt Dooling’s head, which enraged the blacksmith, who grabbed Christopher and threw him overboard.

Pompey retreated to the quarterdeck, where he and the captain watched the riot erupt among the Hodges men and Willis men and Brighton Bulls and independents, all smashing, punching, pushing, falling into the hold, flying overboard, grappling for goods and …

 … our brave New England experiment came to a swift and ignominious end.

*   *   *

HAD THIS RIOT HAPPENED where there was no Trask or Doctor Beal to exert physical or moral authority, the men might be fighting still. But those two combined to restore order and bring the company to a place where negotiation replaced fisticuffs, cold words supplanted shouts and curses. Trask used musket fire. The doctor spoke common sense.

As the fog burned off, an uneasy peace settled onto the William Winter. Men were angry. They were sullen. They were bruised inside and out. But none were for lingering.

The Brighton Bulls demanded their shares. They would go on their own.

Matt Dooling and some of the others formed small groups for the same purpose.

Collins debarked with the pallet of goods and promised to send back for more.

Hodges said that they would get nothing more until Willis returned to negotiate. Though he tried to project authority, he seemed stunned, like a man struck on the head by a flowerpot falling from a second-story sill. So he pulled around him his loyalists—Sloate, the soaking Christopher Harding, Attorney Tom Lyons, and the rest—sat on the forward deck, and, most uncharacteristically, listened. But he listened with little or no comment. He did not even notice when I left the ship.

*   *   *

I WALKED THE WHARVES where Sacramento-bound schooners took on passengers and freight. I climbed the hill to the Parker House and watched the men watching the woman above the bar. I watched the table where they played the game with the spinning wheel. I watched a gambler dressed like a New York actor dealing cards to dirty miners. But I spied no Michael Flynn. So I went to Ah-Toy’s and asked Keen-Ho if the Irishman had come back. Keen-Ho may have laughed or may have scoffed. But I was sure by then that Flynn and my money were gone, probably on the first boat for Sacramento that morning.

So I went back down the hill and out onto the new wharf at the foot of Washington Street. The planks and pilings, shipped from Oregon, smelled clean, with the fresh-cut tang of green wood. I inhaled and tried to drive San Francisco out of my nostrils, for on top of everything else, the stench of garbage, tide flat, and human waste was as thick as the fog.

The beach and wharves, connected by a waterfront wagon rut called Montgomery Street, swarmed with boats, carts, and men, as they had swarmed the day before and probably every day since the Rush began. Pallets of goods rose, and barrels formed tight battle squares, and men stood guard around them or within them, and carts clattered up to them and loaded on cargo and went struggling and straining up the hills and down.

The town was booming. But my spirits were not. I sat on a piling, disconsolate and confused, with my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands and not a coin in my pocket, and I watched the cold fog pouring across the Bay.

Around five o’clock, I noticed Hodges riding the incoming tide with Sloate and half a dozen others. As soon as the longboat struck the shore between two of the wharves, he bounded over the bow and stalked up to a supply pen on Montgomery Street, where Willis had pitched a large tent. He and Willis exchanged a few sharp words in the open, then disappeared into the tent.

My hope rose that they might settle their differences. Being a good distance away, I could not hear what they said. But after a few minutes, they emerged and Hodges stalked back to the longboat, shouting over his shoulder, “This is not the end of it.”

Willis shouted back, “We will have the rest of our goods and have them now! And that will be the end of it.” Then he ordered half a dozen men to seize the longboat.

Hodges spun back. “By God, you won’t touch that boat.”

“We’ll fill it and bring it back,” said Willis.

A man named Morrison, a logger from Berkshire County who carried an ax the way other men carried pistols, said, “We’ll take what’s ours by right.” Then, holding the ax at his side, he stepped toward the boat.

What happened next was shocking, sudden, yet somehow appropriate in this brutal new world. As Morrison hefted his ax, I could not tell if he was preparing to place it on his shoulder or deliver it directly into Hodges’s head. But a plume of white smoke jetted out of Sloate’s gun, and its report reached me half a second later.

Morrison staggered, looked down at a hole in his side, then dropped to his knees.

The waterfront went silent. Everything between the wharves stopped, carpenters in mid-hammer, stevedores in mid-lift, drummers in mid-bark.

Hodges shouted, “You all saw that. Self-defense. He was comin’ at us.”

Collins rushed forward as Morrison fell facedown in the mud.

Hodges leaped into the longboat. Sloate, still holding the pistol, climbed in after.

“The law will be coming for you!” cried Willis.

“There’s no law here but this—” Sloate holstered his pistol.

And a familiar voice whispered in my ear, “Someday, somebody’ll have to kill that Sloate. Hodges, too.”

I turned and looked into Michael Flynn’s face. “You? You Irish son of a bitch.”

“Did you know that every company started in the East falls apart in California?”

“I don’t give a damn. You stole my money.”

“You give a damn. You’re sittin’ here askin’ yourself what to do, now that all your fine Yankee friends is showin’ themselves to be no better than anybody else.”

Down at the water’s edge, Morrison was wailing in pain. Collins and three others picked him up and carried him to the tent.

I said it again. “You stole my money. I did you a favor, and you stole my money.”

Flynn pulled my purse from his pocket and dangled it in front of my nose. “I borrowed it.” Then he dropped it into my hand. “It’s heavier than it was. I pay interest.”

I looked into the pouch: gold dust, nuggets, Golden Eagles. “How did you get this?”

“By doin’ what everyone does in California, playin’ the great game of chance.”

“Chance?”

Flynn turned to the sound of Morrison’s agony. “That feller’s gut shot. But there’s a chance that he’ll live, just like there’s a chance that Willis gets rich in San Francisco, and a chance that minin’ pays off for all the fellers headin’ for the hills. I took a chance last night that I could hold my own when I took your coin pouch to a card table.”

“You gambled my money?”

“And won. Took me all night, but I won yours and mine and then some. Made enough to get more than a look-ee. Even made enough for two of these.” He handed me a piece of paper on which was printed: SAN FRANCISCO SCHOONER COMPANY, PASSAGE ON THE ANNE-MARIE, DEPARTING CLAY STREET WHARF FOR SACRAMENTO. And handwritten: $30. August 4, 1849, 6:30 AM. Flynn said the ticket was for me.

“But I’m for Hodges.”

“Then you’re a fool.” He snatched the ticket back. “Hodges is a beaten man. And beaten men goes one of two ways. Either they curl up and die, or they get mean and bitter. And he’s pretty mean to begin with.”

I said that I owed it to my editor to see which way Hodges went.

“Did you like how it went just now, then? Or how it went this mornin’, with all them fine Yankee gents havin’ their New England town meetin’ … San Francisco style?”

Morrison’s wailing distracted us for a moment, but the rest of the world was already getting back to buying, selling, yelling, hammering, building, hauling.

I said, “I thought we’d be different.”

“You thought you’d be different.” Flynn repeated my words with a fine Irish sneer. “You Yankee boys think too damn much of yourselves. You’ve heard of the California and Boston Joint Stock and Minin’ Company, have you?”

I had. They were mostly Harvard men. They had named their ship the Edward Everett, after the college president. He had even given them all Bibles when they sailed.

“Best-equipped company yet,” said Flynn. “Sailed all the way up to Sacramento. Got off the ship and lasted a week. The whole company come apart like a rotten wheel.”

“How do you know that?”

“I took one of them for a hundred and fifty last night. He said it was all his profit from when the company dissolved … his profit on a three-hundred-dollar investment.”

“That’s only fifty percent.”

“Not quite so good as what them harpies was promisin’ yesterday, is it?”

“It doesn’t matter. My job is to chronicle the Sagamores.”

“But there ain’t no Sagamores now, just a bunch of squabblin’ Yanks who forgot all the high-flown sermons the minute they got here, just like I said they would … and got flogged for sayin’ it.”

“But—”

“Your fat-guts Boston editor don’t want stories like that. You need to get out on your own, James, and I need a pardner.”

“Pardner? You mean you’ve jumped ship?”

“The whole damn crew’s jumped, but for two … the Portagee steward and the nigger Pompey. So there’s nobody to sail that ship. So we’ll have a mean and bitter captain, too. So I’ll be on me way before he can run me down. And you need to be on your way before the law gets round to arrestin’ Hodges and Sloate for what we just seen. You don’t want to be stuck here, waitin’ to witness in some rump court while everyone else is off for the diggin’s.”

I said nothing. I thought next to nothing. I did not know what to think.

Flynn leaned against a piling and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Loyalty’s a fine thing, James, but a man needs somethin’ to strive for. He needs a goal, like.”

“I can guess yours.”

“An easy guess. To find a big strike and sift out every goddamn grain of gold there is. Then go back to Boston, pay me back rent so I get that daguerreotype of me mother, and buy that fuckin’ club of yours.”

“And mine?”

“A rich boy’s dream. To see life … lived large and rubbed raw. To see what you’ll never see again, once you settle into your Boston parlor with your pretty wife. What you want to see is up there”—he jerked a thumb toward the eastern hills—“up where the gold is, up where the stories are, stories to write down and make you famous.”

I did not admit it, but he was right.

“Your dream has its head in a cloud, James. Mine’s rock hard. Between the two of us, we could make a fine team. So”—he put the ticket into my breast pocket—“sleep on it. If you see the sense of what I’m sayin’, meet me at dawn. Just remember, travelin’ is for friends, and Hodges may act like he’s your father, but he ain’t your friend.”

August 4, 1849
Jumping

Some time after midnight, I wrote a note to Samuel Hodges.

I never spoke with him. He was drinking when I returned to the William Winter, drinking hard. I had only seen him sip a few glasses of port in the captain’s cabin, and these had produced pleasant effects—a looser tongue, a broader laugh, a more relaxed demeanor. But that night, he had worked his way through a bottle of bad whiskey and was starting on a second. He appeared sullen, and beneath that, belligerent, a man of thwarted ambition.

So I chose to write rather than talk. I should have looked him in the eye, but drunk or sober, he was certain to see betrayal in my actions. And he had been betrayed enough.

Besides, it was not only Hodges who radiated anger. Most everyone who remained a Sagamore, twenty-five men in all, seemed in the same state.

My note explained that since the company had dissolved, they no longer formed a clear prism through which I might show this Gold Rush to the people of Boston. It was my job to find a new perspective. I did not expect Hodges to accept my argument. But by the time he read, I hoped to be long gone.

*   *   *

AFTER THE SHIP’S BELL rang once for four-thirty, I waited a few minutes so that anyone bestirred by the sound might slip back to sleep. Then I left the note on the saloon table and tiptoed up to the main deck.

Lanterns burned bow and stern and bled light into the fog. I had my sea bag on my shoulder, my pistols in my belt. I moved quietly and breathed lightly. I was a shadow.

The Negro Pompey and Christopher Harding had the watch. Christopher was asleep on the forecastle deck. That was good. But Pompey’s voice cut through the darkness from the stern. He said, “If you’s thinkin’ of sneakin’ off, Mr. Whoever-You-Are, I got the oarlocks. Ain’t supposed to let no one leave at night. Not after last night.”

“You owe me a favor, Pompey,” I said just above a whisper.

His shadow picked up the lantern and came down from the quarterdeck. He held the light to my face. “Mister Spencer?”

“How was that touch-ee?”

“Got a fine yeller woman to stroke my dick, and it—”

“You owe me, then.”

Pompey glanced toward Christopher Harding, who was still asleep. I thought, for a moment, that I saw someone asleep behind him, with an arm thrown over him.

“Besides,” I said, “after last night, there aren’t many left aboard to worry about. Mr. Harding isn’t even worried about … sleeping on the deck.”

Pompey said, “Him and his friend done more than sleepin’, when they thought I was asleep. Mr. Harding, he have a ass that shine like moonlight, and—”

I was not surprised to hear that, but I cut him off. “Will you row me in, Pompey?”

“You can’t take nothin’. Cap’n’ll flog me if you—”

“I want nothing but to get ashore.”

Pompey gave another glance toward the two sleeping men on the forecastle deck. Then he blew out his lantern. We lowered ourselves into the small rowboat, Pompey fitted the oarlocks, and we pushed off.

Reverend Winter looked down from beneath the bowsprit, and I fancied that I saw disapproval in his eyes. But with each dip of the oars, I felt growing relief.

Then the voice of Samuel Hodges cut through the night fog. “Goddamn you, James Spencer. You desert me, too?”

Had he gotten up to piss and seen the note? Had Christopher Harding awakened him? Or Sloate? For it was certainly Sloate asleep behind Christopher.

“Don’t say nothin’,” Pompey told me.

“Come back,” said Hodges. “Come back, and I’ll forget this ever happened.”

Pompey kept pulling, and the oars rocked rhythmically in the locks.

Clink, clank, splash. Clink, clank, splash.

“Turn that boat around or we’ll start shooting,” cried Hodges.

“Shooting?” I heard Christopher Harding say. “I can’t shoot Jamie Spencer.”

“I can.” That was Sloate’s voice.

“Don’t say nothin’,” Pompey whispered, “Be harder for ’em to figure out where to shoot in the fog. Bad enough I’se makin’ noise with the oars.” Clink, clank, splash.

Hodges shouted, “You came to tell the world my story! Our story!”

I felt a pang at that. Hodges was right. I would never have begun this adventure if not for his willingness to take me on.

“Is it that damned Irishman? Are you throwing in with that bog-hopping scum?”

Pompey whispered, “If I’se runnin’, I’d run with Flynn, too. He know how to get by.”

Hodges’s voice grew thicker. A note of defeat seemed to creep in, or perhaps it was the fog, deadening it, “Be careful of him, Spencer. He’ll find a noose sooner or later.” Then he added, “What will your mother say? Your father?”

And that sealed the matter. My father would tell me to stay. So I was going.

“I won’t forget this, James Spencer! You’ve backstabbed me. You and that Irish son-of-a-bitch will come to grief, by my hand or somebody else’s. You mark my words.”

But Hodges did not pursue, perhaps because there were not enough awake to pull the big longboat. Soon, our rowboat slid up to the Clay Street Wharf, just forward of the schooner Anne-Marie.

Pompey took my hand. “If not for Cap’n Trask, I be jumpin’, too, but no man treat me better. He give me a job, give me my own caboose to cook on, give me a chance to make the money for to buy my wife and babies out of North Carolina, so—” He released his grip. “I hope to meet you again, sir.”

“Tell them that I put a gun to your head and made you row me in. They’ll go easier on you, and … I’ll pray you make enough to buy your family.”

August 9, 1849
Sutter’s Fort

This morning, I put into the hands of John Augustus Sutter himself a dispatch which he promised to post when he journeyed to Monterey.

It has been said that in warfare, no plan of battle survives contact with the enemy. I would add that in California, no plan of organization survives the enormity of the landscape or the unleashed ambition of men come to extract their fortune from out of it.

And so, I must report that the Sagamore Mining Company has dissolved. Men have taken their shares and gone on their own, and I have no certainty that I will ever see any of them again. However, if it is any comfort to families, investors, and friends, dissolution is the common fate for all companies soon after debarking in California.

So I have joined with a man named Michael Flynn, and we have struck out on our own.

We left San Francisco on August 4 aboard the schooner Anne-Marie, a vessel of fifty feet and twenty ton, with a shallow draft for getting over river bars. We beat across the bay, passed through the Carquinez Straits and Suisun Bay (named for a tribe of Indians that once lived there), and entered a vast delta formed by the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, a maze of waterways, marshes, and islands that resemble Eden before the fall (assuming there were sparrow-sized mosquitoes in Eden).

Tall grasses wave in the delta breeze. Oak and willow festoon the water’s edge. Salmon roil the streams. Waterfowl darken the sky. Deer and elk graze the banks. And all of these creations of God exist entirely oblivious to us and our ambitions.

A few passengers took pot shots at the deer, but our captain did not stop when one was felled. We protested, as fresh meat is a luxury, but we came to understand his reasoning at the next bend, where we spied on the bank the most enormous four-legged creature that ever I have seen, a silver-brown bear as big as a deck house, his face buried in an elk haunch, his muzzle and claws covered in blood.

Someone said that the bear was called a Grizzly, that he was as ferocious as he was huge, and that it was best to leave the riverbank to him. The man spoke with such confidence that all accepted his judgment.

Indeed, there seemed as much confidence as knowledge on that boat. But in California, a man who speaks with confidence is assumed to have knowledge. I could write a volume about the men aboard who spoke confidently of the riches they would find. They have big dreams and have come to a place big enough to hold their every aspiration.

The vistas, even from the river, are long and broad and big. The river is big, too. Its breadth doubles our Merrimack, just as the mountains that birth it are reputed to reach twice the height of those where the Merrimack takes life. Even the sky is big … and hot. No New Englander experiences the kind of baking, bone-drying heat that cooks this California country. The mercury glass on the mast registered near a hundred on the first day, surpassed it on the second, and came a few degrees shy of hellfire on the third.

By the time we reached Sacramento, the chill San Francisco wind was but a fond memory. Aside from the heat, however, this is San Francisco in miniature. A dozen abandoned ships serve as floating storehouses. Scores of shacks and tents line the riverbank. And two structures dominate: the three-story City Hotel and a windowless warehouse with a sign proclaiming “S. Brannan & Co.”

This Brannan appears to be everywhere, as are the gamblers, the grog merchants, and the grifters, working their schemes in canvas pavilions or at tables under the trees. Merchants pile their open-air depots high with goods, secure in the knowledge that no rain will fall between May and October. And all of them pile their prices high, too, knowing that men will have to pay or go back to San Francisco for a better price.

Two miles south, on higher ground, stands Sutter’s Fort, wise grandfather to this adolescent riverfront, a four-acre compound, enclosed with a fifteen-foot wall of whitewashed adobe, blindingly bright in the afternoon sun. But all is not brightness. It appears a heavily used place, busy and bustling, but in truth, worn to a nub.

Two years ago, John Sutter was a wealthy man, a sort of feudal lord who welcomed wayfarers to an agricultural empire served by hundreds of mechanics, farmhands, and Indian slaves. He grew crops, ran cattle, tanned hides, milled grains, all on a Mexican land grant of 50,000 acres. By most accounts, he was a benevolent despot. But when one of his men found gold at his sawmill, forty miles up in the hills, Sutter tried to keep it quiet, not out of greed but because he knew what would happen. And happen it did.

Portly, courtly, with bushy side whiskers and polished walking stick, Sutter strolls the compound today like a man who has gained all that he sought in California. But his eyes reveal bewilderment, for all that he sought is being swept away, his dreams destroyed by the thousands who have swarmed across his land pursuing dreams of their own.

As his fort stands at the confluence of the Sacramento and American Rivers, it was inevitable that it would become the nexus for thousands of Gold Rushers. But it seems that people who come to draw riches from the earth believe that anything the earth renders is theirs. They have trampled Sutter’s wheat fields, stripped his orchards, plucked even green apples for cider. And pens that held cattle are now empty, because rustlers have stolen most of the livestock that grazed on the wide plains around us.

Representing myself as a Boston correspondent, I sought Sutter out. He told me of his misfortunes and said, “I never believed that people could be so mean.” He is preparing to leave for Monterey, where a statehood convention may bring a degree of order and give him the authority to put squatters off his land. It is a measure of gold’s power that this new possession called California may pass more quickly to statehood than any since the first thirteen.

Despite everything, Sutter’s Fort remains a jump-off point for those heading inland. So horse traders, muleteers, and wagon drivers are everywhere about. A newspaper called The Placer Times is published on a hand press. Brannan & Co. has another store here, to sell to the buyers they miss at the landing. A billiard table and an actual bowling alley compete for amusement. Indeed, there is so much commerce, so much trading, so much buying and selling, that a restaurant serves food here around the clock.

We pitched a tent outside the fort, traded information about San Francisco and the gold country, and purchased overpriced goods from the Brannan Store. My partner, however, has won steadily in card games on the boat and at the fort, so we have eaten well and provisioned well, and in his final game, he won two horses and a burro from a short, fat, and very unlucky Mexican named Carlos.

This is the way of things in California. Great agrarian empires are wantonly destroyed, livestock and money casually wagered on the turn of a card. But in a country so big, there is always a chance that tomorrow will be better. In a country so fertile with possibility, chance rules, and second chances are plentiful.

And so, we strike out to play the great game.

Yr. Ob’t Correspondent,

The Argonaut

By mid-morning, we were riding east across the rolling dry grasslands. About a mile ahead, a cloud of dust floated above a wagon train hauling goods into the hills. To the south, a plume of smoke marked a California prairie fire, a fast-moving beast that seemed to devour both the earth and the air above it. But as the flames were burning south before the breeze, the fire remained a distant spectacle, like the mountains faintly visible beyond the foothills.

We let the horses go at a steady gait, covering not much more than seven or eight miles in an hour. From time to time, we passed groups of miners, most of them moving along on foot. Some had a mule carrying their gear. Others rode in wagons or carts. We exchanged greetings, like ships passing, and kept on. This was the last phase of the rush to the goldfields, but no one seemed to be rushing in the heat.

We reckoned that we would get to the camp called Sutter’s Creek by sundown. Sutter had gone there in the spring with a crew of Indians and had done well until the traveling grog shops had opened and enticed his Indians to spend more gold than they mined. Soon they were all in debt or drunk or both. So Sutter had given up mining altogether and left only his name in the diggings.

Flynn allowed as how grog shops would be no distraction to him. I was inclined to believe him, in that I had never seen him drunk. But he was Irish, so I had my dubieties. If he needed drink, however, it would not be to loosen his tongue. For that, he needed nothing but the air in his lungs. Lord but that man could talk.

We had agreed to take only one canteen each and to drink little, so by mid-morning, my mouth was as dry as the grass. But without a sip of water or a swallow from the jug of whiskey he had bought at Sutter’s, Flynn talked and talked. He talked about Ireland, about the Fenians, about Boston, about his mother and his sister. He talked about the ceaseless sun, about the men we met on the road, and about our plans for mining, too. He even talked me out of one of the Colt Dragoons, saying that if we were to be partners, best we both were armed. Then he talked as he loaded the gun.

His commentary became like the steady drone of a bug in the heat, except when he chose to sing. Then “The Wild Colonial Boy” or “Billy Broke Locks” or some sea chantey would roll out of him, and I would thank God that he could carry a tune. He even sang the song about all of us bound for this heat-stroked Promised Land.

But a question vexed me: Who was this Irishman? Had I betrayed men of my own background to throw in with a scoundrel? I thought I had been able to gauge his character at sea. How would he perform in a crisis on land?

I would not have long to find out.

*   *   *

AFTER ABOUT TEN MILES, we came to a side trail marked by a sign—whitewash on an old plank—Sutter’s Creek, Twenty Miles.

We peeled off, moving now in a southeasterly direction, across that sea of yellowed grass and dry brush, dotted here and there with dark clumps of oak that seemed to be floating atop their own black shadows.

The high sun hammered my hats, the one I was wearing and the one Flynn had stolen from me in Boston. But there was something liberating about sailing our saddleback schooners through the heat. We were on our own, away from the cramped ship, the teeming mud ruts of San Francisco, the know-it-all braggarts aboard the Sacramento boat, and the migrants on the trail. If I rode a few paces behind, I did not even hear Michael Flynn … going on.

We saw few dwellings. One we glimpsed at great distance, a cluster of white adobe buildings with red tile roofs. It shimmered in the waves of heat like the exotic castle of a Muslim prince.

Around noon, we came to an inviting grove of oaks. With the land beginning to rise and the hottest part of the day still ahead, we decided to stop and rest. We staked the animals on long tethers, took the saddles from the horses, and let them graze. The burro just stood, eyes closed, head nodding. Flynn said that the animals could go without water until we reached the Cosumnes River, which lay somewhere ahead.

I dropped my saddle against the trunk of a big oak and reclined against it.

Flynn dropped his saddle on the other side of the tree.

I took a swallow of water. It was lukewarm after hours of sloshing in a wooden canteen, but I splashed a bit on my face, wet my red and yellow-paisley neckerchief, and discovered that even warm water would cool the broiling skin on the back of my neck.

“And now”—Flynn reached into his saddlebag and extracted a whole pie, wrapped in paper—“a work of art made from the last peaches in the Sutter orchard.”

“But ten dollars for a pie?” I said.

“A damn sight better than beef jerky.”

I did not disagree, so we enjoyed the sweetness, the texture, the satisfaction that came with … pie.

Then Flynn lay back and said, “Only thing to make this better’d be a woman.”

“A woman? Out here?”

“Why not? You think women can’t handle the heat or the ride?”

I thought of Janiva and how angry she had been when I told her she could not endure this world. I also thought of how much I missed her.

Flynn kept talking. “Like the man said, I’ll take any woman. Marryin’ woman, loose woman, young woman, old, pretty, ugly, it don’t matter. Wish I had one as pretty as the one you left back in Boston, though.”

I did not answer. I knew that Flynn did not need an answer.

“Ain’t you worried that she won’t be there when you get home?”

“We haven’t been here a week,” I said. “I’m not worrying about going home.”

“Liar.” He laughed. He knew. I was worried. Then he lay back and covered his face with his hat. “I think I’ll dream about one.”

“A woman?”

“Maybe. Or maybe a lot of women. Or maybe the best parts of a few women.”

I agreed that a nap would do us well in the heat. Dreaming of women would be an extra benefit. So I stretched out on the other side of the tree.

In a few seconds, Flynn was asleep, leaving me to enjoy the most exquisite silence I’d known in months, such quiet that I could hear a bird, something big like a turkey buzzard, crossing high above, its wings flap-flap-flapping in the still air.

I opened one eye and watched the bird. I closed both eyes and dozed …

*   *   *

.… UNTIL A DIFFERENT SOUND woke me, a metallic meshing of gears.

I opened my eyes and looked into the barrel of a cocked fowling piece.

“Buenos dias, señor.”

I raised my head and the barrel came closer.

“Carlos, take his gun.”

So there were two, the one called Carlos and the one giving orders, who now gave an order to one called Pedro. So there were three.

Carlos pulled my gun from my belt and gestured for me to stand.

I heard Flynn rouse himself on the other side of the tree. Then I heard the leader say, “Stop, señor. Do not fight. Hand Rodrigo your gun. Sí. Very good.”

Soon enough, Flynn and I were standing in the bright sun, hatless and bootless.

The one called Carlos, squat and fat, held the fowling piece. Pedro and a boyishly skinny one called Rodrigo went through our things. Pedro poked into our saddlebags with a machete. Rodrigo dismantled the pack we had built on the burro’s back.

Two more sat on their horses, close by their leader, whom they called El Patrón. He was mounted on a fine chestnut. He wore a fine sombrero that gave him his own shade. He had a saddle with a fine silver pommel. His spurs flashed silver, too. Even his hair and beard were silver.

The one called Rodrigo pulled a shovel out of the mule pack and held it up.

El Patrón shook his head and said something in Spanish.

Rodrigo threw the shovel at my feet. Then he dove into my sea bag and started flinging out the books.

I said, “If you tell me what you’re looking for—”

El Patrón said, “You are very polite to Californios like us. But it is too late for polity.” The man had been well educated in the English language to use such words.

“We’re just crossin’ this country,” said Flynn, “so polite is the way we go.”

“Polite now. Palming aces last night.”

Flynn looked at the one named Carlos. “I remember you now. You give me a nasty look when I beat you fair and square on the last cut of the cards.”

Carlos did not respond. He let El Patrón do his talking:

“He saw you palm the ace. That is cheating.”

“That’s a lie,” said Flynn.

“No Californio calls out the cheater in a room full of Yankees,” said El Patrón. “He waits until the odds favor him … out here, on a ranchero that still belongs to his patrón, though for how long, I cannot say, now that we have Yankee masters and every man who crosses my ground thinks that my cattle are free for the taking.”

Flynn said, “I ain’t a cattle thief, or a Yankee, or a cheater at cards. Neither is my friend … well, he is a Yankee, but—”

“We will take back what is ours and a little more.” El Patrón patted the pocket of his jacket, where he had deposited our coin pouches. “Interest.”

I heard the turkey buzzard come flapping over again, as if he sensed that soon, there might be something to eat in this isolated grove.

El Patrón looked up at the bird and the angle of the sun and said, “I would not move again until dusk.”

“With no boots?” said Flynn. “Where can we go?”

“I cannot say. It will not be our problem. But we will leave your canteens.”

I said, “Can’t we talk about this?”

“There is nothing to talk about, señor. We are toll collectors, collecting a toll.”

“You’re horse thieves,” I said.

“The horses are your toll. It is a good deal.” El Patrón leaned on his silver pommel and said, “A few years ago, when California was Spanish, we would have traded like gentlemen. We would have talked, like gentlemen. Sipped brandy and smoked and shaken hands, like gentlemen. But now that we are Americans, we must act more—”

At that instant, I heard the crack of a rifle and saw a puff of smoke on a low rise about thirty yards away.

The rider to the left of El Patrón dropped from the saddle.

Everyone turned to the sound, and Carlos swung his fowling piece just enough that Michael Flynn took his chance and jumped onto Carlos’s back.

This caused the gun to discharge and blast El Patrón’s beautiful horse square in the face. The animal screamed and reared and then, after staggering for a moment on its hind legs, it fell over sideways, pinning El Patrón.

Flynn grabbed the gun away from Carlos, who pulled a knife and slashed, but Flynn smashed the butt into the Mexican’s face.

At the same moment, an American in a short military jacket and bowler hat leapt from behind the rise and ran toward us with a short-barrel blunderbuss at his hip.

The other mounted man drove his horse between this American and El Patrón and fired his pistol, but the American kept coming, and as he did, he released a thunderous eruption of buckshot that knocked the man out of his saddle.

Now, the one called Pedro was spinning toward me with the machete over his head, as if driven by the momentum of the moment rather than any real desire to attack.

I will admit that I stood there, making the observation I have just written with almost as much detachment as I have written it, even though I should have been grabbing the shovel at my feet and fighting back. Then I saw the blade in the air, hurtling toward my face, and I flinched.

But Flynn swept down with the gun barrel and knocked the blade from Pedro’s hands. And my instinct was correct. Pedro was as frightened as I. He looked at us both, then turned and leapt onto one of the horses.

The American, running amongst us, cried, “Shoot him!”

I looked at Pedro galloping off, then I turned again to the American, who shouted, “He’s gettin’ away! Shoot him!”

I put up my hands, as if to say, Shoot him? With what?

The American ran toward Carlos, who now lay unconscious in the dry yellow grass. He took the pistol that Carlos had taken from me, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Click. I could have told him it wasn’t loaded.

But Flynn was turning to the one called Rodrigo, who was hunched over with his hands wrapped around his head and his body trembling against the tree. Flynn kicked him to open up, then pulled his own pistol from Rodrigo’s belt and fired at the fleeing rider. The shot hit Pedro between the shoulder blades, and he fell off from the saddle.

The American let out with a whistle. The horse stopped and came circling back.

Flynn looked at me and mouthed the words, “His horse?”

The tall American looked at me and said, “Don’t like to fight, eh? You won’t last long out here.” He was older, perhaps fifty, grizzled, gray, all angles and elbows and unpredictable movements.

Flynn held up his pistol. “Mine’s loaded. The one in your hand, that’s my pardner’s. It ain’t.”

I tried to say that I didn’t want to shoot myself accidentally, but I could not get the words out. I was too shocked by what I had just seen.

There were dead bodies in the shade and dead bodies in the sun. Rodrigo trembled by the tree. El Patrón lay pinned under his horse, which was breathing in strangled gasps, its huge flanks rising and falling like a bellows, its face an eyeless mess of buckshot and blood.

I felt the pie rise in my throat, but my neckerchief kept it down.

Flynn offered his hand to the stranger. “Thanks, friend.”

“No need to thank me. Been trackin’ these brigands a good while.”

Flynn said, “May I ask your name.”

“Cletis Smith, late of the U.S. Army. We took California away from these thievin’ Mexican snake fuckers, and now they’re tryin’ to take it back, one horse at a time.” Smith went over to my mount and ran his hand over the haunch. “Didn’t either of you damn fools look at the brands?”

“Brands?” I said.

“Shit in a shoe, but there sure is a lot of tenderfeet comin’ into this country.” Smith pointed to lettering on the horse’s rump. It looked like “USA.” But the “U” had been rebranded into a “V.” “See that? It’s supposed to stand for, ‘United States Army.’ But this feller says it’s for ‘Vargas, Señor Antonio,’ all nice and alphabetical-like.”

I gestured to El Patrón, groaning under the gasping horse. “Him?”

Cletis took the pistol from Flynn’s hand, walked over to El Patrón, crouched, and said, “Vargas, you stole my horses and left me out here to die.”

“Your horses were your toll. We left you your burro and your boots.” Vargas raised his head and looked into Smith’s eyes. “What have you stolen? A whole country.”

“Lose a war, lose a lot, old man.” Cletis Smith fished into Vargas’s pockets, pulled out our coin pouches, and tossed them to Flynn. “You figure out which is which.”

Then Smith stood, cocked the pistol, and pointed it down.

I cried, “Don’t shoot him!”

Cletis glanced at me and pulled the trigger. The shot exploded and echoed over the hills. I thought I was witnessing murder, cold blooded and brutal.

Then I heard Vargas say softly, “Thank you, señor.”

“Hate to see a good horse suffer. But it’s for the best.”

“A sad world, señor, when something so bad is for the best.” Vargas looked at me. “Thank you, too. You are a merciful man.”

I nodded. I did not think I could speak.

“Just remember,” Cletis Smith said to me, “out here, too much mercy’ll get you killed.” He went over to the one called Rodrigo. “Ain’t that right, son?”

Tears were pouring down Rodrigo’s face, making rivulets in the dust on his cheeks. He was perhaps sixteen, and he cringed from this growling old American.

Cletis Smith studied him a moment, then handed the pistol back to Flynn and moved methodically to his next task: snatching a saddle from off the ground and throwing it onto one of the horses.

“What are you doin’?” asked Flynn.

“These horses are mine.”

Flynn said, “I won ’em on a straight-up cut of the cards and—”

“That don’t mean dog puke to me.”

“Well, it does to me,” said Flynn.

I said, “We just killed three men, and all we care about is who owns that horse?”

Cletis Smith said, “You didn’t kill anybody, son. But you better learn how if you want to stay alive. Ain’t that right, patrón?”

“If you are going to kill us,” said Vargas, “be done with it. My leg is broken. It hurts very much.”

But the trembling Rodrigo said, “Please do not kill us, señor. He is my grandfather. I promised my mamá I would look after him.”

“Ain’t doin’ a very good job of it, boy.” Cletis looked at Vargas. “And you ain’t doin’ too good takin’ care of your grandson. Is one of these we killed his father?”

“No. These were loyal hands on my ranchero. But my cattle have been stolen. My horses run off. So we do what we can.”

“Where’s the boy’s father?”

“Gone to the diggings.” Vargas grit his teeth to hold down the pain in his leg and perhaps in his heart. “Before the gold, we had a good life. But now, some catch the fever, others spread it, and we are all victims of it.”

Cletis pulled the cinch on the saddle and seemed to give something a bit of thought, then he said to Rodrigo, “Don’t worry, son. There’ll be no more killin’.”

“Thank God for that,” I said.

Cletis told me to pick up the shovel. Then he pulled another from the burro pack and tossed it to Flynn. He told us to dig a shallow hole around the body of Señor Vargas.

I looked at Flynn, as if to ask … Should we do it? Flynn shrugged. Why not?

So we pulled on our boots and got to digging. In the meantime, Cletis Smith resaddled the horses, slid his handsome Kentucky Long Rifle into a custom-made cinch on a saddle, then reloaded the 1808 model Harper’s Ferry blunderbuss, a true brute of a weapon. When we were done, he said, “Looks like you know how to work shovels. How much do you know about placer minin’?”

“What we don’t know, we’ll learn,” said Flynn.

“If you promise to go where I go and do what I say till the winter rains, you can ride with me. I’ll teach you what I know.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I ain’t as young as I used to be. And placer minin’ is hard work.”

We looked at each other. Flynn winked. I nodded. We liked the offers.

With a good hole dug around him, we were able to pull Señor Vargas from under the horse. His leg was bent just above the top of his boot, so Cletis Smith made a splint out of Rodrigo’s old musket, set the break, and propped El Patrón against the tree. We gave Rodrigo one of the horses to ride for help, but Smith warned him that we would keep this clump of trees in view for at least an hour. If we saw him riding off before that, we would come back and kill his grandfather. And I think he meant it.

I took Señor Vargas’s hand and wished him the best.

“Just don’t tell him we’re sorry,” said Cletis. “Out here, apologizin’ is a sign of weakness.”

*   *   *

CLETIS RODE HIS FAVORITE horse, the chestnut. Flynn took one of the Mexican mounts. I rode the sorrel. The burros followed on a string.

Presently, Flynn offered Cletis a peppermint from the bag he had bought at Sutter’s Fort, and they began to talk as if nothing had happened in that bloody grove of trees. Cletis scoffed at our plan to head for Sutter’s Creek. Played out, he said. Much better diggin’s deeper in the hills, he said, at a place called Broke Neck, on a river that fed the Cosumnes. That was where we would go, he said, and he did not invite our opinions.

Then he turned us back toward the north and the Hangtown Road, the main route into the mountains. Soon we were rising as steadily as the afternoon heat.

Along the trail, we stopped to help a man with a wagon full of mining tools. His rear wheel had snapped, and he was stuck. Three groups of miners had gone past, leaving him helpless. He was a tall, rock-faced fellow with a long beard. He said he was headed to Hangtown to start what he called The New England Trading Company.

This put me in a warmer frame of mind toward him. Although Cletis wanted to keep moving, I prevailed. If a New England man needed help, help we would offer in the form of muscle to lever up the wagon so that he could change out the wheel.

It felt good to do a small bit of good after what we had done a few hours before.

As we rode off the man said, “I don’t forget a favor. I’ll write your names down.”

Flynn laughed. “You do that, Mister—”

“Hopkins,” he said. “Mark Hopkins.”

*   *   *

BY LATE IN THE day, we had risen into a different world. The ground remained yellow-brown and paper-dry, but the trees were growing taller. There was black oak and buckeye, and here and there, conifers with crusty red bark standing as straight and reaching as high as the white pines of New Hampshire.

We were riding south along the line of the Logtown Ridge, which offered the most amazing view that ever I had seen. To the west, and well below, rolled the prairie we had just crossed, fading into the mist of a distant sunset. To the east, a few rods from the road, the land dropped hundreds of feet into the steep valley of the Cosumnes River. But our prospect carried across the river, across the pines and oaks on the far side, across a distance of thirty miles or more, all the way to the rim of white that ran along the horizon. Yes, I said, white. The white of snow in August, limning the peaks of those distant mountains like sugar on the lip of a holiday glass.

At a promontory, Cletis Smith stopped and swept his arm from left to right. “There it is, boys, La Veta Madre. From away up north, where them Donner folks et each other a while back, all the way south to the desert, there’s gold strikes everywhere. Men hittin’ paydirt in rivers and streams, in dry gulches and gullies, all of it washin’ out of one great big vein of gold somewhere up them mountains.”

“A vein?” said Flynn. “How big?”

“Miles wide, miles deep, or so they say, with lots of little veins runnin’ out of it.”

“Like capillaries,” I said.

“What’s capillaries?” asked Cletis.

“Pay him no mind,” said Flynn. “He went to Harvard.”

“So he’s what we call an educated fool, then?” said Cletis. “Rides in dangerous country with an unloaded gun. Talks with words so big a simple man don’t understand ’em.”

“I don’t speak Spanish,” I said, “so … La Veta Madre? What does it mean?”

“The Mother Lode. Greatest goddamn gold strike since Adam told Eve to bite the apple.” He gave his reins a tug and we kept going. He said that if our horses had needed water, we would have been traveling on the lower road along the river. But the high trail was better going. So we stayed on it a few miles more. Then, we headed down, down and southeast, down toward the Cosumnes, southeast toward a tributary called the Miwok.

After a time, we crossed the Cosumnes and turned due east, following a crude sign pointing to a place called Fiddletown.

“Fiddletown … is that where we go to hear a bit of music, then?” asked Flynn.

“Nope. There’s a camp up there where no one’s gettin’ rich and they ought to clear out, but they just stay, just stay and fiddle around. Fiddletown.”

Before we had a chance to see the fiddling miners of Fiddletown, we broke off south on another road into another east-west–running valley.

*   *   *

WE REACHED BROKE NECK just as the lanterns were flickering to life. Tents and tossed-together shacks lined a narrow, dusty street crowded with miners. A squeeze-box somewhere was pushing out a tune. Men were laughing. Others were jawing. Others, looking glum, were moving on. It seemed a world made for transition, for quick dismantling and migration, all except for three buildings—a general store on a foundation of river stones just north of the road, and on the south side, a combination assay-and-express office next to a big-top saloon.

The ground sloped away gently behind the saloon, rolling a hundred feet to the river that ran shallow and summer-sluggish.

“They call the river the Miwok,” said Cletis, “named for the Injuns still slinkin’ around here somewhere. The town they named after an old boy who heard men shoutin’ on the bank and reckoned he’d best get down there and stake a claim. Went runnin’, tripped on a rock, fell on his chin and—”

“Broke his neck?” I said.

“Died like a damn fool after travelin’ all the way from Pennsylvania.”

“So we’ve arrived, then?” asked Flynn.

“Arrived at the strike. That’s why there’s two or three hundred fellers buzzin’ around here, and why the gamblers and grog merchants is set up, waitin’ to take their gold ’fore it’s even assayed. But this ain’t for us.”

Just then, someone shouted from the side of the road. “Cletis? Cletis Smith?”

“In the flesh,” said Cletis.

The man came over to Cletis’s horse and offered a hand. “I thought you was dead. Heard you was jumped by a bunch of Greasers down in the valley.”

“So I was. They took everything. Called it a toll for crossin’ their land. I got it back with the help of my new pardners.” Cletis introduced us to Drinkin’ Dan Fleener.

Drinkin’ Dan squinted at us through his right eye. A patch covered the left and scars radiated out from it. “If Cletis speaks well of you, you must be right fellers.”

“Right fellers, for sure,” said Flynn.

I took his hand. It was big and gnarled and felt like wood rather than flesh.

“So we got a strike here?” asked Cletis.

“Already pulled out eighteen ounces.”

“What’s the claim size?”

“Miner’s Council done the usual: a hundred square on the flats or the hills, a hundred runnin’ feet along a ravine or a dry gulch.”

Cletis took a chaw of tobacco and offered the rest of the plug to Drinkin’ Dan. “So, this strike is already big enough for a miner’s council?”

“Gotta have rules.” Drinkin’ Dan took the tobacco and stuffed all of it into his mouth. “I’m on the council myself.”

Cletis looked at us. “The richer the soil, the smaller the claim, so everybody can get a share.”

Drinkin’ Dan said, “You’re welcome to use my tent for the night, boys.”

“Nope. We’ll be movin’ upstream. But we’ll be seein’ you.”

“Thank you kindly for the chaw,” said Drinkin’ Dan.

And we rode on, leaving the noise and lanterns of Broke Neck behind.

As deeper we went into the darkening country, Cletis said, “Remember, never give up more news than you get. And if you hear of a big strike, go a mile upstream. Chances are, if there’s gold in one bend of the river, there’ll be gold in another.”

Then he pulled his horse suddenly and raised his hand for quiet.

I felt my mount tense and skitter, but I put a strong hand to him and he held firm.

Slowly, Cletis reached into his saddle pack and pulled out the blunderbuss.

Then I heard something grunting and scuffling in the bushes nearby, something huge, from the sound of it, something powerful from the wide swath of brush that was spreading and cracking before the shadow of it, something moving off to our left and up the hill.

After another silent minute, Cletis whispered, “Grizzly.”

“You mean, there’s bears around here?” said Flynn.

“Biggest damn bears you ever did see. Don’t tangle with ’em, especially the she-bears when they got their cubs with ’em.”

Then he gave us a wave, let us go past, and brought up the rear with his gun at the ready, in case the bear decided that we might be worth eating. But the bear went one way, and we went the other, and I was damn glad of it.

*   *   *

WHETHER CLETIS SMITH DECIDED to stop because he had found his spot or because it was too dark to keep going, I could not tell. But after another half mile, he led us down to the riverbed and across to the other side.

“Why are we crossin’?” Flynn asked.

“I like to camp facin’ north. Just a way of doin’ things. You got any complaints?”

“Not at all.” Michael Flynn had a powerful propensity for complaint, but he appeared ready to take whatever Cletis said without dispute. So we followed Cletis up the slope of the south bank, up about thirty feet to a big skull-shaped boulder.

When he dismounted, we did, too.

“Just unpack what you need for the night. We can do a bit of prospectin’ in the mornin’, but I don’t expect to find much around here.”

“Why?”

He pointed across the stream to the only other camp in sight. “Chinks.”

“Chinks?” said Flynn.

“You mean, Chinese?” I said.

“Chinks,” repeated Cletis. “Not many Chinks around, but enough that white miners don’t like ’em workin’ new claims. The only kind of minin’ Chinks get to do is siftin’ the tailings that white men leave. If you see Chinks, you won’t see fresh gold.”

“Do they ever cause trouble?” I asked.

“They’re too afraid.”

“Just don’t touch their women,” said Flynn.

“Women?” Cletis Smith spit a bit of tobacco. “No Chink women in the diggin’s.”

“I had the pleasure of meetin’ a few in San Francisco,” said Flynn. “Ever heard of a woman named Ah-Toy? She’ll give you a flash of her cooch for an ounce of gold.”

“Is that a fact?” Cletis broke off another chaw of tobacco and stuffed it into his cheek. “Does China cooch go sideways, like they say?”

“Straight up and down, just like a white woman’s, and as pretty as the sunset.”

“Well, that’s somethin’ to think about,” he said. “A man could get rich sellin’ cooch up here, no matter if it was white, red, black, or yellow.”

We pitched our tent next to the boulder, under the tall pines.

We ate bacon and flour cakes cooked in the fat. Then we passed Flynn’s jug. When we were done, I announced that on the first night, I would wash the dinner pans.

Cletis laughed and said he would be washing no pans, not that night or the next or the one after that. He said that in gold country, you didn’t bother with such things. Time spent crouched by the riverbank was best spent swirling a pan, not washing it.

Perhaps, but for tonight, I would wash the dishes in that river rolling down from the mountains.

Though there was still a bit of light in the sky, I carried Cletis’s lantern and set it on a rock. Then I crouched and washed, using handfuls of river bottom to scrub away the bacon fat. I rinsed one tin plate and put it aside. Then I scrubbed another and watched the current spread the sandy gravel and grease like a cloud.

Then I sat back on my haunches and listened to the chatter from the camp of Chinamen. It sounded strange, heavily syllabic, tonal yet arrhythmic. I could not imagine myself learning such a language, nor could I imagine one of them learning to speak mine, so clipped and logical, each word comprised of no more than twenty-six sounds.

Then one of them began to play a flute. The sweet trill of it carried above the burble of the running water, a magical sound, almost romantic in its lonely beauty.

I let it wash over me, hoping perhaps that it might cleanse me of the horror I had seen that day. But I sensed already that ugliness and beauty, shocking violence and gentle quiet, existed side by side in this wild country. So I had best prepare myself.

I grabbed another handful of sand and scrubbed the last plate, rinsed it in the river, swirled it, held it to the lantern light to see that it was clean, and saw something flicker.

I leaned closer, and my heart jumped. It almost jumped out of my mouth. If such things could happen, it would have, because my jaw dropped wide open. I had reached into the river and swept up a fistful of gravel laden with gold.

For the second time that day, I could not speak.

And for the rest of the night, I could not sleep. Neither could Michael Flynn or Cletis Smith, U.S. Army retired. We had found “color.” We would know in the morning if we had struck it rich.