The Gold Seekers (6 page)

Ephraim Crocker rapped with his gavel, but the warning was unnecessary, for the men were silent and still, avoiding each other’s eyes. They had all heard of the terrible cholera epidemic of ‘49, which had ravaged the Mississippi Valley and been carried to the Platte and Green rivers, along the route taken by many of the wagon trains from the East.

Crocker said, thinking to spare the girl from having to make revelations she might not care to admit to in front of strangers, “So you took employment with Jasper Morgan, did you, missy? An’ he brought you here?”

Mercy Bancroft looked up at him gratefully, blinking back her tears. “Yes, sir. The captain told me that he had a cabin here and that he would pay me to cook and clean for him and give me my keep. He seemed to be a gentleman, and I thought—” She broke off, a wave of embarrassed color creeping into her pale cheeks.

Once again Ephraim Crocker sought to spare her. “I reckon that’s all we need to be told on that score. Agreed?” He glanced about him, defying any of the members of his committee to raise objections. None did, and he went on. “But maybe you can help us to conclude this inquiry by sayin’ whether or not Captain Morgan is likely to come back here. We know he’s gone to ‘Frisco, an’ I guess we know why, but did he tell you as it was his intention to come back?”

“No, sir.” The girl shook her head. “He’ll not be back. He left me this.” She took a small buckskin bag from the pocket of her dress. “He said that it was in lieu of wages and that I best return where I came from. But I—I couldn’t do that. My folks came from Lawson, Illinois, but that’s just a small farming community, and I don’t have anyone there. And in Sacramento—” She bit her lower lip and did not go on.

The man named Sam said impatiently, “It’s plain enough, Eph—Morgan’s a murderer an’ a damned thieving rogue. We’ll not see hide nor hair of him back here if he’s got anythin’ to do with it. Let’s quit wastin’ time. We got claims to work, don’t we?”

There was a concerted murmur of assent. Ephraim Crocker gave vent to a resigned sigh. “We got to do things legal, Sam,” he pointed out. “An’ there’s this poor young woman here, orphaned an’ left on her own. She’s as much a victim as them poor young fellers we just laid to rest, ain’t she?”

Several voices were raised, offering suggestions.

“We c’n take up a collection for the little girl.”

“That skunk Morgan won’t come back of his own free will, Eph. But we could send someone to bring him back.”

“Sure we could! An’ then put him on trial fer murder.”

“We got to bring in a verdict against him. Put it to the vote, Eph.”

Luke rose to his feet, knowing suddenly what he had to do, and they fell silent again, waiting for him to speak. He did so boldly, sensing the girl’s eyes on him. “I’ll go search for him and bring him back, Mr. Crocker. I owe my brother that. And Tom and Frankie Gardener were my partners, so if anyone goes, it ought to be me.”

“I guess it ought,” Ephraim Crocker confirmed. He looked worried, but before he could voice any doubts, the men stamped their feet, demanding a vote. It was agreed unanimously that Jasper Morgan was charged with murder and required to stand trial, and in a second vote Luke was authorized, on behalf of the miners’ committee, to bring him back to Thayer’s Bend in order to answer the charges. A hat was passed, and the men contributed generously before hastening off, intent on making up for the time they had lost.

“Take the little girl back to Morgan’s place, will you, Luke?” Crocker requested before following their example. “An” I’ll see you before you set off for “Frisco.”

It was as they were riding back together, the girl on Luke’s saddlebow, that she made havoc of his plans.

“I’m coming with you to “Frisco,” she said with quiet but unexpected firmness. Shocked, he started to argue, but she cut him short. “I’ve no place else to go. In Sacramento I … I was working in a saloon. That was where Jasper Morgan found me, and I won’t go back there. I wouldn’t even if I was starving. And I can’t stay here by myself.”

Luke’s arms, which had been clasping her waist, loosened their grip instinctively. Then, ashamed of his reaction, he apologized.

“But you’re—you’re a female. We can’t travel together. It wouldn’t be right. It wouldn’t be respectable.”

“I shall not trouble you, Luke. And I was brought up to be respectable. My parents were God-fearing folk. But Captain Morgan …” Mercy, her head lowered, left the sentence uncompleted, with all its unhappy implications evoking Luke’s pity. She added, with a swift change of tone, “You’ll need me as a witness in San Francisco. If you go by yourself, it would be your word against his. And he—oh, Luke, you know him! Jasper Morgan would talk his way out, whatever the miners’ committee think.”

She was right on that count, Luke was forced to concede. “I’d planned on killing him,” he admitted a trifle sullenly, “if he refused to come back here with me to stand his trial.”

That notion, he realized, had been in the back of his mind ever since he had seen Dan’s body, but until now he had not put it into words, even in his thoughts. Vengeance, a life for a life—even the Scriptures held that to be no more than justice. And Jasper Morgan had robbed three men of their lives; he had planned to kill them from the moment he had set them working on the useless, unproductive mine that was to become their tomb… .

Mercy Bancroft drew in her breath sharply. She turned to look at him over her shoulder, and Luke was taken aback by the naked pain he read in her eyes.

“I could kill him also,” she said in a low, bitter voice, “for what he did to me. I did not know that any man could be capable of—of such cruelty.” Her tone changed again, became pleading. “Please, Luke, take me with you! We could travel as brother and sister, and I swear I’ll not be a burden or a trouble to you. And we will find him, truly we will!”

Luke yielded. It went against the grain to do so, but she had a right. Morgan had robbed him of his brother and his two partners, as well as of the strike he had made, but perhaps he had robbed this slender, defenseless girl of even more.

“I’ll find him,” he vowed. “If it takes me the rest of my days. Wherever he’s gone, I’ll follow him, Mercy! He’s had almost a month’s start, but there’ll be no place in San Francisco where he can hide. There are bound to be people who’ll remember him. Jasper Morgan is not a man to pass unrecognized in a crowd.”

And he would not anticipate pursuit, Luke thought wryly, for had he not brought half a hillside down to hide the evidence of the crime he had committed?

Mercy was silent for a long moment. Then she said reluctantly,

“He may not be in San Francisco by the time we get there. Have you thought of that, Luke? He may not even be in California.”

“No,” Luke admitted. He frowned. “Where else would he go?”

“He talked of Australia to me more than once,” Mercy told him. And it was true… . Luke’s heart sank as he recalled remarks Morgan had made in his own hearing. He had talked of a man named Hargraves, and Tom and Frankie had talked of him, too. Hargraves was an Australian who had suggested that there might well be gold among the rivers and mountains of his native land. The country was similar to California, he had claimed, and there had been rumors of gold finds there, rumors that Tom said had been suppressed… . Luke’s frown deepened. Morgan might not anticipate pursuit, but he would make sure there was no risk of it.

“Well …” He shook off his momentary despondence. “If Morgan has gone to Australia,” he said recklessly, “then I’ll follow him there. But I think he’ll still be in “Frisco.”

Mercy turned again to look at him, and Luke saw that for the first time she was smiling.

“We’ll leave in the morning,” she said practically, “and pray that he’s still there. And don’t tell me that it will be a rough journey, little brother,” she added, her smile suddenly mocking as she saw him open his mouth to speak. “It can be no worse than crossing the Sierra with a wagon train.” She waved a small brown-skinned hand in the direction of the distant mountains, already capped with snow.

Luke, deprived of his last argument, held his peace, but his arms tightened around her. It would, he told himself, be good to have a companion on the journey. Or for the first part of it, at least.

For both Mercy and Luke, San Francisco swiftly became a place of nightmare terror. Its vast harbor was a forest of masts and spars, thronged with abandoned ships whose crews had deserted to join the rush to the goldfields. And still more ships arrived, from all corners of the globe, to suffer the same fate as those that had come before and to swell the crowds of sullen and angry men, many of them unable to find shelter and lacking sufficient funds to pay for transport to the distant diggings—or even to feed themselves.

Prices were high, necessities in short supply, accommodations in the hotels and lodging houses at a premium. Most of the buildings were hastily constructed wooden shanties, the best-appointed being the saloons and gambling houses— although even some of these were housed in canvas tents or marquees—and spreading out from the town center was a mushroom city of tents, inhabited by people of all nations.

To walk the streets in daylight was an ordeal; at night it was fraught with peril, with robberies so commonplace as to excite no comment, violence and drunkenness seemingly unrestrained and certainly unpunished. There were vigilantes, a passerby told Luke, led by a man named Brannan and controlled by his committee, and San Francisco had a governor and two elected senators, but … He had shrugged and gestured to a block of blackened and burned-out buildings a short distance away, asserting grimly that it was the work of arsonists.

“Them the vigilantes did catch. They hanged four of ‘em, flogged a couple, an’ deported the rest. But it still goes on.”

Their informant, moved perhaps by their youth and seeming

helplessness, directed them to one of the hulks that had been towed close to the shore and scuttled.

“Jemmy Kemp was her cook, an’ the skipper left him in charge, see, when he an’ the rest went off to the diggings,” he explained. “Now he’s turned her into a rooming house. He’ll give you somewhere to sleep if you tell him that Gene Drucker sent you. It’ll cost you, but you’ll be all right aboard the Nancy Bray, and Jem’s an honest man.”

They had found him so, although Luke had been outraged by the rent demanded for the tiny two-berth cabin Kemp had offered them. But it was shelter, and their meals were provided; there was no need for Mercy to show herself in the streets anymore, and, the girl thought, as she stood on deck watching yet another vessel nose her way into the harbor, it would not be for much longer. Despite the delay, Jasper Morgan’s trail was still warm; Luke’s initial inquiry at the office of the United States Mint had elicited the information that their quarry had been there barely a month before them.

Mercy recalled the visit. The Mint was where they had begun their search, and a talkative clerk had been ready enough to tell them what they wanted to know, for clearly it was not every day that a man brought a fortune in gold to be redeemed for cash by the Mint, even in San Francisco.

“A fine gentleman,” the clerk had said without prompting. “I remember him well. A military officer, British, he told me, who came out here in the paddle-steamer Panama. At the beginning of the year it was, when the Panama made her best passage from the East—a hundred and forty-two days. But of course the new clipper ships out of Boston have cut that record. The Sea Witch made it in ninety-seven days around the Horn from New York. No paddle-wheeler will match that.”

He had been disposed to enlarge on the clipper’s achievement, but Luke had brought him back to the subject of their inquiry, and they had learned, to their profound astonishment, that Dan’s estimate of ten thousand dollars had been too low. The mint had paid Jasper Morgan more than twelve thousand, and one nugget alone had been weighed by the mint’s chief assayer and found to turn the scale at thirteen pounds, four ounces.

“Lord alive!” Luke had confided in a hoarse whisper as Mercy stood beside him in the small, dimly lit clapboard office. “That was the nugget I found in the hole where the manzanita bush was growing, halfway up the riverbank. I knew it was big, but I never dreamed it would weigh that much.”

And Jasper Morgan had robbed him of it, Mercy reflected bitterly, watching as the clerk counted out the meager payment for their own small bags of dust, while continuing to sing the praises of the British military gentleman, whose strike had set everyone employed at the Mint enviously talking. None of them, however, had been able to say or even hazard a guess as to Morgan’s present whereabouts or his future plans.

“I figure he’ll have gone back to his claim,” the clerk had suggested. “In the Sacramento Valley, wasn’t it? Or … no, the captain mentioned the Feather. If you’re so set on finding him, maybe you should make for the Feather. There are river paddlers plying from here now, up as far as Sacramento and Marysville, and I hear tell there are stagecoaches running up the valley, if you can afford the fares.”

Jasper Morgan had been able to afford the river steamer; that was probably how he had gained so long a start over them, Mercy decided, knowing his ways. He would not go back to Windy Gully, of course—however carefully he had covered his tracks, he would not take that risk. The area covered by the diggings had expanded; each day the gold seekers moved farther and farther afield as word of some new strike reached the camps, but Morgan, she was convinced, would not choose to remain in California.

Australia—Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, was surely more likely to be his destination. He had talked often of Sydney and the prospects of finding gold in the colony, she remembered, although at the time she had paid little heed to what he had said to her.

Old Jemmy Kemp poked his grizzled head through the open hatchway and, seeing Mercy, gave her a friendly wave.

“That brother o’ yours ain’t back yet?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not yet, Mr. Kemp.”

Luke spent his days in the seemingly profitless search; no one in the town had been able to offer him a single clue, and lately, under her prompting, he had begun to make inquiries on the waterfront, frequenting the seamen’s bars and boarding ships that had not been entirely deserted, in the hope that if their quarry had left San Francisco, he had. sought to take passage in a Pacific-bound vessel.