Skaggs realized immediately what he was saying: four years before, the night of a terrible blizzard in New York, the Tribune’s building had caught fire and burned down.
“I cut old man Prime for Polly,” Duff continued, in the tone one might use to say I went to Stockton to buy a horse. “And Freeborn for Priscilla.” He made the sign of the cross. “I never enjoyed doing a bit of it.”
Skaggs was speechless. Two minutes before he’d meant only for Duff to admit what he had done in Mexico, to begin clearing his tortured mind and get on with his life. Skaggs had asked for a confession, and intended to give absolution. He had been a friend and uncle to the boy, had instructed and employed him, and thought he’d known the dark, cold undercurrents beneath the sincerity and loyalty and conscientious pluck. But now he saw an abyss.
Duff Lucking was cracked.
But…was he suffering awful, demonic delusions? Did he only imagine that he had set the Tribune and the distillery and the brothel afire, and that the suicide of Nathaniel Prime was his doing? Or was he truly an arsonist and a murderer? Skaggs now recalled the bakery fire that had happened to destroy Mrs. Stanhope’s parlor house just before they left the city, and Fatty Freeborn’s letter confessing suicide and arson conveniently delivered to the Herald, which in this light looked implausible.
Skaggs had decided to a fair certainty that his friend was not merely cracked but a monster.
“You do understand, Skaggs, do you not? I am a soldier. I believe I have always been a soldier—and soldiers must be ready to take lives. We don’t wish to do it, but sometimes we must, in the name of justice and honor, and even for mercy’s sake.”
Skaggs was at a loss. Should he shriek? Embrace him? Inform him of his insanity? Question him further about his crimes, ask that he enumerate each arson and murder? Give him a brandy dosed with fluoric acid, or use Ben’s shotgun to dispatch him, for his own good and the safety of the world? Tell him to retreat into the Sierras with his Indians and never return?
“It is late, Duff. You must go home.”
As he stood at the edge of the rock watching Duff walk in the bright moonlight along the river bend below—Piccadilly, they had called that path—Skaggs wished he could erase him from his thoughts forever.
Instead he poured himself a cup of brandy, cried, then finished the pint and fell asleep.
HE WAS AWAKENED after midnight by a pounding and a shout from down below, at the cabins.
He walked outside in his archery-target shirt and drawers and called down. “Duff? What is it? What do you want?” No reply came. What fresh madness was this? He would go down and find out why the wretch had returned. Perhaps what he had said before was temporary insanity, a hallucination produced by too much prayer and Indian holy juice, and he had come back now to recant and declare his mental soundness. Skaggs returned to the observatory to put on his shoes and specs so that he could make the climb down. But as he stepped toward the door, a human figure blocked the light.
“Duff,” he said with a start, but in the part of his mind that operated faster than his tongue, he knew even as he spoke that it was not Duff.
“Sit,” said the man. “Sit down and make your hands open, up above your head. I have the gun.”
When the man stepped inside and out of the way of the moon, Skaggs could see the pistol. It was cocked, the hammer pulled back like a lizard’s open mouth. He raised his hands, turned, and walked to the bench to sit.
“You have the big circles on the shirt. For les flèches…comment estil dit—the bow and arrows?”
“Yes, I do.”
“And you are Doof Lucking.”
“No, sir, I am not Duff Lucking.”
“You lie to me, eh, Lucking?”
“No, sir.” Why was a Frenchman looking for Duff?
“Yes, you lie because you are the criminal, eh? Un déserteur, yes? And you set fires to New York, I know this, and you come to California not to find the gold, no, but to catch the Negro slave for money, yes? Yes? I know all these truth.”
This Frenchman did know an astonishing amount about Duff. But catch the Negro? “I am not Duff Lucking. And since you, sir, are so knowledgeable, you must know that Mr. Lucking is a young man, only twenty-two. I am certainly not twenty-two, as you can see.”
The Frenchman said nothing for a moment. “Allumez—fire the candle.”
Skaggs obeyed. Drumont stepped closer, still pointing his pistol at him.
“Then you are…Skaggs. The journaliste, the photographe, the auteur. Yes? Astronome also,” he said, indicating the telescope, “this I do not know before.”
“Yes. I am Timothy Skaggs. And may I ask your name, sir?”
“Sergeant Gabriel Drumont. I have your mails from the Sacramento City…”
With his left hand he pulled a thick wad of pages from his pocket and threw them toward Skaggs. A dozen Knickerbockers and Literary Worlds and Flag of Our Unions fluttered to the floor. (The two latest issues of The Flag of Our Union each contained a new work by Poe—one a tale about the discovery of a technique for turning lead into gold and the resulting ruination of California, the other a poem, “Eldorado,” concerning a knight’s quest for gold that leads to a meeting with Death.)
“Your revolution magazines, eh?”
Skaggs wanted to smile. The revolutionist Knickerbocker! How was it that abusive policemen and soldiers of every nation were abusive in precisely the same stupid, surly fashion?
“No, monsieur, literary magazines. Patriotic magazines.”
“Now: Where is the address of Benjamin Knowles? It is Knowles I want. He is my reason to come here.”
Suddenly Skaggs understood. This Drumont was not after Duff, or him. How many times had he heard Ben retell the story of his apprehension in Paris, the penguin, the shots, the fallen soldier, the murder of Ashby, his escape, the pursuit all night through the streets, his encounter at the hotel, the chase through the Thames Tunnel…Skaggs had always assumed a certain amount of exaggeration, even from Ben. But here was the French sergeant, come all the way to California to find him.
“I am afraid,” Skaggs said with some relief, “that Ben and Mrs. Knowles have—”
To arrest him.
“—have gone to S—”
No, to kill him, of course.
“—to Sonoma. They are living now in the town of Sonoma, to the west, toward the sea.”
“Sonoma? Not San Francisco?”
“No, Sonoma,” Skaggs repeated, “perhaps thirty miles north of San Francisco. You can ride there straight across the Sacramento Valley. You might reach it in…a week?”
Skaggs was pleased with himself. If the Frenchman went to Sonoma, Skaggs would have time to reach San Francisco and warn Ben, to save him…
Drumont looked long and hard at Skaggs’s face, the candlelight reflecting off his eyeglasses. He could sense the dissembling, smell the trickery. And he had already encountered the two Indians on the road earlier tonight. Jack and Badger had told him that Knowles and the woman were living in San Francisco. Now Drumont was certain they had told the truth.
“You lie to me, monsieur,” he said.
TWO HOURS LATER, Duff did return to Ashbyville. He had walked home to Hembem and then turned around and run all the way back.
“Skaggs!” he shouted from the base of Mount Aetna. “Skaggs, get up!”
He could see the flickering candlelight in the observatory. “Please, I need you to come with me—Yauka is very ill.”
As soon as he had seen her gray face and glassy raccoon eyes by the firelight, before she’d turned away to puke, he’d known that she was sick. He’d felt her pulse racing. He’d brought her water and she’d begged for more.
“I believe it may be the cholera,” he called out. His diagnosis was correct. “Skaggs!” Duff had all the medicine he needed, but Yauka’s condition seemed so acute that he needed Skaggs to inject her with the ammonia and calomel and laudanum, perhaps to bleed her, whatever was required to save her life. “Skaggs?�
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WHEN DUFF SAW the empty brandy bottle lying on the desk near the candle and Skaggs sprawled, face down, magazines scattered around him, he thought he understood what had happened. More than once, Duff had seen him passed out on the floor of his apartment in New York.
“Oh, Skaggs,” he groaned.
He set the bench upright, and the brandy bottle, and collected the magazines and papers in a stack that he put on the desk. He took the candle from the desk and crouched down to awaken Skaggs.
In the candlelight he saw the wet patch of hair and dark pool on the floor near his neck.
And then he turned him over and saw the hole in his face.
He carried Skaggs’s body to the bed and removed his bloodied eyeglasses.
Down in the tent he found the bottles of naphtha and the quarter hogshead of lamp oil and climbed carefully back up Mount Aetna. He made the sign of the cross over Skaggs. With drops of the oil he anointed his eyes and ears and nose and lips, and his hands and feet, and then recited the Lord’s Prayer.
“…Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your church, and grant us the peace and unity of your kingdom where you live for ever and ever. Amen. Bless you, Timothy Skaggs.”
He kissed his cheek, then stood and blew out the candle. First he emptied both bottles of naphtha over Skaggs’s body, drenching him, and then poured the oil in widening circles on the floor, and splashed the walls.
He stepped outside, crossed himself once again, lit a match, and dropped it in the pool at the doorsill. By the time he reached the path at the back of the rock, the observatory was ablaze.
The Maidu burned the houses of the dead, and then never again mentioned their names. From the piazza Duff looked up at the flames and smoke pouring out of the half-open dome on the west wind. Copper, he had learned in the army, melted at a much lower temperature than iron. He could see the tip of the telescope pointed northeast, toward the High Sierras—in fact, toward the star Vega. The Maidu believed, as Duff understood it, that death released the soul along the path of the sun to the Milky Way and then to heaven.
“It is all fire,” he said aloud, meaning the blaze up on the rock and the sun and the stars. He thought of his father’s maxim, Destruction and creation are the cycle of life. He tried to recall Skaggs’s Latin motto about flames and light and trickery, but he could not remember it.
Cave ignis fatuus: Beware the fictitious fire.
EIGHT OF THE hus in Hembem had been burned since the beginning of the year. Their occupants had died of dysentery and malaria and pneumonia and consumption and all the principal fevers—typhoid and scarlet, puerperal and nervous, lung and brain—but none had succumbed to the cholera. Yauka was the first, although she would not be the last.
When Duff returned again to the village before dawn, her brother Bayam handed him a mourning necklace to wear over his rosary, and a red-hot fagot to singe his hair to stubble—mourning length.
In a single dreadful night, Duff had lost his best friend and his wife. And what made the pain worse was his arrival at their sides too late—just too late—to save them or succor them or wish them farewell. As he breathed the sulfur stink of his own burning hair, he decided he was not being punished by God for his misdeeds. To the contrary, he believed that Satan’s own agents on earth had killed Skaggs and, somehow, Yauka as well. No torture could be more painful than this, he thought as the day broke.
But the truth, if he had known it, would have been unendurable. Somewhere in his vocabulary journal was the word bacteria. Duff had picked up the cholera bacterium three months before at the restaurant in Sacramento City; he had carried the new contagion deep into the California backwoods; he had infected Yauka and the others who would soon retch and wither and die of the cholera at Hembem.
A DAY LATER—the sixth Sunday after Pentecost—he walked back to the Middle Fork, stopping at Jack and Badger’s camp to tell them of the deaths of Skaggs and Yauka.
“A stranger pass two nights since,” Jack told him. “A soldier, from Vuhrance. He know your name, Duh-vuh, and Skaggs and Pully. He know Pen most. He travel twelve month, across all America.”
Duff had an inkling. “What was this Frenchman’s name?”
Jack did not recall, but Badger thought he did. “Dro-mont?” he said. “Or Tree-mont?”
Frémont. Was the killer Frémont himself? Frémont had just traveled across America on his failed expedition. Or perhaps the boy misremembered, and the assassin was one of Frémont’s men, an advance guard returning to finish off the Maidu as well as their white allies. Duff recalled the politician Burnett’s promise in the street in Sacramento City, that they would wage a war of extermination against the Indian.
So the war was under way.
He took out his Colt’s and told Jack and Badger to “beware, beware.” They did not know the word. “Ten mucho cuidado,” Duff said. Be very careful.
AS HE CAME around the bend of Piccadilly approaching Ashbyville, he saw a donkey tied to one of the pines. It was not Jenny Lind. After a few more steps he saw a man near the river at one of their old placers. Duff hid behind an oak and watched. The man was squatting, and poking into the ground with a long knife. After a while the fellow walked up from the bank and, still holding his knife, started to explore—looking into the cabins and the tents, disappearing for a minute up the back trail they’d called Broadway.
Duff cocked his revolver and crept from tree to tree into camp. Finally he rested the barrel on the stub of a pine branch, aimed, and spoke. “Trespasser.”
“Ho, what? Who is that?” The man spun around and, seeing Duff and his gun, raised his hands.
Duff saw now that it was the smirking man from the saloon at the hotel in San Francisco, the slick Boston braggart with his 117 ounces from Volcano. “Why are you here?”
“I am Ronald Shepley,” he said, “here to see about purchasing a claim from Mr. and Mrs. Knowles.”
“Liar.” If Polly and Ben were selling claims, there would have been a meeting about it. Ashbyville was a democracy.
“I’ve spoken with Mr. Skaggs. I have a letter…” He started to reach into his pocket.
“Stop.” Duff stepped from behind the pine, careful to keep his aim as he stepped toward Shepley.
Shepley recognized him now, despite the short hair. “You’re the brother, the brother of Mrs. Knowles. Look here, sir, you misunderstand, I have come—”
“Shut up.”
Duff stopped walking and gripped the gun with both hands in front of his chest, the tip of the barrel two feet from Shepley’s face. If he allowed him to live, that would surely count as a great work of mercy in the name of Jesus Christ to please the Lord God and Savior.
“Who sent you here? Why were you rummaging back there on the trail?” The hole where they had buried their gold was behind the cabins where the trail into the hills began—at the foot of Broadway. This dastard murdered Skaggs, Duff now suspected, and returned in daylight to rob them. “I saw you snooping back there in Broadway. Why?”
“Broadway?” he said. “I am only here about a deal of business, sir, and I don’t know ‘Broadway’ from Tremont Street, if—”
“What did you say?” Duff had heard Frémont’s Street.
“I said I am here about your gold.”
The scoundrel had admitted it: he had meant to steal their cache.
“You killed Skaggs up in his observatory, didn’t you?”
“What?” Shepley glanced up at the blackened ruin on the rock. “Oh no, no, sir, your friend died in that blaze? Good Lord. Now I understand your agitation—you’ve been attacked. Do you know,” he said, looking up at Mount Aetna again, “I had wondered, I wondered if one of the diggers had done that. The Indians…sometimes they burn their own houses, as I understand it, for no good reason at all. Crazy damned pyromani—”
Duff pulled the trigger, and Shepley flew back into the grass. He was dead before the echo ended.
Duff stepped forward and looked down at his face. Around the
bloody hole in his cheek was a circle of charred, smoking flesh, and around that a larger ring of soot that covered most of his face. It looked like one of Ben’s archery targets in miniature, the circles red, black, gray, and pink instead of yellow, red, blue, and black.
It was horrendous. My God, I am heartily sorry for having offended thee…He had not fired a gun since the shooting gallery at Barnum’s…. because thou art all good and worthy of all love, and because sin displeases thee. He had never fired the Colt’s. Pardon me through the merits of the passion and death of Jesus Christ, thy Divine Son. He laid the pistol down next to Shepley’s body. I purpose by the help of thy holy grace never more to offend thee and to do penance…He would never fire it again. Amen.
Before he took Jenny Lind and left Ashbyville for the last time, he packed up all of his belongings that remained there, including the black powder and fuse.
72
July 14, 1849
San Francisco
DRUMONT REGRETTED SHOOTING the astronomer. But had he any choice? The man would have warned his friend, and that would have been intolerable. Monsieur Skaggs was a casualty of war. And his fib had made it easier to pull the trigger. Americans, Drumont had come to think, were very poor liars.
After spending nearly his last dollar on the boat passage downriver, he had fretted that Prime’s two hundred dollars would not be awaiting him at the bank, or that the bank would be closed for business on a Saturday—but his luck continued to hold, Pinkerton had been true to his word, his purse was full once again, and Benjamin Knowles was all but dead. As soon as he had finished, Drumont would post a letter to Chicago informing his employers of his discovery that both Miss Christmas and the child were, alas, deceased. And with the two hundred dollars—did he not deserve it, really, in any event, after all that he had endured?—he would steel himself to make one final goddamned ocean voyage, and ship out for good to les Caraïbes françaises.
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