Calico Palace

by Gwen Bristow

And if there were few men ready for such a jaunt, there were even fewer women. A woman was less likely than a man to have a purse full of money; she was more likely to want security instead of wild chances; and she was even more likely to be serious about such obligations as children and aged parents.

  The only people who could scramble aboard the Falcon would be those who had no ties and no cares. Or at least, none that they bothered about. They would be people who could throw away the past and laugh at the future. But they had to be people with ready money.

  Were there any such people? Yes, of course. The professional gamblers, and the most reckless of their lady friends. People like Norman and Rosabel.

  37

  THE Falcon STEAMED PLACIDLY into port at New Orleans. And here, bags packed and tickets in their hands, she found a hundred and sixty persons ready to start for the land of gold.

  They were a varied company. Among them were troublesome rich boys whose families had bought their passage to get them out of the way; men of the hopeful sort who are always chasing rainbows and who always seem able to borrow money for it; even a few responsible citizens who wanted adventure and had nothing to keep them at home. But by far the greatest number—about two-thirds of them all—were gamblers from New Orleans and the Mississippi River boats, and the girls who worked with them. And of course, said Norman, women—

  Here Norman cleared his throat and glanced at Kendra, as if just remembering her presence. “Excuse me, Mrs. Shields,” he said.

  Kendra gave him a smile. “Go ahead, Norman. It’s all right.”

  “It is all right,” Marny assured him. “Kendra has lived at a gold camp, which is more than you have. You can talk.”

  Loren laughed and agreed. Thus encouraged, Norman laughed too and talked frankly. While in New Orleans, he said, Lieutenant Loeser had spoken of California’s excess of men. So, naturally, among those who had bought tickets on the Falcon were several of the town’s most enterprising madames of parlor houses. As the trip was so costly, most of them planned to look for girls after they reached San Francisco, but not all were willing to leave so important a matter to chance. In particular, one keen-witted madame known as Blossom had thoughtfully chosen the four most engaging girls in her establishment and was taking them with her. They were all named for flowers—Lilac, Iris, Clover, and Daffodil.

  “And they were pretty,” said Norman. “And not stupid. Hardly as smart as Blossom, but they knew their way around.”

  All these people had tickets entitling them to passage from New Orleans to Chagres, and then to San Francisco, on the steamboat line. They were all determined to go there.

  The captain of the Falcon warned them that his vessel, only half as large as the California, had berths for only fifty passengers. Half of these berths were already taken. Such a crowd as themselves would be most uncomfortable. Did they mind?

  They did not.

  Very well, said the captain. A berth meant for one could always hold two, and if they were willing to sleep in hammocks, on bare planks—?

  They were.

  Well then, let them do it. The voyage to the Isthmus would take nine or ten days. He would get them there.

  And so the little steamer Falcon, jammed with nearly two hundred people, left New Orleans.

  Marny got up from her chair, took the seat cushion and plopped it on the floor and sat upon it.

  “I am breathless,” she said. “Four clergymen, a general, all those fine ladies—do go on.”

  Norman and Rosabel spoke together.

  “It was dreadful,” said Norman.

  “It was funny,” said Rosabel.

  Norman continued,

  “The captain couldn’t force the old passengers out of their berths, so he had to pack us into what was left. This meant they were more cozy than we were, but they were mighty unhappy all the same. The food was awful—salt meat and hardtack, there was no room to carry luxuries—and the ship was so crowded we could hardly move, but this wasn’t the real trouble. The trouble was, they were the steady sort, and we—” He shrugged again, and looked at Rosabel as if asking for words.

  Rosabel lifted her black velvet eyebrows and spread out her hands. “My dears, the general had brought three menservants to shave him and shine his boots and wait on him. And the general’s wife had brought a maid of her own, a real elegant lady’s maid like in a show. Those army ladies were used to being treated with respect. On military posts I guess everybody steps aside to let them pass. They sure didn’t like us. They sat in a huddle with their embroidery and pretended they didn’t see us—”

  Kendra choked into her handkerchief. She was remembering how she had been ordered not to see those two white houses on the cliff at Valparaiso. She thought of Eva on the Cynthia, with her pretty sewing; Eva in San Francisco, the colonel’s wife. She pictured Eva among those motley travelers. Yes, Eva would have gone on with her pretty sewing. She simply would not have seen them.

  “And those ministers!” said Rosabel. “They were young men and they weren’t bad-looking, but they sure were pious. One Baptist, two Presbyterians, and the other—what was he, Norman? Doesn’t matter. Anyway, they set out to reform us. They couldn’t understand that we were doing all right the way we were. We sat on the floor and played cards—for money, of course, what’s the fun of it otherwise?—and they thought this was wicked. And we played on Sunday and they didn’t like that either. I had brought my banjo, and we sang songs, and they didn’t like our sort of songs. They didn’t like anything we did.”

  Kendra caught Marny’s eye. They both bit their lips to keep from giggling. They both suspected that Rosabel, out of respect for the company, was omitting to say that the real basis for the consternation of the clergy was neither songs nor gambling, but the fact that Blossom and her flower garden had gone right into business as soon as they came aboard.

  Rosabel said, “We were crowded and cross and the weather was as hot as the inside of a cow. But then we got to Chagres.” She gave a long deep sigh. “And after that, everything that had happened on the Falcon seemed like bliss.”

  The Falcon dumped her passengers at Chagres. The captain, having done all he had promised to do, turned his vessel around and left them there.

  Seven degrees above the equator, Chagres was a swampy village on a river bank. In Chagres it was always hot and nearly always raining. The few hundred people who lived here were the mixed-up descendants of Indians, Negroes, Spaniards, and sailors of many races whose vessels had touched here in years past. Their homes were huts made of canes, often raised on stilts because of the swampy ground. The Falcon reached Chagres in the last week of December, but now as usual the weather was so hot that the people wore hardly any clothes, and some of them no clothes at all.

  “The army ladies,” said Norman, “were horrified.”

  “I was horrified myself,” said Rosabel. “I never saw such ugly people.”

  She made a face and continued,

  “The town is filthy. It swarms with every kind of vermin you ever heard of or saw in a nightmare. Every afternoon it rains, then the sun comes out and everybody starts to steam. I never smelled anything like it. There was no place for us to stay, nothing to do about our baggage except sit on it with a gun so nobody could steal it. They have a few little trading booths that sell things from the ships, and we bought umbrellas, but there weren’t nearly enough. We were all so miserable together it actually made us kind of friendly.”

  “What did you eat?” asked Kendra.

  “Stuff we bought at the trading booths. Mostly hardtack and jerked beef. Dreadful.”

  Kendra smiled in sympathy, remembering all the jerky she had eaten at Shiny Gulch. Norman took up the tale.

  “We couldn’t find anybody who spoke English, but some of us from New Orleans could get around in Spanish and we asked how to cross the Isthmus. They said we should take boats up the Chagres River as far as it went, and get mules to carry us the rest of the way. The only kind of boat they have is a thing called
a bongo.”

  He explained.

  “They take a big log—I mean big, the trees down there grow ten or fifteen feet across the trunks. They hollow out this log till they have nothing left but a slab of wood at each end, then they put up a sort of awning made of palm leaves, because the sun would kill even the natives if they didn’t have some kind of shade on their heads.”

  He paused, and Rosabel said,

  “You pile into the bongo, ten or a dozen people and your bags. We threw away a lot of stuff, not room to take it along. There aren’t any seats in a bongo so you sit on the bags. And each bongo is poled up the river by three or four boatmen. And those men, my dears—”

  She drew a long breath like a groan.

  “They are big, they are mean, they are always yelling and quarreling and fighting, and they are stark naked. On that trip up the Chagres River they did not wear one single thing.”

  “They wore hats,” said Norman.

  “Excuse me, gentlemen,” said Rosabel.

  She cuddled into the sofa cushions as if her memories had made her tired. Norman said,

  “Well, here we went, a string of bongos poled by those naked savages. They poked along at about one mile an hour. Every time we came to a patch of shade they stopped to rest. Nothing could make them work harder. We offered double wages, extra food—they would not hurry.”

  Norman gave a sigh of his own.

  “The trees hung over the water and dangled great big vines, sometimes such a tangle of vines that we couldn’t get through, and the men had to hack a way. They had brought big long knives for this.”

  “We were scared half to death,” said Rosabel. “Those creatures with those knives, yelling and howling all day long. They couldn’t keep steady. One bongo would hit another and that one would hit the next one, and so on down the line. They would all hit and scrape and bounce, and we had to hold tight to keep from being thrown into the water, and those men would stop poling and we had to sit there while they yelled and waved those knives. Every one of them was shouting that somebody had hit his bongo on purpose and they were all threatening to kill each other.”

  “We wouldn’t have cared,” said Norman, “if they had only killed each other, but we were scared they were going to kill us. We had money and food, and anyway they looked like the sort who might have killed somebody for the fun of it. We never all slept at once.”

  “Where did you sleep?” asked Kendra.

  “Huddled up in the bongos, or on the ground by the fire. We couldn’t cook much because the rain kept everything so damp. Mostly we nibbled on hardtack and jerky. But we tried to keep a fire going at night, because of the mosquitoes, and to scare away animals. Sometimes we couldn’t even keep that much fire going.”

  “One night,” said Rosabel, “those savages had a monkey roast. Made me sick. It looked like they were tearing babies apart. But then it rained, and put out their fire too.”

  “How did you get out of the rain?” asked Kendra.

  “We didn’t,” said Rosabel. “We bunched together under our umbrellas, or under the bushes, and then steamed. It was like being boiled alive.”

  “We were on that river,” said Norman, “three days and three nights, every minute of it plain horror. That’s the time it took us to go thirty miles. When we’d gone that far we came to a village called Cruces. This is the end of the river.”

  “Cruces was worse than Chagres,” said Rosabel.

  “Right,” said Norman. “Hotter, wetter, dirtier. And nobody in Cruces knew anything. Chagres is a port, the people have to do a little something. In Cruces they don’t even move. They just sit and sweat. They are there because they were born there and it’s too much trouble to get out.”

  He gave a long low whistle.

  “This,” he said, “is where we were supposed to get mules to take us to Panama City. Hell, damn, by—oh, excuse me, Mrs. Shields. Here we were, nearly two hundred of us, and there weren’t that many mules around. Or donkeys or horses or anything else that could carry us. And some people who had animals wouldn’t sell them. Not for any money—and no wonder, what could they buy in a place like that?

  “But we had to get out, and fast. The place is a pest-hole—malaria, yellow fever, smallpox, everything. Two or three of us were already sick.

  “The boatmen were going to take the bongos back to Chagres—that’s easy, the current carries them down—and some of our crowd said they were going right back to Chagres and back home. Said they wouldn’t move another yard through this hell if they never saw a speck of gold.”

  Kendra smiled as she listened. She knew nothing about Norman’s talent as a gambler, but she was recognizing the trait that made Marny admire him. He had it, and so had Rosabel. They were not halfway people. It had not occurred to either of them to turn around at Cruces. They had set out for California and they meant to get there. Norman was saying,

  “Those fellows had their minds made up to go home. They wanted to sell us their tickets on the Pacific steamer, Panama to San Francisco. Most of our party wouldn’t buy them. Said we had our own tickets, who’d want any extra? But—”

  Pausing, Norman sent a flash of his black eyes toward Rosabel. She laughed under her breath, and added,

  “But Norman said there might be somebody at Panama City who would want to go to San Francisco, and would be glad to buy a ticket on the steamer. So we bought the tickets from men who were going back. Of course it was a gamble—”

  “Norman Lamont,” said Marny, “is the smartest gambler I ever knew. I’ve been saying so for a long time.”

  Norman accepted her praise with a comradely smile. Evidently he had a similar opinion of her.

  “We spent a day in Cruces,” he said, “buying all the mules and donkeys we could. We didn’t dare stay longer because we knew we’d catch our death if we did. We had left a lot of our baggage in Chagres, now we had to throw away more because we couldn’t carry it. Rosabel and I got a mule and a donkey, and they had to carry us and our stuff too. And we were lucky. Some men paired up and bought one donkey for both, and took turns riding it. Some of them walked the whole way with their bags on their backs.

  “We had to spend a night there, lying on the wet ground and slapping mosquitoes. Some of the ladies cried all night, and some of the men never stopped swearing. Blossom gathered her girls together and put her arms around them and they sat there in a bundle of misery. Next morning we started out.”

  With a desperate look, Norman poured brandy into his glass.

  “Cruces to Panama City,” he said, “is only twenty miles, but it’s twenty miles of mountains, rocks, bugs, heat, rain, torment. Away back, three hundred years ago when the Spaniards used to carry treasure across the Isthmus so their ships could take it to Spain, they made a sort of trail. But now the trail is overgrown, and piled with rocks that have rolled down the slopes. And steep—!” He whistled again.

  “We climbed over mountains made of solid rock,” said Rosabel. “They were so steep that they went almost straight up in the air. In the steepest places those old Spaniards had cut notches, like steps, so the mules could climb without sliding backwards. These mule staircases were so narrow that only one mule could go up at a time. Sometimes a pack would drop off a mule and people’s clothes would fall out and their money too, gold and silver coins clattering down the mountain and rolling into the cracks between the rocks.

  “Then when we got to the top of the mountain we had to go down the other side the same way. It was so steep, some folks fell over the heads of the mules and got hurt. We had to tear up clothes to make slings and bandages for them. Blossom knew how to do this. She showed me how and made the other girls help. One man fell so hard he broke his bones all to pieces. He screamed and screamed and at last he shot himself.

  “After that,” Rosabel continued grimly, “I walked. I let the mule carry my bags but I walked.”

  She laughed suddenly.

  “My dears, I wish you could have listened to those men! I’ve h
eard a lot of blue words but I never heard so many at one time. Army and non-army. Blossom and the girls too. The ladies wept and sobbed and prayed and begged the ministers to pray for them. The ministers did pray. They prayed for us all, even those who played cards on Sunday.

  “Those fifty miles across the Isthmus,” she said clearly, “took us a week. Seven days. And there’s a lot of minutes in seven days and every minute I thought I was going to die and I thought, What good will it do me to have a solid gold tombstone? But at last we got to Panama City.”

  “When you got there,” said Marny, “were your troubles over?” Norman and Rosabel broke into sardonic laughter. Like Norman before her, Rosabel reached for the bottle.

  38

  “Panama City,” said Rosabel, “is a town of two thousand people and forty million bugs. It is hot and wet and sticky and when we got there they were having an epidemic of cholera.”

  “Have you ever seen anybody die of cholera?” Norman exclaimed. “Well, I hope I never have to again.”

  He continued. He said the people of Panama City were more civilized than those of Chagres, and in general they were a good-natured lot. But like most people who live in the smothering heat of the tropics, they spent most of their time drowsing in the shade, and moving as the shade moved. They had no idea what to do when a mob of Yankees exploded into town like a bunch of firecrackers.

  The Falcon’s passengers burst into Panama City one day early in January, 1849. They demanded food and shelter and a steamboat to take them on their way.

  Food? Well, the town had a market. Shelter? There wasn’t any. Panama City had no hotel. As for the steamer, nobody knew anything about it.

  Most of the Americans had to sleep outdoors, on the ground. Only a few of the most persistent, like Norman and Rosabel, managed to get lodgings.

  “We went around and around,” said Rosabel, “until we found a woman who would rent us a room. The room had fleas in it, and cockroaches and spiders, but at least it kept off the rain. And the house had a well, so we could wash. We kept as clean as we could because our people were getting sick.”