Bound for Gold--A Peter Fallon Novel of the California Gold Rush

by William Martin

  So, unmarried, we slept as if we were. And the captain’s berth became our Bower of Bliss, until …

  * * *

  THE EASTERN SKY WAS just glimmering when the knock came.

  I grabbed my pistol and bounded for the door. “Who is it?”

  “You got some deep-sleepin’ guards on this boat, Jamie, that’s for sure.”

  I undid the latch and pulled open the door. “Michael!”

  Janiva half rose from the bed. “Who is it?”

  “Your Irish waiter,” I said over my shoulder.

  Michael Flynn peered in at her. “So it is true? She came to you after all.”

  I pushed him into the saloon, struck a match, lit a lantern. He had a black beard now. But he still wore my old visored hat and seemed little changed.

  I whispered, “Is Hodges after you?”

  “Hell no.” Flynn laughed. “He’s still at Broke Neck. Seems we done him a favor. He was looking for a way to get rid of the Gaw brothers. Gettin’ too big, they was, tryin’ to take over. And when we blew up the dam, we opened a gravel bank like a river deposit, halfway up the hill and loaded with gold.”

  “A lost river of gold?”

  “Don’t know about that. But Hodges and the rest, they’re minin’ and bankin’ and not givin’ two damns about us.”

  “We’re in the clear, then?”

  “Don’t know about that, either.” Flynn picked at his beard. “Hodges may be downright cordial, but you got problems of your own.”

  The cabin door opened and Janiva stepped out, neatly dressed, hair pinned.

  Michael Flynn swept off his hat and bowed. “A pleasure to see that the lovely lady followed my advice after all.”

  She gave a little half curtsy. “You were the only man to encourage me.”

  “And damn glad to do it.”

  She liked Flynn. She had liked him from that first day in the Arbella Club. She said, “I’m damn glad, too. And I’d be damn glad for a cup of coffee.”

  “Coffee?” said Flynn. “Why? Is it morning already? I ain’t even been to bed.”

  “Brandy, then,” I said.

  “In your coffee.” Janiva went forward to the caboose, where we always kept a pot bubbling.

  And Flynn whispered to me, “Good lookin’, feisty, curtsies like a lady and curses like a lad. Oh, Jamie, you’re a lucky man.”

  We sat at the captain’s table and watched the morning light brighten the April-greened hills. I sweetened three mugs with brandy, and Flynn told of his travels. He had begun by leaving tracks to the north mines, to throw off Sloate. Once he was certain that Sloate was deceived, Flynn had turned south for the Chinese camp.

  Janiva asked him why.

  To find Mei-Ling, he admitted. But when he got there, he learned that she and her brother and their friends, fearing vengeance from Broke Neck, had already moved on. To where? No one knew. So Flynn had come looking in San Francisco.

  Janiva understood. She had sailed seventeen thousand miles for much the same reason. She said, “Love will make you journey far.”

  Flynn said he wasn’t sure if it was love, but he sure missed Mei-Ling.

  Janiva told him that we all have our dreams and must do what God tells us, even when he tells us to pursue the love of a heathen. She spoke with what I knew she considered a liberality of spirit about the Chinese. And Flynn, well-supplied with a liberality of his own, took no offense.

  He explained that he had not found Mei-Ling in San Francisco, so he had gone to Ah-Toy’s, to satisfy his urges. And there, he had overheard the conversation of a man called Trub with three others named Muggs, Bludger, and Brizz.

  At first, Flynn was surprised to hear our names bandied about in a Chinese whorehouse. Then he was astonished to hear the one called Muggs say, “You know, Trub, she’s a bird worth pluckin’.” To which Trub responded, “I thought of it. And from the way she makes eyes at me, she thought of it, too.”

  Janiva said, “Eyes? At him? He frightens me.”

  “Some women like to be frightened,” said Flynn. “And some men think frightenin’ is what women want.”

  “I am not some women,” she said.

  I poured Flynn more brandy and told him to keep talking.

  “The one called Muggs, he said if you was out of the way, Jamie, this Trub could have it clear with Miss Janiva and her goods.” Flynn sipped. “Amazin’ the things you hear waitin’ for your name to be called in a whorehouse. We need to see that this Trub McLaws don’t call yours … in a manner of speakin’.”

  “We can fire him,” said Janiva after a moment.

  “No,” I said. “We’ve agreed that if we do that, he’ll just make more trouble.”

  “It ain’t firin’ you should be thinkin’ of,” said Flynn. “It’s killin’.”

  “Killing?” said Janiva. “Killing McLaws?”

  “But first, you two get married if you ain’t already, so the likes of him can’t be braggin’ in the whorehouses about havin’ a chance with a proper Boston lady.” Flynn drained his cup, got up, and unlatched a gallery window, which swung out on its hinge. “I’ll come and go by the stern. Better them Aussies don’t know when I’m about.” Then he put a leg out and dropped down a rope into a rowboat tethered to the rudder.

  Janiva leaned out the window and asked, “Where are you going?”

  “To find that Chinese girl. And if not her, any girl.”

  “Where are you sleeping?” I asked.

  “Nobody on the Willie Winter but rats. I’ll sleep with them.” He pointed to the figurehead of the North Shore minister, rotting and lonely, a few hundred yards away.

  And I said, surprising myself and Janiva both, “Will you witness our wedding?”

  Janiva looked at me. “Wedding?”

  “Day after tomorrow!” I said. “Shipton’s at eleven o’clock.”

  “I’ll be there, but ask that Brannan feller to be your witness. Make friends with the powerful, not the Irish.”

  April 11, 1850

  Man and Wife

  It was not the nuptial that we would have planned in Boston. It was in no way traditional, since we had spent the night before in the same bed. But we knew as our wedding day unfolded that we would never forget it.

  Janiva wore her best dress, maroon, with four petticoats, a dark blue half jacket, matching hat. I wore my last white shirt and red cravat with the brown tweed suit, and I arranged my red and yellow-paisley neckerchief as a bit of color in my breast pocket.

  We let Muggs and Trub row us in. Trub offered to escort us to Portsmouth Square, but I told him we had someone else watching over us. Who? The man waiting for us at the end of the Washington Street Wharf. He wore polished boots and a new gray flannel shirt with a black neckerchief. He was holding a bouquet of orange California poppies.

  Trub said, “Who’s he?”

  “My friend, Michael Flynn,” I said. “Expert with pistol or fists.”

  The boat bumped against the wharf, and Flynn handed Janiva the flowers, then helped her up. “Ah, but it’s a grand sunny day for the most beautiful bride in California.”

  Trub whispered, “You don’t invite your faithful Aussies … but a Mick?”

  I knew the old adage about keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. But this was our wedding day. We would invite who we would. If the Aussies wanted to loot the ship while we were ashore? I had goods in the Brannan warehouse. I would not be impoverished. So I put McLaws out of my mind, took Janiva’s arm, and together we walked up Washington Street with Michael Flynn clearing the way.

  There was no plan to our procession, but up ahead, Reese Shipton’s slave, Dingus, was standing on the boardwalk. When he saw us cross Kearny Street, he put bow to fiddle and delivered the most beautiful rendition of the old Pilgrim hymn, “We Gather Together,” that ever we had heard.

  Now, the mob around Portsmouth Square made way, as if all of them, engaged in all their forms of commerce, construction, and conversation, remembered for a moment what
a wedding had meant back home, in Joplin or Savannah or Boston, Massachusetts.

  Men doffed hats and bowed. Women, many of them what we might have called “soiled doves,” offered us a “God bless” or “you look beautiful, dear” or even “make him pay, darlin’, pay every day,” which made Janiva laugh out loud.

  Dingus played us right into the office, where Reese Shipton awaited in a suit so white that I could not believe he had ever worn it in California before.

  As our official witnesses, Sam Brannan came with his wife, a delicate woman named Ann Eliza, who greeted Janiva with a motherly embrace and told her that she would always remember this day, “even if it’s not a church wedding.”

  I sensed that Janiva liked her from the start.

  Jonathan Slawsby and his wife also attended, as did a woman named Sally Tucker, who was associated with Shipton, but who appeared as if she had been associated with other men. Indeed, as I thought about it, I realized she had been the living tableau above the bar at the Parker House.

  After Shipton pronounced us man and wife, we paraded to the Brannans’ home at Stockton and Washington, on the uphill outskirt of town. The green slopes above were dotted about with houses, and the streets faded into sandy paths crisscrossing their way toward the top. But the Brannans’ house reminded us of a pleasant dwelling in Concord or Lexington, and as the day was warm—April being one of the nicest months in these parts—they had laid out a collation on the veranda. We feasted on oysters and champagne and fresh sliced beef prepared with chilis and Mexican spices, all with a glorious view over the city and across the bay to the distant hills.

  Though our small talk was genteel, as spirits rose, so did the volume of our laughter and sense of good fellowship. And in San Francisco, there was a distinct lack of the caste consciousness that we would have found in the environs of old Boston. When I introduced Flynn as “my good friend from Galway,” Brannan did no more than look him over, take the measure of him, and offer his hand. “If Spencer vouches for you, you must be all right.” When Flynn asked Sally Tucker if she had any friends, no one acted insulted or appalled. Social boundaries here were fluid, and Sally said she would be happy to introduce Flynn to a few “unattached” San Francisco ladies.

  At sundown, Janiva and I bid our farewells and retreated to the St. Francis, the red-painted, twin-gabled, three-story hotel at the corner of Dupont and Clay. In that few marriages were celebrated in these parts, the hotel lacked a bridal suite, so they gave us a double room on the third floor, beneath the gables, from which we could see the ramshackle city expanding in every direction. And a bottle of champagne awaited us, chilled in shaved ice shipped round the Horn from Boston.

  Alone together, we toasted to the great wonder of our lives, that in little less than two weeks we had come so far. We toasted to a future that we viewed now with new optimism, no matter the dangers around us. We put the distant spectre of Samuel Hodges and the nearby threat of Trub McLaws out of our minds. And we agreed that Mrs. Brannan was right. We would always remember this day.

  Then we fell together into the enormous featherbed.

  April 14, 1850

  Doing Business

  After four nights of bliss in the Drake and four days of meals in the restaurants around Portsmouth Square, including an exotic Chinese dinner (which did not feature maodan) in a restaurant called Jon-Ling’s Canton House, we returned to the ship, where we immediately felt a distinct sense of resentment from our hirelings.

  I resolved to be on my guard around Trub and Muggs and their equally hairy associates, Brizzie, short for “Brisbane,” and Bludger, which is Australian slang for lazy.

  But I lowered it the first night back as I strolled the deck after dinner. I liked to watch the sky darken from east to west. And here, as we raced toward the longest days of the year, I liked the lingering of the light. I also wanted the stern lanterns lit, so that the Proud Pilgrim looked like a storeship rather than a derelict.

  As Janiva preferred to stay in the warmth below, I brought a cognac for company. I leaned on the rail and sipped and considered the ways in which my life had changed. Boston was no longer my destination. It was something much closer, up on those San Francisco hills … and something far away and unknown, a distant future …

  … until my contemplation was interrupted by, “Evenin’, Mr. Spencer.” The voice of Trub McLaws preceded him. He sauntered along the rail, mug in his hand, and the thought skittered through my head that a man who enjoyed an evening stroll must have some good in him, after all.

  So I offered a bit of friendly talk: “Marvelous night.”

  “Aye, Marvelous.” Trub tipped his mug.

  I asked him what he was drinking.

  “Rotgut rum.”

  “Would you like some cognac?”

  “Is that like brandy?”

  I told him to drain the mug, then I poured him a healthy measure from my glass.

  He sipped and smiled, as if his whole being had been illuminated by such a magnificent drink as the De Luze. He said, “You know, runnin’ with the likes of you is a good way to get an education in the finer things … and another in knowin’ when your betters is lookin’ down on you.”

  “Betters? Lookin’ down?”

  “Me and Muggsy was awful hurt you didn’t invite us to your weddin’.”

  Though I had an answer, Trub was not interested. He kept talking. “But something tells me you ain’t so high and mighty, seein’ as you’re friends with that Irish whoremonger—”

  “Whoremonger?” I sipped my brandy and feigned amusement.

  “An honorable callin’ in my world, but not in yours.” Trouble Tom turned and headed toward the bow. “Maybe he’ll come round tonight and tell some Irish tales. A tall teller, that one is, with a big mouth for the tellin’ and some mad men on his own tail, too.”

  On his tail? Hodges? Trask? Had Flynn led them to us? If so, they would be more trouble than Trouble Tom.

  April 18, 1850

  A Ship Sinks

  Michael Flynn did not come round that night or for days afterward. Neither, I was happy to say, did Hodges or Trask.

  And our fledgling company kept growing, despite my fears of revenge. We made another wholesale deal and awaited word from Hopkins in Sacramento. We also considered the purchase of land. We had come late to the sale of so-called water lots. The city council had run an auction on January 3 for four hundred and thirty-four prime plots. But by spring, men were developing new means to lay claims, as I observed that morning.

  I happened to glance toward the storeship Elizabeth, anchored between us and the Washington Street Wharf. I had noticed her crew dismasting her and removing anything—binnacle, bright work, lines—they might carry. Now, they were rowing frantically away, because she was sinking, going down on an even keel, as if they were scuttling her right there in Yerba Buena Cove.

  But why?

  McLaws came by, stopped, looked out, and said, “Fine smart fellers, them hulk undertakers, buryin’ dead ships like dead bodies.”

  If Trub McLaws admired them, dishonesty was afoot.

  “What’s a hulk undertaker?” I asked.

  “The city sells ‘water lots’ for tax money and the buyers agrees to fill the land, all as if it’s the very thing to make this canvas-and-sand shithill a right honest city. But hulk undertakers kedge their vessels into prime spots and scuttle ’em. That way they owns the land without payin’.”

  The air was bubbling up through the hatches of the Elizabeth and roiling the water as she settled onto the bottom.

  “How do they own it?” I asked.

  “Laws of maritime salvage. Shipowner can claim the bottom his hulk is sittin’ on. That’s what they done with the Elizabeth and the Niantic and a dozen more.”

  “Sounds like a good line of work.”

  “Aye.” Trub scratched at his stubble. “But not so good as what we got here. And my price is goin’ up. Two ounces a day for all four of us. And a monthly bonus for me, to keep me
mouth shut.”

  I was almost afraid to ask: “About what?”

  “About what you and that Irish whoremonger done in a place called Broke Neck. Blew up a dam, killed men … that’s the talk, anyway.”

  “The talk? The humbug, you mean.”

  “It’s what they’re sayin’.” He studied me, as if waiting to see fear’s shadow cross my face, then he turned and headed for the fo’c’sle, casting this over his shoulder: “New arrangement starts next week and the first bonus on May 1.”

  * * *

  THAT NIGHT, I FOUND Flynn at Ah-Toy’s. I warned him that if he was to spend time there, he had best not drink beforehand. Too much drink caused his gums to flap.

  He assured me that he had said nothing, that word must be spreading by other means. He also warned against paying McLaws to keep quiet, as it would lead only to more demands. Having heard talk of an actual lake of gold, he was planning on leaving. “But I’ll stay a bit longer. You might need help with this Trub. And I might still find Mei-Ling.”

  I looked around at the men, sitting on benches, waiting for their “lookees,” “touch-ees,” and “do-ees.” I said, “Just so long as you don’t find her in here.”

  May 1, 1850

  No Pay

  When we handed out the week’s wages, the gold share was as it had been, an ounce a day, one of the best salaries in San Francisco. But no bonus for Trub McLaws.

  When he said nothing, I told Janiva that he was planning something. But I could not imagine what lay ahead.

  May 4, 1850

  Fifty-dollar shovels

  Even San Francisco slept at four in the morning, but I lay awake.

  Most of the worries afflicting me since Broke Neck afflicted me now. But they were calmed by the quiet breathing of the woman beside me. She lay on her stomach, her face turned to the window, her hair cascading onto us both. I touched her sweet bottom, but lightly so as not to wake her. The rising sun would do that within the hour.

  I would simply enjoy the quiet and her presence and our existence together.

  Then I heard the sound of a distant bell. It clanged once or twice, then it began to ring as furiously as a scream in the night. I sat up, looked toward the city, and saw flames leaping near Portsmouth Square.