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

by William Martin

  Then two more shots, two more thunderous reports, two more night-to-day flashes. The first took off Bunche’s top hat and half his head. The second hit Becker, who answered with two wild shots from Pompey’s ivory-handled Colt. Then a shot hit him in the chest and turned his white coat blood red.

  All while this was happening, Samuel Hodges was pulling his pistol, pointing at me, hesitating, then swinging toward the rowboat.

  Michael Flynn, the shadow in the boat, cried, “Kill him!”

  My gun was in my hand but—again, the old hesitation. Could I shoot him?

  Hodges swung back to me, perhaps asking himself the same question.

  Flynn was struggling to stand on one bad leg in a rocking boat, because from where he sat, he had no angle on Hodges. He fell back and shouted it again. “Kill him!”

  Hodges fired three times at Flynn’s shadow. Wood chips flew as the shots ricocheted off the planking. The boat rocked. Flynn almost went over—had he been hit? And I fired. I could not tell where my bullet struck Hodges, only that it drove him back and he hit the water with a tremendous splash.

  Then I turned to Flynn. Before I could ask if he was hit, he laughed. “That son of a bitch better be dead, because I can’t stay in this fuckin’ rowboat another minute.”

  I reached down and pulled him up by the crutch.

  “Ah, Jamie, but you had me worried. I thought you was about to prove Cletis right.”

  “About what?”

  “About too much mercy gettin’ you killed.” Then he shouted to the girls, who stood about twenty feet up the dock, “Run, gals! Run! Get on back to Big Beam. And never let cheatin’ gamblers pimp you again.”

  “We love ya, Michael,” shouted one of them, who sounded like Roberta.

  “Keep singin’!” cried the other, who had to be Sheila.

  Flynn said to me, “I knew you’d need help. But I couldn’t move around. So I rowed out here a few hours ago. The girls was in on it, too. They hated their new whoremasters more than I hate Hodges, and if singin’ was enough to get them in the clear, well—”

  The Monumental bell clanged twice more.

  Then a voice rang out, “Murder! Murder! Clay Street Wharf!”

  Suddenly, torches and lanterns were appearing up where the wharf met Sansome Street.

  “I hope the girls get through the mob,” said Flynn. “As for you, go home. Get dry. Then get on to the Committee meetin’, or they’ll suspect you for certain.”

  “Get dry?” I said. “But I’m not wet.”

  Flynn glanced at the torches coming toward us, then he hit me in the gut with the crutch, driving me into the water. “You’re wet now.”

  The shock of the black cold stunned me. The weight of it filled my boots and soaked my trousers and tweed coat. And the rumble of footfalls on the wharf above filled me with dread. I could hear the crowd shouting: “Murders!” “Lay hold!” “Hang him!” “No, bring him to the committee!”

  The tide was ebbing, pulling me out, and the farther it carried me, the stronger it grew. But I was afraid to splash because the torches were probing the dark in every direction.

  Someone shouted at Flynn, “Is there anyone else with you?”

  “Not at all,” answered Flynn. “I killed all four, I did. And fine act of self-defense it was.”

  The cold current now seemed strong enough to sweep me all the way to the Golden Gate. I resolved to ride it well into the dark before I began to swim. I went twenty or thirty yards through the water, then struck a hard surface, bounced along, bounced and rolled, and realized that I had struck the Proud Pilgrim, emerging as the tide dropped. I grabbed for the rail, held on, then flipped over. From water to water I went, from the pulling current running around the hull to the still water inside it. My feet found the hard deck.

  Waist deep in water, I gripped the top rail and hunkered down so that the men on the wharf could not see, and I stayed like that for five minutes or more, waiting, shivering, while six dead bodies lay like unforgiven sins below, and all the while, the Monumental bell kept ringing, two clangs, a minute’s silence, then two more clangs … tolling the dead and calling the Vigilantes.

  Finally I heard a man shout, “There’s no one else.”

  “I told you that, you damn fools,” said Flynn.

  I watched them go, all bobbing torches and burning anger. Then I turned my cold-fogged brain to the business at hand—survival. Could I swim against the current, swim off to the left, to the little stub of a wharf at the end of Market Street? Did I have the strength? I might drown first, even if I took off my boots and trousers. But I could not stay in the icy water. I was already shivering, and the cold seemed to be digging down to the very marrow of me.

  I looked for something floating, anything by which I might gauge the speed of the current. What I saw was large and dark, off to my left. It was a man, floating facedown, the body of Samuel Hodges, riding the waters toward oblivion.

  Then I heard a voice calling my name. A voice?

  Instinctively, I looked toward the stern companionway, to see if the ghost of Trub McLaws was rising with his rat-eaten face.

  Then I heard it again and thought, yes, there are ghosts in the dark cold of this sunken hulk. This one said, “I no come that side. You come here.”

  I turned to starboard and saw a shadow that seemed to stand on top of the moonbeams that lit the water, as a ghost would do. It was looking in at me. But standing? How could that be? My God, was I going crazy with the cold and the dark?

  Then it said, “Spencer! I no swim. I no get wet. You wet already. Come.”

  Chin? Chin. He was standing in a rowboat next to the hull. He said, “I come find Mei-Ling. I think, maybe she go with him tonight. He try buy her, so maybe she go with him.”

  “Buy her? But I thought you told him—”

  “Ah-Toy give me note from Flynn. It say, Flynn take my sister to Rainbow Gulch but leave me ‘the Chinese gold of Broke Neck, first trickle from lost river of gold.’ That what he say. He say gold in Brannan Warehouse safe, put in the name of Chin.”

  “Is it?”

  “Brannan office not open.” Chin reached out his hand. “Now come.”

  I shivered and waded toward them.

  They pulled me aboard, and I said, “So you’ve forgiven Flynn?”

  “For giving back my own gold? No forgive. Never forgive. He dirty my sister, kill her husband.” Chin gestured to Little Ng to start rowing. Then he said to me, “You friend. Always friend. But if they no hang Flynn tonight, I kill tomorrow.”

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, JANIVA insisted that I go to the meeting of the Vigilance Committee. She said it would be the best way to deflect suspicion. And she reminded me that until the Proud Pilgrim was filled in and covered over, we had much to deflect. So, dried, warmed, fortified with a brandy, dressed in a new black suit, I hurried back to Sansome Street and the huge mob milling and gossiping in the torchlight outside the Brannan Warehouse.

  I gave the sergeant at arms my name and the number 25, which were checked against the master list, and I was duly admitted into the crowd of San Francisco men ready to distribute angry justice to the pair who stood before a committee of “judges,” including Sam Brannan and Reese Shipton.

  Brannan was shouting, “John Jenkins, also known as the Miscreant, is accused of stealing a safe. Who saw him do it?”

  “We saw him run!” shouted someone in the crowd.

  “Yeah, run with a big sack over his shoulder. Then he stole a rowboat, and when we caught up to him, he threw that sack into the water!”

  “Sounds like guilt to me,” said Sam Brannan. “What do you say, Jenkins?”

  “It wasn’t me,” answered the accused, all split lip and blackened eye.

  “But you’re a solid, big man, the kind just able to carry off a safe,” answered Brannan.

  As this “interrogation” was unfolding, I got to the side of the room and worked my way toward the front. Those who knew that I was Flynn’s frie
nd kept an eye on me, as if I might try to rescue him or some such foolishness. I could feel the gaze of suspicion all around me, but as I reached the front, Flynn saw me and winked.

  By now, they had heard all the “evidence” against John Jenkins, Sydney Duck, so Brannan called for a verdict. “A voice vote, if you please. All in favor of guilty?” This was answered with a roar of ayes. And opposed? Not a voice.

  John Jenkins hung his head.

  Michael Flynn, however, held his head high.

  “What about you?” Brannan stalked over and looked Flynn in the eye. “Four dead. Two on the dock, two in the water.”

  “Self-defense,” said Flynn, with an air of disdain so obvious that he knew no one would believe him.

  “There’s a story that two of the men, the two gamblers … you had an altercation with them night before last.”

  “The son of a bitch Tector Bunche was palmin’ aces,” said Flynn.

  “So you followed him back to his boat and shot him?”

  “Cowards is what they were. I went down to see if I could get me money back. They called for Hodges to tell his little yellow-haired squint of a bodyguard to shoot me.”

  “How do you explain this?” Brannan held up the Walker Colt.

  “A damn fine gun, good for killin’ mad grizzlies or bad men.”

  “Only fourteen hundred made in the whole world. And only one man in the Mother Lode ever carried one that I knew of. Hodges’s man, Deering Sloate.”

  “And a rotten mean son of a bitch he was,” said Flynn.

  “Did you kill him, too?”

  “No. I just borrowed his gun.”

  Some in the audience laughed at that. I sensed grudging admiration for a man who faced death with such spirit. Would it save him?

  Reese Shipton looked again in my direction, “Is there anyone who would like to speak for the defendant’s good character?”

  I pushed forward. I would do it. I had to do it. I did not know what I would say. No playwright had written this scene. But—

  Flynn saw me coming and cut me off. “No need for any of that. I killed them four. And I killed the Chinaman named Jon-Ling last night.”

  “You did that, too?” said Brannan, genuinely surprised. “But why?”

  “He give me the wrong dumplings. Pan fried instead of steamed.”

  “Goddamn you,” shouted someone in the crowd. “I loved them dumplin’s.”

  And many of the men in the room began to shout angrily, perhaps because they loved dumplings, too.

  Brannan had heard enough. He called out, “All right, same as with the Aussie. Give me a voice vote. He’s confessed, but all in favor of finding him guilty—”

  “AYE!”

  And opposed? Eyes turned to me. The words caught in my throat.

  Flynn again made it easy for me. “Nay to all of you. I done you all a favor. I killed cheatin’ gamblers and bad cooks.”

  Brannan called, “What’s the sentence of this body, gathered here, June 10, 1851?”

  And something surprising happened. These angry men, sensing what was now being asked of them, quieted and seemed to draw back. I saw eyes shifting, heads turning toward the floor. Death was not something they were so willing to serve, after all.

  But Sam Brannan believed that this had to be done, or our city would never stop burning and our society would never grow strong. Why else would he be so determined? He said, “All right, then. I tell you all that the punishment for murder is hanging. And for you, John Jenkins, Sydney incendiary, the punishment for grand theft is”—here he paused, as if thinking it through—“also hanging.”

  Now, the crowd murmured rather than roared. Was conscience afflicting them? Did they see that they were taking the law into their own hands, which would soon be covered in blood?

  Brannan said, “For the Irishman? All in favor of hanging?”

  The ayes came through, though with less force than before.

  “Opposed?

  Flynn looked at me and shook his head. Don’t fight this. It’s a scrape no man gets out of.

  Feeling as low as ever I had, but knowing I had no choice and no chance to change the outcome, I closed my mouth.

  Flynn nodded. He may even have smiled.

  For Jenkins, the ayes had it, but fewer men voted … and less loudly.

  Brannan put his hands on his hips. “You seem to be losing your spirit.”

  And from the back of the room came a voice that was high and harsh, sharpened by years of cutting through stiff winds. “As I understand it, we came here to hang somebody. Now it’s my right to hang that Irish deserter, and—”

  Nathan Trask never finished the sentence. Whatever he said, it struck the right nerve. The room seemed to explode. In an instant, men were shouting for execution. Others came forward to lay hold of the prisoners. Brannan himself carried word out to the street, where more shouting erupted. Lord, but the mob could be a fickle thing.

  Meanwhile, Reese Shipton was asking Jenkins and Flynn if they had any last requests.

  Jenkins asked for a cigar and a glass of brandy, both of which were quickly brought.

  Flynn said, “No tobacco. Bad for the health. Just a whole damn bottle of brandy.”

  And the bottle, minus one glass for Jenkins, was put into his hand.

  Flynn drank down two or three swallows, looked at me with tears in his eyes, and offered it to me. For the last time, I drank with him. Then he took another swallow and fired the bottle against the wall.

  They bound Jenkins’ hands in front of him and led him out, but this was a task more difficult with Flynn, since he needed the crutch to walk up the hill. So someone came forward with a wheelbarrow. “Here you go, Mick, a final ride in a Irish schooner.”

  Flynn looked at the man, then at the wheelbarrow, and said, “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.” Then he pulled himself up straight on the crutch and whispered to me, “Stay close, and I’ll show these bastards what kind of man they’re hangin’.”

  * * *

  OUT INTO THE STREET we all went, surrounded by a cordon of stern-faced Vigilantes, the best and best-armed men in San Francisco. And though it was near one-thirty in the morning, the crowd seemed to come from everywhere to witness this new form of justice, to jeer and cheer, to surge and swirl as we started up the hill to Portsmouth Square.

  I knew it would be a brutal climb for a man with a gunshot leg. So I would stay close to him on his final walk, no matter what the town thought, go with him, help him, support him. In truth, I would have done it even if he had been moving on two good legs.

  But after a block, he wobbled and fell to one knee. As I tried to lift him, he said, “Don’t worry, Jamie. If I go a little slower I get a few more minutes of life.”

  “Damn, Michael, but I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “I’m sorry, too, lad, sorry that when I circled back that day—with everyone in town to hang Cletis, with Sloate gone the wrong way lookin’ for me—sorry that I took your gold, too. Dug it up and spent it. But I held on to the Chinese gold, held it to swap for Mei-Ling. But now … ah, Jamie, what a bollocks. I’ll never live to pay you back.”

  I told him I forgave him.

  He patted may arm, then said, “Ah…’t’would have been a bollocks if I lived, too. I’d have had to kill Chin. Then Mei-Ling, she’d have hated me forever.” Flynn raised his head to the dark night sky, thought some dark thought, then turned to me, his eyes glistening in the torchlight. “At least you’re in the clear, Jamie. I killed Hodges. Never say otherwise to anyone. I pulled the trigger. Just stay strong, and … and stay merciful.”

  I helped him to his feet, he leaned one arm on the crutch and the other on me, and we kept on. Just before we came to the square, he said, “Whatever happens, you have that baby. Bring him up strong and straight, and tell him about his Uncle Michael.”

  Then the mob in the square saw our moving clump of men approaching. Voices rose. Angry faces pressed in from every direction. Someone shouted that they sho
uldn’t hang criminals from the liberty pole. That was a symbol of America’s greatness and “too great for the likes of these bastards!”

  Someone else shouted that they should find a tree instead.

  Another pointed toward the old adobe city hall, where an exposed beam and support formed a huge wooden cross. “Do it there!”

  Michael Flynn did not seem to care. He was losing strength, and blood, too, in a long trail that traced all the way back to the waterfront. When he tripped and sank to his knees again, Matt Dooling appeared from the crowd and lifted him gently.

  “Ah, Matt. Grand to see you. You’re a grand friend,” said Flynn. “Even if you are helpin’ me to a noose.”

  “This is a terrible thing, Michael.” Matt Dooling was crying big unabashed tears. “Just terrible.”

  Flynn tried to wipe the sweat from his eyes, hunching his face to his shoulder.

  And there came Roberta, the whore, pushing forward, tearing one of her dirty petticoats, and wiping the sweat from Flynn’s face.

  She said, “I hope it wasn’t me singin’ that Irish song that got you in this trouble.”

  He said, “You done a grand thing, darlin’. And the voice of an angel you have.”

  Then Janiva’s hand reached through the crowd to grab mine.

  Matt Dooling said, “I couldn’t keep her at home.”

  I gripped her and pulled her close, glad for her presence but fearful at the same time, and angry that she would expose our unborn child to such a mob. But when she touched Flynn’s face and kissed his cheek and he smiled as if she had given him his freedom, I thanked God that she had come.

  Reese Shipton said, “We need to move, folks, I’m sorry.” And we started across the wide greensward, toward the old adobe city hall lit now by furious torchlight. Jenkins walked ahead of us, calmly smoking his cigar, but I could feel the emotion boiling in Flynn, as it was boiling in my own belly, and in Janiva, and in the ravening crowd itself.

  Then someone stepped in front of us and ordered us to stop. His name was James Kenney, a state senator. Half a dozen others surged in behind him, as if they would oppose the lynching by force.