The Ladies of Sutter's Fort

by Jane Toombs

  “Danny O’Lee!” She felt suddenly lightheaded but when Rhynne stepped toward her she held up her hand. “You know?” she whispered.

  “I know. No one else does.”

  “How dare you bring up Danny’s name. You’re certainly no gentleman, Mr. Rhynne.”

  “I think you told me that once before. In San Francisco. At the time I said I didn’t pretend to be. I still don’t.”

  “You also said you’d wait to see if I was a lady or not.”

  “Yes, and I’ve decided. You are.” He took the medicine bottle from his pocket and handed it to her. “I’ll do the best I can to get laudanum for you.”

  “I’ll pay you.” She took a small glass from her bag, poured in a bit of laudanum and drank it.

  “That won’t be necessary.” He picked up his chair and turned it to face hers. Sitting down, he took her hands in his. “Pamela,” he said, “with you, tonight, I’m as shy as a boy.”

  Though she looked down at his hands holding hers she did not pull away.

  “When I found out about your need for laudanum,” he said, “then later when I became aware of you and young O’Lee, I thought I’d force you to bed with me. I was a fool. That’s not what I really wanted.”

  “And what is it you really want?”

  “Someone to talk to.”

  “To talk to?” She smiled as he watched her warily. Then, putting her head back, she laughed until tears came to her eyes. She took her hands from his, found a handkerchief in her bag and dabbed at her face.

  “I was afraid you might find me amusing,” Rhynne said.

  “Oh, W.W., I’m not laughing at you. I’m not, I’m not. I’m just so relieved.”

  “I’m not sure I like that sentiment any better.”

  She took his hands, holding one in each of hers, and squeezed them. “If you had forced me,” she said, “I would have hated you. Eventually I might even have killed you. I detest the idea of being forced. It’s not you--I don’t detest you. It’s having to do what I don’t want to do. The violation. Do you understand?”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “Do you know, W.W., I’m almost disappointed. Does that make sense?”

  “Do you mean you want to ... ?”

  “No, no, I don’t. Perhaps someday, if the time is right. Not now. Not tonight.”

  “I can wait, Pamela. In fact I’d rather wait. I’m a very patient man.”

  “And you only want to talk?”

  “Is that so strange? Whom do I have to talk to? Reverend Colton? Abe? Ned? The miners in the bar? The gamblers? What do I really have in common with most of them? Besides, they’re men and I’m not attracted to men. I much prefer women.”

  “W.W., I’ll gladly talk to you whenever you wish. But why the intrigue?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose I don’t know any other way.”

  “About this new bed? I heard you were ordering one.”

  “New bed? No, this isn’t about the new bed. I don’t expect it to arrive for some weeks yet. Ah, but it’s a grand and glorious scheme, Pamela. I’m buying the most magnificent bed in California and installing it in our largest room. There’ll be a lottery and the winner will be rewarded with a night in the bed. I expected to sell one hundred tickets for the bed.”

  “Who would pay a hundred dollars for a night at the Empire? No matter how grand the bed may be?”

  Rhynne stood and walked to the window. “Well,” he said, not looking at her, “I suppose I might as well tell you now as later. I’ve let word get around that the bed will be occupied.”

  “Occupied?”

  “By the most beautiful woman in the western world.”

  Pamela puzzled, said, “I’ve heard Selena called that.” She jumped to her feet. “W.W.! You don’t mean you’re offering Selena as a prize. You wouldn’t do that!”

  He turned and put his hand on her arm. “Of course I’m not. Her name’s never been mentioned and never will be.”

  “And what happens when you hold your drawing and someone claims his prize? What will you do then?”

  “That’s the glory of the scheme.” He reached under his bed and dragged out a rough pine box with a slot in the top.

  “I thought that box was behind the bar downstairs,” Pamela said, growing even more puzzled.

  “This is a second box, identical to the first. In this one I’ve put one hundred lottery tickets. When the drawing is held, this will be the box we use. And every ticket will have the same number on it.”

  “And who is this lucky winner?”

  “The Reverend James Colton. Who will promptly request a cash prize in lieu of the advertised award, the money going to his church.”

  “Rhynne, someday you’re going to outwit yourself.”

  “Not with this lottery. We’ll end up with nine thousand dollars to divide between the two of us.”

  “One hundred times one hundred comes to ten thousand.”

  “There are certain expenses. I made a donation today to the Reverend Colton’s church. And there’ll be the second one when he wins.”

  They heard hoof beats approaching on the street outside. Pamela went to the window and peered between the curtain and the frame.

  “Only some miners,” she said after a moment.

  “You seemed worried.”

  “I was and am. About Diego de la Torre.”

  “Wasn’t that the last name of that Mexican gal?” he asked. “Who is this Diego?”

  She told him of Selena’s elopement, not concealing her part in it. “I admit I misled Diego,” she admitted.

  “And you think he means to harm you or Selena?”

  “He lost Selena. And now his sister’s dead. I don’t know what he might do. I’m afraid, W.W., I’m afraid.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The man who called himself Pike threw his pan to the ground. He had found nothing to repay him for his ten hours of panning, not a gold nugget, not a flake, not even a bit of dust. Another day wasted.

  Bad luck had dogged Pike all his life.

  Back home in Missouri he had tried farming and failed. He had clerked in a grain-and-feed emporium. He had not failed there. Six months after he was hired, the store failed. After his wife left him, he stole horses and made a tolerable living at it for a time, only to be caught red-handed. Faced with a hangman’s noose, he escaped from the county jail and fled Pike County in ‘47.

  The run of bad luck wasn’t his fault. Was he to blame for two years of drought, for the hardscrabble Missouri soil, for all the damn foreigners?

  The bad luck followed him west. Even before his wagon train reached the mountains he’d come down with the scurvy, his hands and feet swelling. Then he was caught borrowing a few cans of food to keep himself going, caught only because the swelling by that time was so bad he could hardly walk, much less run. That bastard of a wagon master had abandoned him at Fort Bridger.

  California, so far, had been more of the same.

  After finally making his way to Sutter’s Fort, he suffered a fierce attack of diarrhea and didn’t get to the diggings until October. The winter rains started the next week and so he had to wait till spring. In March he started panning, working fifty pans or more of dirt in a ten-hour day. He’d shoveled the dirt, sorted it, panned the best of the lot, his hands in the ice-cold water for ten minutes and more at a time as he whirled the gravel to wash away the lighter sand and separate the gold from the remaining heavy sand.

  Pike wouldn’t have minded the hard work, he was used to hard work, if he had found gold. He hadn’t, only enough to keep him in salt pork, bread and dried beans. So he’d teamed up with another Pike County man, helping him work a cradle—a box on rockers—one of them shoveling dirt into the hopper while the other added water, all the while violently rocking the cradle. The gold, what there was of it, lodged behind the cleats along the cradle’s bottom. They made a few dollars, no more, before Pike’s partner drifted off after hearing news of a strike to the south.

  Pi
ke could always hire out, of course. He could make five or six dollars a day working for somebody else on a Long Tom, shoveling dirt into the coffin-shaped trough, washing it along the trough to a sieve, then into the riffle where the gold particles were caught by wooden bars.

  He could have worked for others but he didn’t. He knew better. Every time he hired himself out, whether in Missouri or at Sutter’s, he had been cheated. He knew that employers, for whatever reason, saw him as an easy mark.

  The grain-and-feed boss hadn’t paid Pike the wage he’d been promised, blaming the lack of business. At Sutter’s, they said he was too slow. Who in hell wouldn’t be slow when they had diarrhea? The day after he was fired he saw a Mex doing his old job. Talk about adding insult to injury! Everybody knew how slow they were.

  Bad luck piled on top of bad luck. Now, back on his own again, any change in his luck would have to be for the better.

  Pike walked up the hill to the oak where he had made his camp. His morning’s fire was a black circle on the ground. Beyond the dead fire his blankets were spread on pine boughs. Should I break camp, he asked himself, and move on? Or should I stay? He worried the question, turning it this way and that in his mind. He had just decided to give this claim another day and was heading for the woods in search of fuel for his fire when he heard the hoof beats.

  With one hand on the butt of the gun in his belt, Pike looked down along the creek. A hundred yards below him three horsemen, dressed in the black and silver of Californios, were dismounting to water their horses. Pike watched as one of the men pointed down the creek and another shook his head, gesturing on along the trail they had been following. The third man listened, looking from one of his companions to the other as though undecided.

  Lost. The damn greasers were lost. You might know, Pike told himself, relaxing.

  One of the horsemen, the undecided one, saw Pike. Saying something to the others, he left them and started to climb the hill on foot. Probably wanted to know the way to Coloma. All they had to do, Pike knew, was follow the creek downstream to the town.

  Hands on hips, Pike waited for the Mexican, a thin, wiry man with a small black moustache, to reach him. When the Californio was still twenty feet away he removed his black hat and held it respectfully in front of him.

  “Lost?” Pike asked.

  “Si. We are strangers in search of Coloma.”

  Pike pointed across the creek into the hills, smiling to himself. They’d end up twenty miles out of their way, maybe even get lost in the mountains.

  “Are you Senor Pike?” the Mexican asked.

  “I’m Pike,” he said, surprised.

  The Mexican took a pistol from beneath his hat and shot Pike in the right shoulder. Pike spun back but did not fall,

  “I am Diego de la Torre,” the Mexican said.

  Diego shot Pike again, in the left shoulder this time, the force of the bullet knocking him to the ground.

  Pike grunted with pain, trying to reach the gun in his belt. Diego stepped on his hand with the heel of his boot, took the gun from Pike’s belt and tossed it into the brush. He slid a knife from Pike’s boot and hurled it away.

  “I am the brother of Esperanza de la Torre,” Diego said.

  Pike stared at him through a haze of pain. Esperanza. He recognized the name. That was the greaser girl who had killed English Bob in Hang-town two weeks back. Her brother. This was her brother.

  Diego thrust his pistol in his belt and removed a long knife from its sheath. Bending down he grasped the top of Pike’s trousers and pulled them toward him, slitting them with his knife, the blade slicing through belt and fabric, the buttons ripping off. Pike reached for Diego, tried to reach for him. He couldn’t move his arms.

  Diego peeled Pike’s trousers down to his knees, then gripped Pike’s sex in one hand. Pike screamed. Diego held the point of his knife inches from Pike’s eyes. When Pike tried to scramble away, Diego twisted his hand. Pain seared through Pike. All he could see was a jagged red mist. He screamed again. He couldn’t move. The pain grew, became unbearable, then grew worse.

  Pike screamed again. And then he fainted.

  Fainting was the only good luck Pike was to have that day.

  Danny O’Lee whistled as he rode his new two-hundred-dollar mule down the trail toward Hangtown. What a glorious day! Even with the morning sun still behind the Sierras, he knew the day would be clear and hot, yet not unbearably hot for already a breeze stirred at his back. A grand day for a man to go into town for provisions. And perhaps stop by the Empire for a bit of sport. He started to sing:

  “Did you ever hear tell of Sweet Betsy from

  Pike

  Who crossed the wide prairies with her lover Ike?”

  Wouldn’t anyone sing on such a day? Especially a man whose claim was even richer than he’d supposed at first, a man with a whole day ahead of him with nary a cloud in the sky, a man heading for town with a bit of gold dust in his poke, a song on his lips, and a beautiful colleen waiting at the end of his journey?

  Today he would speak to Selena. No longer the inexperienced lad of a few weeks back, he would march up to her and ask her to walk out with him. What else could she say but yes on such a day as this?

  Surely she no longer held a grudge for his highhanded doings on the night of Matt Murphy’s wake. Already he could feel her tiny hand on his arm, see her blue eyes looking up at him, hear her lilting laugh as he told her the story of his luck at the diggings. To think that Pamela was her mother. Why, Pamela must be old, possibly forty, the age of his own mother when she died. She didn’t look that old. He would never forget Pamela and he’d always admire her. There’s be a corner in his heart for her always. But she wasn’t Selena. Golden-haired Selena! He came down the hill into town, the tents and shacks on both sides of the road only outlines in the grey dawn. There were more of them then he remembered seeing when he’d left just two weeks before. Soon Hangtown would be the biggest city in California if not in all the West.

  Only one blight marred Danny’s happiness. He had not found Duke Olmsted, the man who’d murdered his father in cold blood. Wherever he had gone he’d asked after him. He’d not found a trace of the man. Duke seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.

  At the bottom of the hill, Danny turned into the town’s deserted main street. Soon the mules, horses and men on foot would stir the dust into a haze and fill the air with their oaths and shouts, but now in the early morning the town lay unsullied before him, the only movement the smoke drifting from an occasional chimney.

  “Whoa!” he called to his mule.

  Something had caught his eye. There, on the great oak just ahead, the hanging oak. Danny dismounted and peered up. A body dangled from one of the lower limbs of the tree, twisting and turning in the wind.

  He walked to the tree. The man’s body was naked. Danny uttered an inarticulate cry of protest when he saw the slash of dried blood between the man’s legs. His eyes went up to the rope around his neck, to his livid face, finally to his mouth. His mouth. What was in his mouth?

  Danny gagged. He ran to the side of the road and vomited into the ditch.

  That night Danny O’Lee stood at the Empire bar staring at the whisky in his glass, oblivious to the talk around him.

  “Rhynne says he thinks it’s this Diego Dellator, or whatever he calls himself.”

  “He’s the brother to the girl that killed herself.”

  “Why Pike? What did Pike have to do with the girl?”

  “He egged everyone on, didn’t he?”

  “Don’t know. Wasn’t there.”

  “From what I hear, seems no one was there.”

  “Why did the little Mex girl have to go and kill herself? We’d of had a trial and she’d of been let go. Nobody’s about to hang a woman.”

  “Not with them in such short supply, they ain’t.”

  “Maybe English Bob’s lucky after all.”

  “You mean him dying the way he did?”

  “Right. We th
ought he was a goner and then Doc Braithewaite said he’d get better if he didn’t get infected and then the next thing we know he’s dead.”

  “I’d of hated to be him if he hadn’t died. With that Mex butcher after me.”

  “Stuffed Pike’s parts in his mouth, they say.”

  “Here’s the lad what found him. Danny, tell the gentleman.”

  Danny shook his head, still staring at the golden glow of his whisky. He raised the glass, sipped and grimaced.

  “We ought to have law in Hangtown.”

  “Didn’t some of the boys ride out looking for whoever did it?”

  “That they did. They didn’t find nothing ‘cept Pike’s camp. A few hoof prints, Pike’s gun and knife, nothing more.”

  “Whoever killed Pike, why he’s a hundred miles from here by now.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure. He’s crazy, isn’t he? A man’d have to be crazy to do something like that. It’s not natural. Like eating people. And if he is crazy, he’d do something crazy like staying around. Listening to folks talk about what he done. Watching.”

  “You mean he might be here? Now?” The miner looked around him. Though the room was full, the saloon was unusually quiet. “Where’s Rhynne tonight?” the miner asked. “Why don’t we have some music?”

  “We want Selena,” someone shouted.

  “There’s an army man over at Coloma,” the man next to Danny said. “Maybe he could help track this Dellator. I saw him when I was there last week. A lieutenant. Has part interest in the Coloma store, they say.”

  “What’s the army doing in these parts? Still looking for deserters?”

  “More than that. The army has a survey party up in the Sierras. They’re talking about building a rail line from the East.”

  “They’ll never get over them mountains. I come over them myself and I know what I’m talking about. They’ll have to bring her through all that desert down south if they can get her here at all.”

  “There’s Rhynne. W.W., let’s have us some music. The funeral’s supposed to be tomorrow, not tonight.”

  Ned climbed onto the stage and took his place at the piano.