Blood Gold (16 page)

I rushed forward, angling the knife so the blade would drive upward—into his heart.

He brought up the pistol as my shadow was about to fall over him.

He pulled the trigger, and there was that characteristic split-second delay of such weapons, a flint spark and a sputtering whiff of smoke rising from the pan.

I never heard the shot.

CHAPTER 44

Time had passed, but I did not know how much.

I lay flat on my back. The sky stretched blue and empty overhead, and tall pines rose up on either side.

I believed that I was alive, but I was not sure. I breathed the enduring scent of gunpowder, an odor of sulfur and carbon. The sandy ground was hard, grit rasping against my cheek as I turned my head. I could not move my arms or legs for a long time. I lay there knitting together the time of day, and the events that had led up to my current condition.

I was in pain, and I was aware of a nagging, but still badly scattered sense of danger. It was afternoon, I reckoned, and I was alone. I had been unconscious for a good long while, perhaps hours.

After a very long time, I did manage to lift one hand and flex my fingers. I touched my coat buttons, trying to take reassurance from the fact that my hand answered my will. I groped up toward the charred wool of my jacket breast. I felt revulsion at the sensation of frizzled fiber, and the round, charred crater over my heart.

I could not move my left hand, my arm and my ribs paralyzed. But at once I contradicted this discovery, forcing myself into action as I struggled to my feet. I was exposed there, high above the campsite, and Murray could return at any moment.

I could move my arms after all. And I could walk, although shakily, first one step and then another. My ribs throbbed. My knife lay on the ground, and I groaned involuntarily as I snatched it from the sandy soil. I vomited, an agonizing spasm, but what my mouth emitted was the transformed relics of bacon and corn flour. There was no blood.

I cringed at the thought of probing a wound in my chest, but I made myself begin to do just that, feeling within my coat and gasping when I touched the warped, deformed metal there, what was left of my pewter flask of Dutch gin.

I extracted the wrecked container with effort, the dent left by the pistol ball clear and perfect, as though the round peen of a hammer had struck the metal. The bullet had flattened, and the flask dribbled what was left of the medicinal spirits. I was bruised and numb, but there was no wound.

Trees murmured and twigs sighed, the woodland breathing all around. Every tiny abrasion of branch against granite could be Murray and his companion, on their way back to finish me.

CHAPTER 45

I half climbed, half fell down the shrub-choked slope, all the way down into the camp. In my shaky condition, even this desolate ruin of a site was an improvement over the rocky woodland above.

By then the flies were thick around the two bodies, the sun brighter than ever. I half stumbled to the river, all the way out on the black sand of Spanish Bar, and splashed cold water on my arms and my face. I cupped some of the chilly water in my hand, and poured it over the fierce bruise on the white skin of my chest.

A sense of duty made me survey the delved and shoveled site, wondering which hole would be a suitable grave for my old friend and his fellow gold seeker. But then I reminded myself that it would be unwise and perhaps even illegal to bury them until civilized people had examined this scene. Somehow, there would have to be some sort of lawful proceeding—an inquest.

At the same time I felt naked. My Bowie knife now seemed puny. How little I could do to fight Murray off, I realized, if he returned. Something about the bloody mining tool made me cringe—I did not want to lay a hand on it. I found myself rummaging through the tent and found a hatchet, the iron edge grimy with pine sap.

As I let this tool fall, I heard a voice call out over the rush of the river. I turned to gaze at the shambles of the tent, telling myself I was certainly mistaken.

It rang out again—someone calling my name.

I stepped into daylight.

The source of the cry was a figure in gray: a miner's gray shirt, loose-fitting trousers, and a slouch hat. This individual called my name again, and bounded over the torn ground, carrying a shotgun.

I wondered where, exactly, I had dropped that perfectly good hatchet.

Well, then, I would die twice in one day, I thought, standing upright in the warm sunlight. I steeled myself for a charge of lead from both barrels.

The figure approached, her green eyes bright.

CHAPTER 46

I followed Florence on weak legs, my boots slipping from time to time as we made our way upriver.

I offered her a breathless, fragmented version of events as we hurried over the rocks and pine roots of the trail. She had much to tell me, too. Florence had snatched the gun off the ground before Jeremiah could stop her, and run to find me. She said that, as usual, she was much faster than any of her relations. “They're probably a mile or two off, even now,” she said, “falling down in their hurry.”

“I'm grateful to see you, Florence,” I said.

“Watch your step here, William,” she said. “Don't stumble on that broken log.”

She leveled the shotgun every time we rounded a boulder on a bend in the river, lifting a hand to caution me.

We found them before long.

A rope had been stretched across the river by some enterprising miner in the recent past. Murray hung suspended from this makeshift crossing, clinging with white fists in the middle of the current. The rope was river-stained and slightly frayed where it dipped into the water. Murray's weight pulled it further, straining the span of cordage. His toothless companion had made it to the other side, and he cried out encouragement, his mouth working, his words soundless against the rush of the river.

Florence lifted the shotgun to her shoulder, and cocked both barrels.

You don't aim a gun like that so much as point it, estimating range with your eye. For a long moment I was frozen, sure that she was going to judge the gun capable of hitting the red-haired man.

“Don't waste the powder,” I said, when I could move my lips.

When she didn't respond, I added, “He's too far away.”

She said, “I know that.”

It is the major drawback to scatterguns. Close in they can be deadly, but too far away they are only a source of noise.

She kept the double-barreled gun pressed to her shoulder, the very picture of menace. Murray waved beseechingly, calling out something in a tone of supplication. I could make out the words on his lips,
don't shoot
, and something else: explanation, promise—it was impossible to hear more than the drift of his voice. He patted his clothing meaningfully, indicating something secreted on his bulk.

She took long strides toward Murray, well out in the water now, the lapping current up round the shanks of her boots. She pressed the gun to her shoulder, and took the stance of a person well used to hunting.

I joined her, the cold river nearly to my boot tops. “It's still too far,” I said quietly. I meant: Let him go.

I had seen enough violence.

Murray was wide-eyed, motioning with one hand while the hard current dragged him. The rope was pulled downriver by the weight of his body, and Florence kept both barrels steady, the muzzles of the barrels tracking him as he splashed.

Murray looked around to take in the sight of his imploring companion, then back at us with no further attempt to communicate. He measured the width of the river back and forth with his gaze, and took one more look at Florence, who was up to her waist now in the fast current.

She fired one barrel, a hard, punching sound over the roar of the rapids.

The shot went far wide, momentarily scarring the boiling current. But Murray, mouthing a curse, let go of the rope. He sank at once, down below the surface of the water. I expected to see his face again, breaking into the daylight, but there was no sign of him.

It was one thing to want to kill Murray, but quite another to stand there and watch him drown. I was in the icy water, scrambling over the boulders, wading out into the current. I fought the pull of the current, but as I struggled for better footing, my legs were swept out from under me. I swam hard, my ribs aching, right for the place where I expected Murray to reappear.

But he did not surface again. Something forced him down to the bottom of the river, and through the streaks of current I could see him struggling, his arms reaching, flailing in the depths.

CHAPTER 47

My own garments, my belt and my boots, were dragging me down. I fought hard against my own sodden weight, and against the cold current, until I reached Murray. His arms were drifting now, strengthlessly, but one of his limp hands wafted out toward me, and I clung to it.

I could not pull him up. The lingering life in him wrenched his hand from mine, and when I found him once more he was a man of stone, a figure I could not lift. I struggled to the sunlight, drank in deep, sweet drafts of air, and then I was underwater again, groping, searching.

This time I folded him over my shoulder and half swam, half trudged along the river bottom, my feet slipping, the breath burning in my lungs. By the time I saw clear daylight and breathed oxygen, Florence was out in the river again, clinging to the rope, reaching out for me.

She seized me as I struggled to drag Murray. I was gasping, the cold numbing me, Murray's bulk impossibly heavy. I was barely able to cling to him against the force of the river, and I wrestled with the slowly rolling form until I heard welcome voices, Johnny and bearded Timothy wading out into the rapids, calling to me, lending me their helping hands.

We dragged Murray out of the water, and higher, all the way up to the torn and shoveled mining claim, and stretched him out there in the brilliant sunlight.

His mouth was agape and his eyes fixed, the water puddling wide around his body. I tugged my knife from its sheath, and used the blade to cut open the source of Murray's unnatural weight, his bulging pockets.

For an instant it looked like blood, the spilling, richly flowing stuff pouring from the gashes in his clothing.

It was gold.

PART THREE

THE RIVER

CHAPTER 48

“There's another bear in the supply shed,” reported Johnny.

“Talk to it, Johnny. Tell it to go away,” I said, too busy shoveling wet gravel into the mining cradle to bother with an interruption.

Spanish Bar had turned out to be a veritable thoroughfare for every drowsy, half-starved bear in the Sierra foothills. The incessant mining activity aroused them from hibernation. Word was that a miner from Georgia had been found clawed to death near Iowa Hill.

“It won't come out,” replied Johnny.

He had just returned from the Barrymore camp with a sack of coffee and some plug tobacco, and I had left our supply shed unattended in his absence.

Grizzly bears, especially she-bears with cubs, could be a menace, but the common brown bears were harmless, if powerful, vagrants, breaking their hibernation with occasional raids on poorly secured larders. We had not seen a grizzly here in the foothills, but the brown bruins had helped themselves to our bacon and our cornmeal, breaking into the shed as fast as I could repair it.

I made my way across the dug-up claim, hoping a word from me would discourage our most recent guest.

I was sorry Florence was not here. She was living at Dutch Bar, under the watchful eyes of her family. She would have known what to do with a bear, or any other sort of intruder.

It was a cold morning in the winter of 1850. Five weeks had passed since the deaths of Ezra and the others. Cholera and rising river waters were devastating Sacramento City. I didn't go down there to observe the disaster at first hand, occupied as I was helping the Barrymores working the Nevin-Follette claim. The family had bought the claim at an auction at Welsh Flat, the proceeds to go to the kin of the two gentlemen back in Philadelphia, along with the tidy fortune we had found on Murray's body.

I liked the Barrymores. They paid me a fair share of the gold flakes I dug out of the sodden ground, but my future was in repairing the iron tools breaking and losing their edge all over the Sierra foothills. Captain Deerborn had a new shipment arriving any day from Baltimore. He could use a younger partner, he had said, who could hawk ironware from Shirt Tail Canyon to Grass Valley and back, and I agreed with him that the sale and repair of such items was the smartest way to put color in my strongbox.

Captain Deerborn had held an inquest at Welsh Flat the week before Christmas. I testified at the outdoor legal proceeding, which the captain himself—resplendent in newly polished spurs—had presided over as acting coroner. I put my hand on the Bible and told what I had seen.

The jury of Forty-niners, including Aaron Sweetland and Jeremiah Barrymore, delivered a verdict of homicide, and charged the late Samuel Van Buren Murray of Philadelphia with the crime. The unknown toothless pugilist was listed as an accessory and was still at large. Most observers were of the opinion that his luckless remains would be found during the spring thaw, wolf-gnawed in one of the mountain passes.

I had used my best penmanship in describing Ezra's good fortune and untimely death to Elizabeth, but I kept tossing the half-completed letters into the campfire. I was running out of blank pages in Ezra's journal, and I accepted the fact that any letter writing would have to wait. I would send a good portion of my own earnings back to Elizabeth, to help Ezra's child get a start in life, but the young woman I had known in Philadelphia was already changing from a living presence to someone I had trouble remembering.

Now I was standing outside our lean-to, watching as the makeshift structure swayed, the creature inside just visible through the slats in the wooden walls.

I struck the side of the shed with my shovel, and the animal responded by leaning nearly all his weight on the plank wall, forcing the square-headed nails to loosen with a chorus of squeaks.