* * *
ABOUT SIX MILES SOUTH, in the township of El Dorado, Peter directed Larry to turn off at a convenience store with a broken Pelton wheel for decoration: Quartzite Road. (They were big on geological terms around here.)
Peter had never been here before, but he had “driven” it on Google after meeting a retired Kern County detective named William Donnelly at the Sacramento Book Fair. He had sold Donnelly first editions of Ian Fleming and John le Carré. And “Wild Bill,” as his friends called him, had become a regular customer of Fallon Antiquaria.
Google had prepared Peter for the arid landscape, the blue oak and buckeye, the eclectic three-mile stretch of houses—working spreads with barns and corrals, retirement ranches doing the long, low California contemporary thing, and here and there a rundown place, something that time and the real estate market had forgot. But Google could not do justice to the view. The road ran along the Logtown Ridge. Forty miles to the west, the buildings of Sacramento reflected the midmorning sun. And the easterly views reached across California, all the way to the snowcapped mountains at Lake Tahoe.
Peter said, “James Spencer described this view.”
“Bierstadt painted it.” Evangeline was seldom quite as moved by connections as Peter, but this time she was awestruck. “It’s the picture in the library.”
The Donnelly house was on the left, one of the newer places, a handsome ranch with a paving-stone driveway.
Jane Donnelly answered. “Why, Peter Fallon! We meet at last.” She looked at the Escalade backing out of the driveway. “Aren’t your friends coming in?”
“Previous engagement. We’ll catch up with them later.”
Jane was in her sixties and seemed happy to be there, easy in her own skin, in her own house, in gardening clothes puffing dirt. “I’d shake, but—” She held up her dirty hands and gave him a wave. Come on in.
The house turned to the east, with good reason. Everything flowed through the open sliders to the patio, the small infinity pool, and the spectacular infinity view.
Bill Donnelly was peering through a telescope. He pivoted, shook Peter’s hand, and said, “Here’s the man who helps me spend my pension on books.”
Donnelly hailed from Bakersfield, California, but he had the kind of beefy presence and tomato-red complexion that would have played well on police forces in Boston or Brooklyn, especially with that Irish name. He swung an arm, north to south, and said, “Welcome to the Mother Lode. The remnants of Broke Neck are about ten miles south, as the crow flies.” He pointed to the telescope and told Peter to have a look.
Peter squinted into the eyepiece. “What am I looking at?”
“That fourth ridge out there. The Miwok River is just beyond. It joins the Cosumnes, which flows to the flatland and into the Mokolumne, which eventually runs into the San Joaquin. The ground here is as dry as flour this time of year, but these rivers form an incredible drainage system for half of California.”
“Bill is always watching for plumes of smoke,” said Jane.
Donnelly looked up into the clear blue sky. “We should be seeing rain any week now, but until we do, every puff of smoke is a worry. Some folks down where we’re going, they started a fire about three weeks ago. Drove one of their old cars off road. The heat from the exhaust manifold set the grass on fire. Burned a thousand acres.”
“The Boyles family,” said Jane.
“They’ve been on the Miwok for a long time,” said Wild Bill, “long after the mines played out, long before the vineyards took off. They ran cattle, wrangled horses for weekend dude riders out of San Francisco—”
“Don’t forget moonshining.” Jane ducked into the house.
“Yeah, until they discovered marijuana. They grow so much weed back in those hills, anytime there’s a brush fire, half of Amador County gets high.”
Jane came out again, carrying a shoulder holster with a big silvered .44 Magnum. “If you’re going to be wandering the hills, bring this.”
Peter said, “Are the Boyles folks dangerous?”
Wild Bill laughed. “This is for the rattlesnakes.”
“Rattlesnakes?” said Peter. “That gun could kill a car.”
“Might not kill one, but it’s stopped a few. Put a round right through an engine block once. Guy behind the wheel was trying to run me over.”
Jane said, “Bill was not the best shot, but with a gun like this, close counts. So we get to enjoy our retirement together.”
* * *
WILD BILL DONNELLY DROVE his Chevy pickup back down to Route 49 and turned south, offering commentary all the way: “The miners would go along the ridge unless they had livestock that needed watering. Then they’d take the river route.”
“My guys had horses, but they rode along the ridge.”
“Must’ve been cavalry horses. Tougher. Most miners didn’t want to worry about horses. They wanted to be mining. So they went on foot.”
The river was on their left now. The previous winter had been snowy, so there was still good water in the Cosumnes, and the current was running fast.
Peter noticed cars parked along the road. Down in the river, guys in wetsuits were panning.
“They still find flakes,” said Wild Bill. “Sometimes nuggets.”
“You mean there’s gold that the miners missed?”
“The laws of erosion don’t change. But in 1848, you had thousands of years of gold, lying untouched. Today, if a few flakes wash out in June, they’re panned out by the Fourth of July.”
They went past ranches and corrals, then over a deep gorge where the Cosumnes turned southwest. The Gold Rush had left scars everywhere, Wild Bill said. If you could see the scars, you could imagine the face of the landscape a century and a half before.
On an open hillside, a foot-high ridge of dirt ran at a carefully pitched slope: the Michigan Ditch, carrying water from the upper Cosumnes downstream fifteen miles to Michigan Bar. Wild Bill explained that some miners, who couldn’t make it prospecting, started ditching and “got rich from water instead of gold.”
Then he pointed out bone-dry gulches, like vertical cuts on the hillsides. Along the edges of any gulch, hillocks covered in straw grass sprouted trees and bushes. “Looks like they’ve been there forever, right?”
“But?”
“Those are tailing piles. If miners saw a dry gulch where rainwater or flash flood had caused erosion, they’d start digging. If they found gold, they kept digging, turning over, sifting, leaving piles of dirt that became part of the landscape.”
After a few miles, they arrived at a strip of businesses in the town of Plymouth. Donnelly turned east onto the Fiddletown Road, with signs for well-known vineyards … Renwood, Deaver, Terra d’Oro, Easton. But they weren’t stopping to taste.
A few miles more brought them to Miwok Road. It meandered southeast through country dotted with clusters of oak standing stark and dark on the dried-out hillsides, a lonely house here, a vineyard patch there, and livestock grazing everywhere. All the while, off to their right, sometimes visible in the baking sunlight, sometimes buried in a fold of earth or lost behind a line of trees, flowed the Miwok, as it had when Spencer and Flynn rode this way almost a hundred and seventy years before.
Then Wild Bill turned southeast again, onto little single-lane side road marked with a few mailboxes. Another quarter mile brought them to a dirt road running directly south. It had a closed chain-link gate and two signs: PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT and BEWARE OF THE DOG.
“The Boyles’ land. They own a thousand acres south of the river.” Wild Bill kept on another quarter mile, then slowed and pulled onto a patch of dry grass surrounded mostly by … nothing. “Welcome to Broke Neck.”
Peter got out, threw his sport coat in the backseat, and drank it all in.
Down the gentle slope, through the trees, lay the riverbed, about forty feet wide. A stream of water—decent for the end of dry season—rolled over the rocks. Grass and shrubs greened the bank and grew along the damp edges. O
n the uphill side of the road, a two-car garage stood on a stone foundation. Behind it, the land rose to a dusty corral that formed the front yard of a little redwood-board ranch house. Two horses were nodding under an old oak tree by the road.
Peter absorbed the heat and the quiet. But it was more than quiet. It was silence. No road sounds, no airplanes, none of the hum of the modern world.
“Doesn’t look like much now,” said Wild Bill, “but it was a whole town once. We think the garage is built on the foundation of the Broke Neck store. And those stones you’re kicking at, they’re the foundation of the Abbott Express Office.”
“Are there photographs?” asked Peter. “Daguerreotypes?”
“Not of Broke Neck. It came and went too quickly, like most of these places.”
They walked down toward the river. It was cooler under the trees. At the edge of the water, Peter listened to its gentle whoosh.
Wild Bill said, “You can see it, can’t you?”
“See it?”
“Hundreds of miners working claims, with shovels and pans and rockers. Scraping, cursing, splashing, joshing, maybe fighting.”
Peter knew that he had found a kindred spirit.
“They didn’t quite understand the geology,” said Wild Bill, “but they knew the gold was along the riverbeds, in the sandbars and under the rocks.”
Peter squinted upstream. “Spencer writes that they camped the first night near a big boulder, about a mile above the town.”
“Can’t see that far. The river bends, and the trees and understory are too thick. But … what exactly are you looking for?”
Peter almost never admitted this truth, but he had the feeling that a retired detective might understand. “I don’t really know.”
And he liked Wild Bill Donnelly’s answer: “So we just keep looking.”
“As long as you look someplace else.” The woman’s voice was so startling that Wild Bill’s hand went into his windbreaker.
“Easy there, big fella,” she said. “I’m not armed.”
She was about fifty-five and as sun-dried as the landscape. She wore faded jeans and cowboy boots, but they were no affectation. This straight-up, stringy woman looked like she could spend the morning mucking stables, then go into the house and do a little online bond trading just for fun.
Wild Bill introduced himself and Peter as historians.
She said, “Historians, hunh?”
“From Boston,” said Peter.
“Must be hard, being a historian if you can’t read.”
Peter said, “I think we missed a sign.”
“A ‘No Trespassing’ sign.” She gestured back up the hill. “So, what are you really? Gold guys? Wine guys? Cops?”
“Retired cop,” said Wild Bill. “Now a book collector.”
She looked at Peter. “You a book collector, too?”
“He sells them,” said Wild Bill, “to me.”
“I’ve been called a wine guy, too,” added Peter.
“Well, if you’re looking to buy a riverfront vineyard, this isn’t it. No volcanic soils on this bank. And the valley’s too deep. You want more sun. So you want to look up high.”
“Actually, we’re looking for—”
Wild Bill interrupted Peter. “Is that your house up there, Ms.—”
“O’Hara. The name’s right on the gate. Ginny O’Hara. But you knew that before you came out here. Public record. So is my property assessment. So you knew that, too. But I’m not selling the land on this side of the river, no matter how many bullshit artists come around saying they’re historians … from Boston.”
Just then, they heard a high-revving motor whining over the hill on the other side of the river. A four-by-four ATV appeared at the bald crest about a hundred yards above the bank.
Wild Bill Donnelly stiffened, like a well-trained dog sensing danger.
From this distance, all they could tell was that the driver was as big as the grizzly that James Spencer had written about.
Ginny O’Hara shouted up to him, “Did you send these two?”
The guy said nothing. He spat, revved the engine, and sped away. Point made. Stay on your own side of the river.
Wild Bill said, “That’s Buster, right?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know him. Or his mother. If Buster is buzzing around, Mother Marti is usually up on the other side of the hill somewhere.”
Peter watched Buster disappear. Then he said to Ginny O’Hara, “We really are who we say we are.”
“You mean you weren’t sent by the Boyles bunch because they want to buy my land, because they smell big money coming into our forgotten little valley?”
Wild Bill said, “We saw plenty of ‘for sale’ signs. Ranchland offered as vineyard. Vineyard offered as ranchland. Folks who’d like to sell and can’t. Why would your land be so special?”
“It isn’t. Lots of folks think making a living from the land might be easy, or at least maybe romantic. Never has been. Never will be.”
“Who wants yours?” asked Peter.
“Folks who think there’s still gold here. And there are more of them every day.”
“Like who?” asked Wild Bill.
“Start with that Jack Cutler guy. If he sent you, it’s a fool’s errand.”
“Jack Cutler?” Peter tried not to sound surprised at mention of his future in-law.
“He calls himself a geologist. Just a glorified prospector. Wanted to do core samples on my land. I said no way. Bad enough we have the Emery Mine trying to start up again. I don’t need people digging holes and starting fires and getting my livestock all riled up.”
Peter said, “What’s the Emery Mine?”
Ginny O’Hara looked at Wild Bill. “He does it better than you.”
“He wouldn’t know the Emery Mine from a rare book.”
Peter pulled out a business card and handed it to her. She took it, turned on her heels, and headed up the bank. “Drive him by the Emery Mine. Then he’ll know.”
“Thanks for your time,” said Peter.
“You’re welcome. Don’t come back.”
* * *
FROM THERE, THEY DROVE a mile upstream, with a swath of blackened trees and burned grass spreading to their right, on the south side of the river.
“This is where they had that fire I was telling you about,” said Wild Bill.
As they rounded a bend, Peter looked down and said, “There’s the rock!”
“What rock?”
“The rock where Spencer says they camped the first night. Pull over.”
The road was closer to the river here, about fifty feet above the bank, which dropped more sharply. On the north side, it was sunburned but not blackened, because the fire had not jumped the stream.
They got out, and Peter said, “See it? About thirty feet up on the other bank? The big rock?”
Wild Bill said, “This is the first time in decades you can really see that rock from here, thanks to the fire.”
“It looks like a big skull.” Peter took a picture with his iPhone. Then he looked along the bank and tried to figure out where Spencer would have washed dishes that first night. Probably a straight drop from the rock. So he photographed that. Then he asked, “Do you see mining evidence?”
“Tailings everywhere. On both sides.”
Peter looked at the piles forty or fifty feet downstream, where the river widened a bit and seemed to settle. “That was where Spencer saw the Chinese camp.”
Peter had a hunch that he would want to know more about that rock and all that might have gone on around it. So he plotted a quick river crossing, then he did it.
“Hey!” cried Wild Bill Donnelly. “That’s Boyles’ property.”
“I’ll only be a minute.” A few hops. Rock to rock. Big rocks. Then a jump, and he landed on the opposite bank, feet as dry as the ground. But his next step brought a sharp crack and an explosion of dirt at his feet.
Wild Bill pulled his .44 and ducked behind a tree.
“Stand still!” shouted Wild Bill.
“And let him shoot me?”
Then came three, four, five shots, ripping through the trees above them.
“Now run.”
Peter stumbled into the stream, tripped, slipped in the knee-deep water, smacked his shin on a rock. Two more shots struck on his left and right, bracketing him perfectly, sending up splashes and ricocheting off the rocks.
“Come on,” said Wild Bill from the other side. “You’ll be all right.”
So Peter stumbled and splashed back to the bank, scrambled over the last few boulders, and dove behind a tree. “Jesus Christ. I’m soaked. Who the hell—”
“Sun’s out. You’ll dry in no time.” Wild Bill looked up the hillside, into the trees higher up, all blackened from the fire. Then he stepped out and fired his .44 once into the air. “That’s just to let him know we got his message.”
A moment later, they heard the ATV whining away.
Peter straightened up. “‘Stand still. Run. Stop. Now run really fast.’ Very confusing when someone’s shooting at you.”
“Calm yourself, Book Man. That was just a demonstration.”
“Of what?”
“The Boyles’ commitment to their ‘No Trespassing’ sign. Or to scaring off competition for the O’Hara place. Buster probably figures that if he takes a few shots at us, we may decide we don’t want to buy.”
“We don’t.”
“He doesn’t know that.” Wild Bill Donnelly headed up the slope. “Seen enough?”
“For now. Do we file a report?”
“About what?”
“Being shot at.”
“Can we identify the shooter?”
“You just said it was Buster Boyles.”
“Can’t say for sure. And if we’re planning to keep trespassing around here, we may not want to raise any red flags with the Amador County Sheriff’s Office.”
Peter followed Wild Bill back up to the Chevy pickup. “Good advice, but—”
“Thirty years of law enforcement talking.”
* * *
THE ROAD MEANDERED ANOTHER mile through a mostly deserted landscape, in some places heavily treed, in others open and empty. Then they came to a spot where the river turned sharply below them. Wild Bill stopped and said, “There’s evidence down there of miners who came in and built a stone-and-log dam. Tried to control all the water right where the Miwok turned.”
Bound for Gold--A Peter Fallon Novel of the California Gold Rush Page 18