The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana)

by Robert Lewis Taylor

  My father looked taken aback for an instant; then he said, “Whatever’s right for the lass, of course, providing she favors the idea.”

  The girl looked up, her eyes shining, and then she glanced around at us all, me last. But she didn’t need to go throwing herself on my hands; I couldn’t make up her mind; it didn’t matter two pins to me if she went to the North Pole and sold ice. My father said she was free, and free she was, ungrateful or not.

  And later, after they’d talked it over a good deal, she came down to where I was skipping rocks in the stream, and said:

  “Doctor thinks I should go. I could be a lady.”

  “You go right ahead,” I said. “Get to be a lady by all means. Yes, Your Worship, no, Your Lordship. Will you have some more punch, Your Honor. I’ve seen it in books. A collection of capering nincompoops.”

  “Like Mr. Coe?” she said softly.

  “He’ll change. You wait. He was wearing white gloves when he came out, and he’ll go back to them quick, on the other side.”

  “Then you think I should not go?”

  “Who, me? I haven’t got any stake in it. It’s nothing to me. Charge right on, do just as you please.”

  “I thought maybe you might miss our fun in the woods. Fishing and hunting for plants, talking together, being friends.”

  “Fish will bite whether people go to England or stay home. It doesn’t make a particle of difference to them. Go ahead, if you think you’ve got to, I don’t need any guide in the woods.”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute, then she said, “I’ll miss you, anyway. And I’ll come back, and be just the same.”

  “Oh, no. Once you’ve joined the tea-sippers, you won’t have any time for outdoor things. Don’t worry about coming back.”

  “You mean you don’t want me to come?”

  “I’ll be pretty busy,” I said, “and digging gold and tea-sipping don’t mix. We wouldn’t have time to knock off and get the pot going. No, you’d better just count on staying right where you are.”

  Her eyes suddenly blazed up and turned a kind of fiery purple, the way they did sometimes. Then she whirled around with her head high and started back toward the clearing. I continued to skip rocks, whistling, but I was so mad over her thinking it made any difference to me, I felt sort of choked, and both palms were sweaty. So she was gone. One Indian less. But at the edge of the trees, she stopped and called back, “Jaimee, I will miss you. You are my brother.” Then she folded her arms in a cross over her bosom, very curious, but it didn’t mean a thing to me.

  I gave a short laugh, and stood without saying anything until she left. Indians. I kicked a couple of logs, which didn’t work out, being barefoot, and sat down on the bank, feeling miserable for some reason.

  And I didn’t get any sleep that night, either. I was homesick, I guess. Toward dawn I dozed off for a while. When they left, with everybody teary and sad, I stayed to one side, mostly. I said I would write a letter, but didn’t mean it. After they were gone, I went down in the woods, and after a while I went to sleep.

  Before leaving this part, I want to include a conversation my father had with Mr. Coe apart, after supper the night before. They didn’t think I heard, but I happened to be behind a tree, and I failed to entirely avoid listening.

  “Coe,” said my father, embarrassed. “This is awkward to bring up, and I make my apologies in advance, but is your interest in the little Po-Povi altogether, ah, educational? That is, in an honorable way, of course, do you—?”

  “My dear fellow,” said Mr. Coe, “you have every right to ask. But I wish you to consider; the child is thirteen; I am nearly forty. What’s more, I am tentatively engaged to the Lady Barbara Willing. Nothing could be further from my mind. And as to any sordid intrigue, I can assure you—”

  “Please say no more,” exclaimed my father, coughing furiously. “I beg you, erase it from your mind. Reduced as I am, I am still able to recognize a gentleman when I see one.”

  “So am I, doctor,” said Mr. Coe, smiling, “and let me tell you now what I am not able to say well—that I feel the richer for having known you all.”

  “My dear fellow—” began my father, choked up, and they left it at that.

  So we lost two companions. It left our hearts heavy. And for my part, I guess I’d better out with it and get it off my chest—in my stupid, cruel, childish way, I let the girl go without a solitary word of kindness. But she hadn’t any right saying I’d miss her like that-most of all, she hadn’t any right to go.

  Chapter XL

  We began crevicing in our creek bed again, but we were about through. Uncle Ned thought there was gold down deep in the rock, but it was probably a thin vein there, and not worth the toil. That rock was hard to powder, even for Mr. Kissel.

  As it was, we cleaned out everything in sight, up one side and down the other; then we called it a day. Altogether, that creek bed had coughed up better than eight thousand dollars, which was a very good haul, short of an outright strike.

  We divided it up and prospected around for more. Everybody could see the Kissels were anxious to put their stake in a farm now, but my father talked them into shooting for more, to “obtain a ranch of princely proportions.” So they went along, not because they wanted anything princely, let alone a ranch, but because they wished to be helpful and not leave us shorthanded.

  Several days ran by, with us not crevicing enough in the creek beds to pay for our food. We did some dry digging, too, such as people said was popular, near a place called Weber Town, and also used the cradle and sluices on several ravines. But there was very little doing. We hated to see our eight thousand dollars melt away, and got pretty down in the mouth. One evening, a very frail man of about forty-five, gray-black-haired and sickly, with a woman in about the same shape as he was, only worse, stopped by camp to ask for water. Mrs. Kissel took pity on them right away, telling the poor peaked wife she ought not to be traipsing over the hills in her rundown condition but should tent up for a rest. The way they looked, they certainly needed it; they were beat out. Still, raggedy as they were, something about them reminded me of somebody else. It was funny. I racked my brain, but I couldn’t place them.

  “It’s hard,” the woman said. “I and Morris have sank everything into getting this far. What’s more, we’ve placed our faith in the dear blessed Jehovah, and we cain’t hardly stop when we’re this close to Canaan.”

  The man spoke up in a kind of croaky voice, which would have interested an undertaker with the expectations of doing some business soon, and said, like her, “It’s hard, hard. Given one additional month, thirty days, in tolerable health, we could have shoved over the hill, but everything throwed off at once. Bauxie taken down with flux, and then I’m confounded to goodness if I didn’t slip on a rock while shoveling and produce a double hernier, totally crippling, both sides, port and starboard.”

  The man said he had been cook on a small coastal vessel, but had naturally jumped ship when gold was discovered, the year before, and sent for his wife, who was running an eatery in San Francisco.

  He looked around uneasily, coughing a little.

  “There ain’t but one thing to do—sell out before we’re thieved out. And us with a fortune in our laps.”

  “You poor things,” cried Mrs. Kissel. “You’re churchgoing, you said, back home?”

  “Ma’am, it’s faith has sustained us this far. Faith, omnium-gatherum, and open bowels.”

  This omnium-gatherum was a dish of food that a bunch of half-starved Frenchmen had concocted, and the name had spread through the camps, being no more than a potful of whatever they could find hereabouts, mostly frog legs, turtles, woodpecker birds and squirrels, all mixed together.

  “Your luck hasn’t been all bad, then?” my father asked, politely.

  The man looked even uneasier than before; then he said, “All bad, or mediocre, up to five weeks ago, sir.”

  “Morris, your tongue’s a-waggling again.”

  “The
se are kind, Christian people,” he said. “Even in a den of cutthroat thugs, you can select those worthy of trust, praise be to the infant Jesus.” He described how they had been fleeced out of one claim, then told how in another place where they’d dug, a man had been branded on the cheek with a hot iron for claim-jumping, and still another, “only a lad,” had been shorn of his ears for pilfering dust out of sacks.

  My father smiled. “Whatever secrets you may have are safe with us. We are not yet reduced to preying on our fellow creatures.”

  Looking all around to establish that no strangers were nearby, the man hauled from his pocket something wrapped in a piece of tissue paper.

  “Morris!”

  He hesitated a second, then threw the coverings back. We all gasped. Lying there, fat and yellow, was a nugget the size of a walnut. It was pure, solid gold, no quartz blossom; no alloy of any kind a child could have told it.

  “Great Scott!” said my father, and Uncle Ned reached over, with, “Begging your pardon,” and held it up to the light.

  Showing it, the man was so ashen and sunk in, he looked pitiful, and his wife had tears in her eyes.

  “You sweat, starve, sleep in the wet and cold, dig your hands raw, stave off the roughs and the Diggers, and then, when our be, loved Saviour showers down His bounty, you’re too sick to stand up and respond.”

  “What exactly do you mean, sir?” inquired my father.

  “Morris!”

  He had another glance around, and said, “We’re rich I We’ve struck it rich, a gulch that would give us millions-I learned all the signs this past year—and look at us. What can we do? We ain’t fit to mine. If I kept my dear wife there another month, she’d been in the ground alongside the gold.”

  “Morris,” broke in the woman. “I’m stouter than you think. I’ve told you once, and I’ll repeat it here-sooner than give up what we’ve striv this hard for, I’ll stand there and dig till I drop. I’d prefer it.”

  “Not while I call myself a man, Bauxie. No, we’ve got only the one chance—go in and sell, before the jumpers grab it. And we won’t get a fraction of what it’s worth, neither. It’s hard.” I thought he was going to cry.

  We felt sorry for them, so we fed them and put them up for the night, since they were traveling light and had only a blanket between them.

  Later on, when the others turned in, I saw my father and Uncle Ned getting their heads together, and next morning, up early, he approached the man and said:

  “See here, sir, if you have a claim worth selling, we’d take it kindly to have a first look. We haven’t struck pay dirt in over a week, and we’re anxious to resume work.”

  “You’ve befriended us, and we’re almighty grateful,” he replied, “but I wish you to understand our fix. I’m mortal positive we’ve got a strike—millions, maybe—so I and Bauxie hoped to get the largest sum we could. To be outright candid, a syndicate in Sacramento—”

  “I should have said,” my father spoke up quickly, “that we are not entirely without funds. We’ve had our moments, and rather valuable ones they were.”

  “We’re beholden to you, and should give you first show, but I dislike to make commercial palaver with friends.”

  “Your attitude does you credit, but let’s leave it at this—we’ll inspect the claim, explain our financial position, and if we can’t get together, there’s no harm done whatever.”

  He wasn’t anxious to, it was easy to see that, but my father put so much pressure on that he hadn’t much choice. I was embarrassed to watch them. So in the morning after breakfast, the men of our party and this Morris—last named Simpkins—all struck out upcountry, with Todd and me trailing right behind.

  It was a comfortable day for a hike, warm but not hot. The country was a series of small hills and dales, same as we’d been digging in, sparsely wooded with scrub pine and such, and we ran across quail, rabbits, and one deer, along with a pair of Digger Indians which jumped up and ran lickety-split. Uncle Ned said he could have shot them easy, but they made a very tough stew. I judged he was joking.

  It was nearly three hours—a tolerable long pull, with Mr. Simpkins nearly dead of exhaustion—when we finally got there. A handsome ravine with a scaly creek bed in the bottom, and a long, windy rill leading upwards for a distance of two or three hundred yards into some rocky ledges.

  At the edge, before going down, we saw claim signs, a picket fence of them, almost—“Morris Simpkins Claim,” and the date staked out.

  We stopped on the knoll above, and Mr. Simpkins said, “I think it only upright and honest to tell you gentlemen that I and Bauxie taken out a group of nuggets—maybe a thousand dollars in all—for expenses. I wouldn’t care to represent the claim as being wholly unworked.”

  “Never you mind about that,” said my father. “We quite understand. Draining off the visible gold is the most natural thing in the world, once a claim is staked. We’ve done it ourselves.”

  “We only creviced it for an hour or so,” said Mr. Simpkins. “We stumbled over the claim on root to Sacramento, after Bauxie fell prey to the bloody flux and I’d produced the double hernier.”

  “You mean you took a thousand dollars in nuggets in an hour’s time?” cried my father.

  Mr. Simpkins nodded dumbly and then said, “As I cautioned before, I think it’s a case for a Sacramento syndicate. There ain’t a particle of doubt in my mind it’s the biggest strike yet, hereabouts, but if it was a dry hole, then we’d be mortally grieved to have mulcted a group of Samaritan friends.”

  He was an honest man, and my father and the others thanked him for coming out so open and forthright about the nuggets. Then they all except Mr. Simpkins, who was having trouble with his hernier, scrambled down the slope, and Todd and I clipped along after.

  Well, within seconds, Uncle Ned Reeves had plucked a gold hunk the size of a marble out of a ledge, and the rest of us began picking up particles nearly every place we looked.

  My father was as pale as a ghost. He stuffed about three hundred dollars’ worth in his pockets, and got the others to knock off searching.

  “Hold it!” he said. “Let’s pull up. The more we take, the more this claim’s apt to cost us. Now we certainly don’t want to cheat our friend up there, laid low as he is, but it’s only good business to buy as cheap as we can.”

  “If we can buy her at all,” said Uncle Ned. “This looks pretty rich for my blood. Let’s pool up—how much do you figure we’ve picked up here in ten minutes?”

  We lumped it together, and made a calculation of five or six hundred dollars.

  “We’ve got a fortune, and we might as well have it as a bunch of sharks from Sacramento,” said my father. Going on, to make himself feel better, he added, “Moreover, they’ll skin him out of every cent, one way or another, as soon as they’ve paid over the money. Let’s go up and negotiate.”

  Mr. Simpkins was laid out over a log, looking poorly. I felt sorry for him. If he’d had the good health to work this claim, he might have wound up a very wealthy man; everybody was sure of it. There was something familiar about him, too; just as I said, I’d seen him before, but I couldn’t to save me spot him exactly. I puzzled over it while they talked.

  “Mr. Simpkins, we’ll come right down to brass tacks,” said my father. “Your claim looks good; there’s gold in it. How much, we’re not prepared to guess. We’d like to buy you out, if we can afford it.”

  “I and Bauxie hadn’t gone that far in our estimations, doctor. I thought we’d heave down to Sacramento and get her appraised.”

  “No, no, I wouldn’t do that,” said my father hastily. “That is, you run the risk of not only claim-jumpers here, but of unscrupulous rascals in Sacramento. Our point is, do you feel like unloading now and getting the matter settled once and for all?”

  Mr. Simpkins lay back on the log and shaded his eyes—he was sick, and looked so—then he raised up and said, in a sort of quiet, resigned and tired voice, “Let’s traipse back and talk it over with Bauxie
.”

  So they left it. But you can bet we hurried him right along. I figured he didn’t only have a double hernier when we got there, he probably had a triple at the least, and maybe more. To tell the truth, when we arrived, and they set him in a chair, I slouched over to see if he was breathing. You might have settled it with a mirror in front of his mouth, but I didn’t know of any other positive way, not in his case.

  By and by, though, when his wife and the other women came up, he roused himself, and Bauxie spoke her piece.

  “I say let’s sell, and go into a boardinghouse for a rest. I’m tuckered out, and don’t mind admitting it freely. Another few days of the flux and I won’t know whether to puke or go blind.”

  Something stirred down deep in my mind, but I couldn’t dredge it up to the surface.

  Looking nervous, my father asked, “What figure did you good people have in mind?”

  “I don’t think we’d ever hit on a calculation,” replied Mr. Simpkins in his faint voice. “Did we mention a figure, Bauxie?”

  “Morris, don’t lay it in my lap. You throwed too many things in my lap already. Sell and be done, I say.”

  “Our situation is this,” said my father, sitting down next to Mr. Simpkins, his forehead shining with sweat in his anxiety to get things wound up. “We’ve got nearly eight thousand dollars altogether, amongst us, every dime we have in the world. Now wouldn’t you say seven thousand dollars would be a fair sum, chancy as it is?”

  Mr. Simpkins looked a little paler. “It’s kinder taken me unawares. We’d reckoned on a tolerable sale.”

  “Say seventy-five hundred and meet halfway, no harm done to either side.”

  “Morris, they befriended us.”

  “Let it go, then,” and he sank back down as if it was time to fetch the hearse.

  Everybody clasped hands, to seal it, and congratulated each other, and acted well pleased, all except the Simpkinses. The transaction had kind of drawn their last strength, so to speak, and I reckoned that the money would be used to provide them with a decent burial. But the next day, after the papers were signed, we helped them on their ailing way to Marysville. Saying goodbye, I stood watching them go on down toward Vernon as passengers on a Sante Fe wagon, and tried hard to think where I’d seen them. I was getting close—it was right there on the tip of my tongue—but I couldn’t pin it down. That’s the way of those things. It’s like a watched kettle. It might come to me when I wasn’t pressing so hard.