Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  My mother listened to my relation of my successes in San Francisco as a fledgling reporter for The Hornet. I bragged a little, enlarged a bit. She appreciated good news so much it was impossible not to make some up to satisfy her appetite. I did not mention slashed whores, however, feeling I had entertained her sufficiently.

  “How’s the Gent?” I asked.

  “He’s working for the SP. Mr. Wallingford thinks he’s a natural wonder. Oh, he could sweet-talk an orang-outang out of a banana.” She said this with pride.

  She wanted to know why I was going to Virginia City. “The Gent says the lode is all used up, people moving on. They’ll be closing the mines soon. He is the world authority on anything to do with mining except how to make money by it.”

  I listened to secondhand reports of the successes of Michael in Denver, Brian in Chicago and Emma in Portland with her third baby.

  “Do you know what he does for the SP?” I said.

  She peered up and down the street and lowered her voice. “Bobby Wallingford works over at the legislature. I think he passes out money to the Representatives and Senators. The Gent probably carries his carpetbag and the account book. He’d like giving money away. He has always been good at that.”

  I produced the Manila cigar with its red, white and blue band someone had given Bierce and passed it on to my mother.

  “Thanks, baby,” she said, pocketing the cigar.

  I heard the clatter of hoofs before I saw the Gent appear. He turned the corner on a handsome gray, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, holding up an arm in greeting. He tied the gray’s reins to the fence and stamped up the walk to embrace me.

  “Good to see you, boy!”

  He was a fine-looking man, thickening through the waist but stylishly dressed, sporting black whiskers with slashes of white on either side of his big grin. My mother headed back into the house.

  I told him I was bound for Virginia City on newspaper business.

  “Sad place,” he said, shaking his head, and settling in the chair beside me with his shiny boots up on the rail. “Thanks, hon,” he said, when my mother brought him a glass of lemonade.

  “You spent some time there, didn’t you?” I said.

  “Briefly, briefly,” he said. “They got your money away from you pretty fast on the Washoe.” He grinned at me, as though we both appreciated his weakness.

  “Tell me about the Comstock,” I said.

  “Never been there, have you?”

  “Never been to Nevada at all.”

  “The Comstock paid for the War, you know. Made San Francisco what it is today besides. Silver ore and stock games.” He managed to nod and shake his head at the same time in some inner recollection and amusement. Then he assumed a serious expression.

  “Well, sir, there are two canyons running off Mount Davidson, Six-mile Canyon and Gold Canyon, and there was an old bird that’d staked some claims there named Henry Comstock. Old Pancake he was called. There was some gold but an awful lot of trash blue mud with it, till somebody sent in that blue for assay and it proved out about three thousand dollars a ton silver.”

  My mother watched us from the far chair, gauzed in blue smoke from the cigar I had brought her. “Tell him about that mine you had an interest in,” she said.

  “They say there were seventeen thousand claims around Mount Davidson in the ‘60s, and five of them were mine,” my father said. “In ‘63 alone there were some three thousand Comstock properties selling shares on the San Francisco Stock Exchange. Most came to naught, like mine. Or got euchered up because someone was a lot smarter than you were.

  “The Ophir, the Hale and Norcross, the Yellow Jacket, the Consolidated-Virginia and the Con-Ohio had run holes down to five or six hundred feet where they begun to peter out. Shares dropped to next to nothing and the Ralston Ring and the Bank of California started buying up shares and claims, and Ralston sent Will Sharon to Virginia City to take charge of things. The Big Bonanza came in at a thousand feet and made fortunes for Ralston and Sharon, and Nat McNair and those Irishmen that controlled the Consolidated-Virginia, and a pack of other fry. So the Bank of California and Frisco began living high on Comstock silver.

  “Then there was a bewilderment of stock options and shenanigans, boomers and plungers, assessments and bankruptcies, fake bonanzas and real ones, until the whole mess of it blew up and the Bank of California went bust and Billy Ralston took his last swim. Sharon ended up with his debts and assets, paid off debts at pennies on dollars and held onto the assets and showed himself to be the sneaking rotten two-timing son of a bitch he is. I hear he has got his hands full of this Rose of Sharon lawsuit, howsomever.”

  I asked if he had known Highgrade Carrie. His eyes squinted just a bit before they fixed on mine.

  “Heard of her, Son,” he said. “Quite a woman, I believe. The Miner’s Angel.”

  “Angel is as angel does,” my mother said.

  “Angel does is just why she was called the Miner’s Angel,” my father said.

  When it was time to go my father gave me a lift on his borrowed gray, up behind his saddle, which made me feel like a boy. I looked back to wave to my mother on the porch.

  Braced against my father’s back, jogged with the horse’s motion, I recalled the good and the bad of my childhood. The Gent had been a strong part of the good. We had fished off the riverbank by the big snag, seated side by side with our poles at the same angle, lines falling together into the brown swirl of water. He had taught me how to play ball, patiently pitching the baseball to my mitt, a hand-me-down from Michael, and patiently pitching to Brian’s bat. He had brought me home new books I had known he could not afford. He had never paid attention to what he couldn’t afford.

  I remembered him weeping when Michael punched him in the eye and left home.

  “Those were beautiful ladies in Virginia City,” my father said over his shoulder. “Julia Bulette and Highgrade Carrie. Those were some times,” he said.

  “A Mrs. Bettis said she’d known you on the Washoe,” I said.

  “Don’t recall anybody by that name. What’s she look like?”

  I didn’t do very well remembering what Mrs. Bettis had looked like, much less describing her.

  “Probably her married name,” my father said. “Or she was using a different name. Lot of folks used different names, on the Comstock.”

  He left me off at the station, with promises to take me out for a fine dinner the next time he came down to the City. On the train there was a half-hour wait before the conductor called the all-aboard, and the cars lurched and jangled with the tug of the engine.

  On the Truckee & Virginia headed south down the Washoe Valley, I gazed out the window at the eastern peaks of the Sierra Nevada. The snow line was so regular it looked drawn with a ruler. The snow caught the sun like some heavenly show of the purity of nature, but I could see by the sparse timbering of those lower slopes that men had been at work cutting down the forests and sawing up the logs for cordwood, and for cribbing for the stopes of the Comstock Lode.

  After a halt in Carson City, the train chuffed on around the mountain, up and up, curve after curve, tunnel after tunnel lined with blackened zinc against the sparks from the smokestacks, slow enough so I could get out of the cars to stride alongside, on up toward Mount Davidson, Virginia City and the Comstock Lode. The mountain was scarred with coyote hole mines and weathered shacks. I descended from my car into the depot below the town to the thin distant crashing of stamp mills.

  A few bums, a shawled woman with a sickly child by the hand and a blanket Indian with a face as dark as mud stood watching the passengers come off the train. I climbed the hill in the shadow of the mountain, with my satchel slapping against my leg, up to C Street where stores and saloons fronted on boardwalks in need of repair. Virginia City was not a bustling community.

  In the International Hotel, where spittoons glinted among the potted palms on worn carpeting, the racket of the stamps was felt through the soles rather than heard. I
engaged a room on the second floor. There did not seem to be any other guests. When I opened my window that looked out on C Street and down a canyon slashed with tan dumps and tailings, the stamp mills’ pounding came loudly again.

  A horse car with a weary gray horse and a listless driver took me and a red-shirted miner with a crippled leg north out C Street, to where I had been directed to the Consolidated-Ohio, which had absorbed the Jack of Spades. From a rutted wagon road I gazed down on a spur of track where there were flatcars stacked with cordwood and a cluster of wooden buildings with corrugated iron roofs splashed with patches of rust, all of them centered around a central two-story structure with tanks and ladders and smokeless chimneys on the roof, and a glimpse through high windows of ranks of dusty machinery. Over the tallest section of the main building were the fading letters: CONSOLIDATED-OHIO. The Con-Ohio appeared to be shut down.

  As I strolled down the wagon road toward the mine, a bearded man wearing a wicker-sided conductor’s cap appeared out of a shed and leaned on his crutch watching me approach; another lame man.

  “We’re closed up, friend,” he said, when I came up.

  “Just wanted to see the famous Jack of Spades,” I said.

  “Nothing to see. Closed down. I’m just here so nobody’ll come past and see there’s nobody here.”

  “Which part is the Jack of Spades?” I asked.

  With a sweep of his arm, he said, “Jack of Spades is the near adit in there.”

  “I’m looking for some information,” I said.

  “Tell you, friend, if you want information on anything in this dead place, you just see Mr. Devers. He’s editor at the Sentinel.”

  “You wouldn’t give me a look-in at the Jack of Spades for a dollar?”

  His tongue swiped over his lips. He had coarse whiskers that stuck straight forward out of his face like gray quills. He removed his cap and scraped his fingers through a tangle of dull hair. “Can’t do that, mister. You git now.”

  “I’m interested in Nat McNair and his missus,” I said.

  “They’s nothing to do with Con-Ohio any more. Anyway, he’s dead, ain’t he?” He peered past me. “Oh-oh!” he muttered.

  A man strode toward us from a gaping door in the main building. He was black-headed, black-bearded, wearing a black suit and boots, gesturing as he came. They were not friendly gestures. I thought he was going to walk right through me, but he stopped a foot away. Staring into my face, he addressed the crippled man:

  “Who’s this, Phelps?”

  “Says he’s interested in the Jack of Spades, Major.”

  “Tell him we will welcome the sight of his coattails, if you please.”

  “Better git, friend.”

  I said to the younger man, “I’m interested in the McNairs—”

  “Get him out of here, Phelps,” he said, glaring at me. He had cheeks as red as apples. He swung around and stalked back to the open door.

  Phelps pointed.

  The horse car seemed to have ceased operation for the day, so I walked back to town.

  I found Editor Devers, the fount of information on Virginia City, in the saloon across the street from the International Hotel. He was sitting on a stool at the far end of the bar in the stance of a jockey on a fast horse. He was clean-shaven, with an unhealthy brown complexion. His dark suit was rumpled, his collar was dirty and he looked like an editor who had seen better times and did not expect to see them again. A bottle of Old Crow spiked up on the bar before him.

  “Devers,” he said. He regarded me in the mirror behind the bar instead of face to face. “Josephus P. Devers, yes, sir. Wounded at Second Manassas, mustered out and came west. Seen the great days of the Comstock. Now this camp is done with. Mines closing down. They are letting them flood to water-table level. Con-Ohio’s closed down. Ophir’s closed down. Nothing but assessments-due in the Sentinel these days. They say they’ve come up with new methods for working over low-grade ore in the tailings, but nothing’s doing there yet.” He nodded at me in the mirror.

  “It’ll come back, Josey,” the bartender called down to him.

  He shook his head. He kept shaking it for a long time.

  I said I was a friend of young Beaumont McNair and held my breath.

  This time he turned to glance at me directly. His teeth and eyeballs were the same tint of yellow.

  “McNair,” he said.

  “The Comstock millionaire. His father, I mean.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Married a woman from here named Carrie.”

  There was a silence. I had a sense of having missed the ball, maybe only strike one.

  “The Jack of Spades,” I said.

  “Oh, yes.” He watched me in the mirror again.

  “I understand that Beau McNair’s mother no longer owns the Consolidated-Ohio,” I said.

  He nodded lengthily. “Sold out, closed down. Yes. Everybody with brains in their heads is clearing out. Oh, I’ve seen the great days, but it’s all over now.”

  “I understand the Jack of Spades was one of the first mines,” I said.

  Nodding, Devers said, “Nat McNair took over in ‘64, I believe it was. Had some fights with the Bank Crowd‌—‌Ralston and Sharon and them. Then the Silver Kings come to bat. Flood, O’Brien, Fair and Mackay. In ‘75 the Bank of California went bust. Just in time for the Big Bonanzas! That’s when Nat McNair made his fortune. Bought up the Peterkin and Ohio right next door to the Jack of Spades. Consolidated-Ohio! Drifted into a big orebody. But he didn’t make his fortune digging silver out of the ground, he made it manipulating stocks. They all did, all the Silver Kings.” He pointed a finger at me. “There was more money made booming stocks than there was mineral taken out of the ground. Had our own stock exchange, right here! They weren’t interested in mining, they were interested in the fixed poker game they had set up. And that’s the tragedy of the Comstock Lode!”

  “Well, Mrs. McNair is Lady Caroline Stearns now,” I said.

  “She is a wonder of the world, that lady,” Devers said.

  I said I heard something about a spades club, a Society of Spades. “Maybe it was investors who bought up Jack of Spades stock?”

  He nodded for a long time. He splashed more whiskey into his glass. “Nat McNair, Highgrade Carrie‌—‌Caroline LaPlante, her name was.”

  “A madam.”

  “A damned fine woman! The Miner’s Angel, some called her.” Devers stuck his chin out at me as though that was a second strike. Then his forehead creased with thought. “Al Gorton. E. O. Macomber. Somebody else.”

  “Elza Klosters?” I said.

  Devers shook his head. “No, Elza worked for Nat McNair. Enforcer. Later on he was one of the deputies at that Mussel Slough shoot-up, as I recall.”

  The Railroad again!

  “Al Gorton’s dead,” he added. “Murdered down in San Francisco.”

  “Clubbed?” I said.

  His face jerked toward me. “Why, I believe that’s right!” he said. “Did you know Al?”

  “I think Beau said something.”

  “Believe I’ve got a tintype of that bunch in the files,” he said.

  “I’d surely like to see it.”

  “Come by in the morning. I’m not too busy these days. We’re up on B Street.”

  “What I’m not clear about is how McNair ended up with control of the Jack of Spades.”

  “What I said. You get a certain stock position and you can call for assessments until you drive out the weaker investors. Often enough that was how those Silver Kings got their control. Nat McNair was one of the worst of them. Will Sharon was the total worst. No offense to your friend meant, you understand.”

  “So Beau’s mother got out of the Consolidated-Ohio.”

  “Year, eighteen months ago. Listen: between ‘71 and ‘81 the Comstock produced about $320,000,000 and paid $147,000,000 in dividends. Last year there weren’t many dividends paid, and this year my pages are filled with assessment notices. There are not
many stockholders paying assessments any more, I can tell you.”

  “Did she sell out to a man called Major?”

  “Major Copley,” Devers said. “He’s just the super for the bunch that bought it.” He poured more whiskey.

  He was fading. He sat lower on his stool, and he didn’t face me at all any more, gazing at the mirror with drooping eyelids. Finally the bartender said, “About time to go home, Josey?”

  “Home,” Devers muttered.

  “Where’s Jimmy Fairleigh?” the bartender said.

  “Hey, Jimmy!” one of the other drinkers called, and a bunch of them began laughing and shouting, “Jimmy! Hey, Jimmy Fairleigh!”

  A little man appeared, wearing a cloth cap and a tight little suit over a big bottom. He was a dwarf, with a big, ugly face that was a curious mix of old and young. He fronted up to Devers and said, “Time to go home, Mr. Devers!”

  Devers slid off his stool and, leaning on the little man and stepping carefully, as though traversing treacherous ground, made his way to the street door and was gone.

  “Does he do that every night?” I asked the barkeep, who was swabbing the bar where Devers had sat.

  “Every night except Sundays,” the barkeep replied.

  “Wouldn’t think he’d be much good in the morning,” I said.

  “He’ll be right there at his desk in the morning, nose to the wind,” the barkeep said.

  9.

  LABOR, n. – One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  I was sitting on my bed in my nightshirt when there was a knock, and another, very peremptory, as I started toward the door. When I opened it a man shoved in past me, breathing hard as though he’d just run up the stairs. He was the gent the watchman had called “Major” from the Consolidated-Ohio Mine. Major Copley.

  He swung around to face me, no one but me to talk to this time. I felt at a disadvantage in my slippers and nightshirt. The gasjet hissed.

  I asked him what he wanted.