Chapter 7
Back Home in Miracle Springs

It was late the next afternoon when the stage pulled into Miracle Springs.

We got out, and just in the time it took Pa to get our bags down off the top and walk across the street to the Mine and Freight, half a dozen people came up to greet us and ask about our trip.

“Afternoon to you, Mayor Hollister,” said the man in charge of the stage office when he came out to meet the stage. He’d been in town only about a year and still acted as if Pa was about the most important man for miles. I reckon in a way he was, but Pa’s old friends still just called him Drum like they always had. But even as they said it, there was a hint of a different tone to it. They knew that Pa had become something special.

As we walked across the street to the office, Edie said, “My goodness, I knew my sister’s brother-in-law was the mayor, but I didn’t expect this much attention. They act like you’re a celebrity around here!”

Pa just laughed.

Above the building stood a big sign that read: Hollister-Parrish Mine and Freight Company, a change Almeda had insisted on even though she still ran the business pretty much herself, with my help. The Hollister on the sign didn’t mean me, of course, but Pa.

My little half-sister, Ruth, was three years old, and she was a handful, so Almeda didn’t spend nearly so much time in town as she once did. I came into the office on most days; Pa helped out now and then, and Marcus Weber and Mr. Ashton took care of everything else. Almeda wouldn’t have needed to come in at all, but she usually made the ride into town once or twice a week, when Pa or I would stay home with Ruth. She was too much of a businesswoman to be content always being at home.

But times had changed in Miracle Springs in the ten years Almeda had been there. There wasn’t as much mining and freighting business to be done nowadays, even though Mr. Royce had closed down his competing enterprise. Mining itself had slacked off a lot; most of the men had all the equipment they needed, and Miracle Springs had become less of a gold-rush mining town, and more of a regular community made up of all kinds of people and families.

The business was still called the Mine and Freight, but Almeda and I had gradually started carrying a wider range of goods and merchandise. Now it resembled a general store for all the kinds of work men around the area did—farmers and ranchers as well as miners. We had wood tools and plows and barbed-wire and wagon parts and hand tools, even some harness and saddle equipment and seeds—lots of different things people needed. We were careful not to order goods that any of the other merchants carried; Almeda had strong feelings about such things as loyalty and competition. But if there were things folks needed they couldn’t get someplace else, we found a way to get what they needed.

Pa and Uncle Nick still worked the mine several days a week, but not like they once did. They still dug gold out of it, and Alkali Jones was always talking about hitting another rich vein just a little ways farther into the side of the mountain. “Dang if there ain’t a whole new lode in there, Drum,” I had heard him say again and again. “I can smell it, hee, hee, hee!”

Whether Pa or Uncle Nick believed him, I don’t know, but the persistence with which he trusted his “gold-sniffer,” as he sometimes called his nose, usually brought out a wisecrack or two from Uncle Nick, and a sly wink in our direction from Pa. But he loved Mr. Jones—partly like a brother, partly like a trusted friend, even like a father. He would never do anything to hurt his feelings. Whenever the word mayor was used in Alkali Jones’s hearing, we’d hear his high cackling hee, hee, hee! sooner or later. He still couldn’t get used to dad-blamed ol’ Drum being mayor to nothin’ but a hill of prairie dogs! Hee, hee, hee!

Pa and Uncle Nick didn’t need to mine. The business did well enough along with the original strike to keep our whole little community of two families fed. But mining was so much in their blood that there was no way they could keep themselves from doing it. I suppose Alkali Jones’s predictions of a new vein drove all the men to keep going deep down inside. Hope could be a powerful force. So Pa and Uncle Nick kept poking and picking and sometimes blasting away, and little bits of gold kept tumbling down the stream.

Pa mayored about as much as Almeda kept shop, though most of it was folks coming to him rather than him doing much of anything. He had no office in town. People knew where to find him when they wanted.

“Hey, Marcus,” said Pa, sticking his head inside the livery out behind the office, “you got a wagon and a couple horses you could hitch up for us?”

“Yes sir, Mister Hollister,” said a beaming Marcus Weber, coming out to greet us. “Your wife’s gonna be glad to see you.”

“Why’s that, Marcus?”

“Little Ruth, she done took a fever.”

Pa’s face wrinkled in concern as he threw a couple of the bags in the back of one of the wagons. “Anything serious?” he asked.

“I dunno. Miz Almeda, she was just in here a minute yesterday, on her way to the Doc’s.”

“Hmm . . . then we better get out there as soon as we can,” said Pa. “Corrie, why don’t you and Edie go back to the stage office and get the rest of the bags. I’ll give Marcus a hand with the horses and wagon.”

By the time we got back, he and Mr. Weber nearly had the wagon ready to go. We climbed aboard. In two or three minutes, we were off and rumbling through the streets of Miracle and out of town toward the claim.

As much as I could with the bouncing and racket of the horses and wagon, I told Edie about the town—how it had grown and what it was like when we first came in 1852. We’d already told her all about the Gold Nugget and us five kids showing up and Almeda going in to fetch Pa, thinking he was dead and that it was Uncle Nick inside. But now I had a chance to show her everything firsthand. In many ways the town was different than back then—bigger, less raucous, fewer saloons, more stores.

Mr. Royce still had the only bank in town. Pa and the town council had denied Finchwood another petition a year after the first, so they finally decided to open their new bank in Oroville instead. Mr. Royce had lowered the interest rate on all the loans he held to four and a half percent to match Finchwood’s. Maybe he wasn’t making as much profit as he once did, but folks were much more kindly disposed toward him, and you could tell from his face that he was a happier man for it, too. So nothing more had come of the “Hollister-Parrish Bank.”

“It’s so different than a city or town in the East,” said Edie as we bounced over the bridge and out of town. “So much more primitive.”

“You should have seen Miracle Springs eight years ago!” I said.

“Don’t get me wrong, Corrie. It looks like a lovely town. Especially compared with some of the rough places the stagecoach went through!” She shook her head at the memory. “My, oh, my! Some of the things I saw! The territories and towns across the plains are called the frontier for good reason—every man carrying a gun! At least Miracle Springs appears to be more civilized than those places. But you really should see the East someday, Corrie.”

“We came from the East,” I said.

“Oh, where?”

“New York. But only the country part. I’ve never seen the city.”

“Ah, New York is indeed the city of cities!”

“What about Washington?” I asked.

“I’ve never been there,” replied Edie. “There’s nothing there but the government. Why would you want to visit Washington?”

“I’m interested in politics,” I answered. “I sometimes write about it in my articles.”

“You write about politics! Good heavens, that kind of foolishness is for men, don’t you know that, Corrie? What could a young woman like you possibly have to do with politics? We can’t even vote!”

“I’m still interested in what happens to our country.”

“The men will decide everything, so what difference does it make what we think about it?”

“But aren’t you interested?”

“Not in men’s affairs.”

“What about slavery?”

“What about it?”

“Don’t you think it’s wrong?”

“How could it be wrong when half the country has slaves? It’s not a moral issue of right and wrong, Corrie. It’s just part of the economics of the country. It’s how things are, that’s all.”

“That doesn’t make it right,” I insisted.

“That’s what the northerners are always trying to do—make it a matter of right and wrong. But it’s just different cultures. Slavery is part of the South. Northerners have no right to condemn something they know nothing about.”

For someone who wasn’t interested in politics, Edie seemed to have some definite ideas about slavery. And I wasn’t sure I altogether liked the sound of them.

“You make it sound like northerners belong to a different country,” I said. “Is there really that much difference?”

“When you live in the South, Corrie, there is. The North is a different country—and not a friendly one.”

“You live in the South?”

“Of course. Virginia has always been a slave state, and always will be. My husband, the late Mr. Simpson, worked for a large landowner and had dealings with slaves all the time. It’s just how things are in the South, and always have been.”

“But . . . but doesn’t slavery seem wrong to you?” I said again.

“I told you before, it’s not a matter of right or wrong. Besides, slavery’s in the Bible. Nobody in the Bible ever said it was wrong.”