Chapter 58
Parting of the Ways

If I thought the last night was awful, this one was much worse. Never had I felt so isolated in my life. How desperately I wanted to feel Almeda’s loving arms around me, to hear Pa’s voice, to retreat to the warmth of our home!

I felt small and foolish. How could I have been so naive? Cal was exactly right—a naive kid, that’s what I was, nothing more! All this time I thought I meant something to him, and now I realized it had all existed nowhere but in my own mind!

Lying on my bed at Miss Baxter’s, I cried and cried, drenching the pillow with my tears.

Not until late in the evening, after my tears had temporarily dried up, did I begin to think rationally again. Should I tell somebody . . . Mr. King, Mr. Stanford?

I supposed Cal would give the governor some kind of formal resignation. We’d probably not see him again on the fund-raising platform! Now that he had decided to throw in with the South, as dreadful as it was to think it, he obviously would be hoping for the Confederacy to win as quickly as possible.

At last I concluded that it was none of my business to tell anyone. Let Cal do his own dirty work! If he was going to betray us all, let him tell them face-to-face. I hoped he choked on the words!

I cried some more, but managed to fall asleep around midnight. I woke up several times, suddenly remembering the ache inside my heart and longing so badly for home. Each time, however, I drifted back to sleep again, and the final time slept for several hours. When I woke up, the sunlight was streaming through the window and it was halfway into the morning.

I rose and dressed, wishing I’d gotten up early enough for the morning stage north, but it was too late now. I’d have to wait until tomorrow. The morning edition of the Bee had already been delivered. I greeted Miss Baxter, saw the paper lying on her table, and looked down at it. Across the top, in bold black letters, were the words: UNION SUFFERS DEVASTATING DEFEAT AT FREDERICKSBURG, MD. REBEL ARMY 40 MILES FROM CAPITAL.

I sat staring at the headlines, stunned. It was as if Cal had known yesterday.

Suddenly I ran back up the stairs, dashed into my room, and rummaged about until I found the scrap of paper Cal had thrown on the ground. I read the cryptic message again. Of course! He had known. The paper said the battle had taken place two days ago, on the thirteenth, the same day he had received the telegram!

But the last words of the message . . . NO TIME TO LOSE. What did it mean?

I stood thinking for a minute; then a terrible sense of foreboding swept over me.

Oh no! I thought. What if. . . ?

I couldn’t even say it! With hardly a word of explanation to Miss Baxter, I ran back down the stairs and was out the door and heading toward the middle of town. I stopped at the first livery stable on the way and hired a horse. The instant it was saddled, I galloped off, and in six or eight minutes I was pulling up in front of the capitol building. I hardly stopped to think whether I was presentable or not. I just ran down the corridor toward the governor’s office. It didn’t take long to find out what I needed to know: Cal had not yet come in this morning.

I turned around and retraced my steps. How I wished Pa had some business in Sacramento right then! I could have used his help!

I got back on the horse, walked her quietly until I was away from the capitol, then urged her again to a gallop. Three or four minutes later, I arrived at the house where Cal lived. I had never been inside, but we had ridden by several times, and he’d pointed it out. Jumping off the horse, I ran to the porch and knocked on the door.

“No, Mr. Burton isn’t home,” his landlady said, looking me over from head to toe with a not-so-pleasant inquisitive expression. “I don’t know when to expect him, either. I didn’t see him come in last night, but then I don’t make it a practice to be snooping into other people’s affairs.”

“Did he come in last night?” I asked.

“I don’t know for sure. I thought I heard him, but he might have left again later. I didn’t pay too much attention. I don’t like to pry, you know.”

I had the distinct impression that if she had known anything more than she was saying, she might have thought twice whether to tell me or not.

I ran back and jumped up on the horse’s back, wheeled around, and made for downtown.

I hoped Mr. King was still at his hotel and hadn’t left for his home in San Francisco! I was at the hotel in five minutes. I dismounted in front and dashed into the lobby. From all the riding, I was sure I looked a mess.

“Is Mr. King still here?” I asked the desk clerk.

The clerk gave me a look similar to the one Cal’s landlady had given me. “He is.”

I knew the room. We had several meetings of the committee there. I bolted for the stairs and bounded up them two at a time.

At last I knocked on the door, completely out of breath.

“Corrie!” said Mr. King, answering it, “Come in . . . you look as if you’ve just ridden one of those Pony Express routes you wrote about last fall!”

“Mr. King,” I panted, “have you seen Cal today?”

“Why, no, Corrie, I haven’t. As a matter of fact, I was going to get in touch with you to see if you’d seen him. I need to talk to him about what I’m sure must simply be a clerical mistake of some kind at the bank.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“So, I take it you haven’t seen him this morning either?” said Mr. King.

I shook my head.

“Hmmm . . . well, we’re going to have to find him sooner or later to clear this up.”

“What?” I asked again.

“You and he did make the collections yesterday, did you not?”

I nodded. “Nearly all of them. Several large checks, and a big amount of gold, too. I think the total was $52,000.”

“Yes, it was a marvelous day—$69,000 in pledged contributions. And you say the two of you collected over forty thousand of it?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Hmmm . . . that is peculiar. When I checked with the bank this morning, it seems there wasn’t a deposit made to the Sanitary Fund account yesterday. But you and Cal did make the deposit?”

My heart began to sink beneath a dreadful weight of doom.

“Uh . . . Cal left me for thirty minutes or so after we were through,” I said. “He told me he was going to the bank and asked me to run a message over to the capitol building for him. I met him afterward.”

“Hmmm,” mumbled Mr. King, pondering it all. “It must be a clerical oversight of some kind. I’ll go check with the bank again. In the meantime, when you see Cal, tell him to come see me. Perhaps he can clear it up.”

By now I was all but certain in my own mind that Cal could indeed clear it up! Whether Mr. King would ever hear about it from his own lips, however, I was beginning to seriously doubt.

I only had one more stop—the one I hoped I wouldn’t have to make. I went from the hotel to the downtown district, where I pulled up in front of the Western Union office and tied up the horse. I walked along the boardwalk and around the corner I had seen Cal disappear around after receiving the telegram. It was a street I knew well from frequent use myself. But it had never occurred to me what he was doing when I’d seen him right here the other day. Three doors down was the stage office!

I walked inside and looked up at the schedule board, then went to the window.

“Morning, Miss Corrie,” he said. “You ready for your ticket now?”

“Not yet, Mr. Daws, thank you,” I answered. “Only some information.”

“Anything I can tell you, Miss Corrie.”

“Did you have a passenger on this morning’s stage, a Mr. Burton?”

“Well, not exactly,” replied the stationman, with whom I’d been friendly for several years. “That is, if you’re meaning the same young fella I’ve seen you traveling with a time or two.”

“That’s him,” I said.

“Handsome young man, eh, Miss Corrie?”

“Yes, he is . . . but was he in? Did you sell him a ticket?”

“Yes, he was in. Came in twice, as a matter of fact. But it was yesterday, not this morning.”

“He was in twice?”

“Yes, ma’am. First time around four, five o’clock in the afternoon—”

That was the exact time when he’d sent me to his office with the message!

“He just wanted to leave his bag right then,” he said, “so he wouldn’t have to keep lugging it around. Once I lifted it, I knew why! Heavy as the dickens, it was! Heaviest bag I ever recollect. ‘What in tarnation you got in here?’ I asked him, ‘solid gold?’ ‘That’s a good one!’ he laughed. ‘Taking gold by stagecoach! What kind of fool do you take me for?’ he said, still laughing. Nice young man, Miss Hollister.”

“And then you say he came back later? But I was sure he would be on the morning stage.”

“Yep, he came back later all right—around 8 o’clock. Most curious thing I ever saw. Don’t know why they never told me about it.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Special stage rolled up—all outfitted and ready to go. Driver said it was government business. And your man Burton, why he was the only passenger—other than the two armed guards, that is.”

“What stage line was it?”

“The Butterfield.”

“Which way did they go?”

“Butterfield only goes south, Miss Corrie. Driver told me they was gonna be driving all night. Said they were heading all the way to Fort Smith, Arkansas.”

“That’s behind the Confederate lines.”

“Yes, ma’am. I . . . I thought you knew all about it, Miss Corrie.” For the first time Mr. Daws’ voice lost its cheerful tone, and he began to sound concerned.

“Why did you think that?” I asked.

“Well, ma’am, on account of him mentioning you, and saying you’d be along shortly. I just . . . well, I figured you’d be taking the stage out too, one of the regular Butterfield coaches, and that, well . . . that you and he’d be meeting up somewhere, or maybe that you was going all the way back East too. The way they made it sound like government business—I figured it had something to do with you.”

Cal knew that sooner or later I’d figure it out.

“He even left a message for me to give you, Miss Corrie,” the stationman added. “Makes it seem kind of odd now, him doing that, and you not even knowing he’d gone.”

Cal had said it himself—the world was full of ironies.

I braced myself. I didn’t want to ask, but I couldn’t live without knowing. “What was the message?” I asked.

“Don’t make much sense now, but he said to thank you for helping him to atone for his transgressions. He said his uncle would be very grateful, and that this would help explain things very nicely. Then he said he hoped to see you when you both got where you were going.”

I took a deep breath. If Zack had to learn to be a man by facing Pa with humility, I suppose today was the day when I had to learn to stand up and be a woman by facing Thomas Starr King and Leland Stanford with honesty and humility, too.

I would have to face them both, and tell them what I knew about Cal. And I would have to tell them I had known it yesterday, in time to have stopped him. I would have to apologize. I would have to admit to the two great men of California that they had entrusted too much faith in me, and that I had not been worthy of it. And I would have to beg their forgiveness for allowing over forty thousand dollars of Union contributions to be speeding along its way south toward the government of the Confederate States of America.

“So I take it you won’t be wanting a ticket, after all, Miss Corrie?” said Mr. Daws.

I sighed. “I might as well buy it now,” I said. “Yes, I do want one, Mr. Daws. Give me a ticket north for Miracle Springs, on tomorrow’s stage.”

“Round trip, Miss Corrie?”

“No, Mr. Daws. One way will be sufficient. I don’t know that I will be coming back to Sacramento anytime soon.”

“Your business here all done?”

Again I sighed. “Not quite. I have some very unpleasant business to attend to this afternoon,” I said. “But by tomorrow, yes, my business will be done.”