Past All Dishonor

12

We stayed there two days. We both had a little money, and she’d drop down in the town and buy stuff and carry it to the mouth of the gully, and I’d meet her and carry it the steep part of the path, and then I’d tie a string to the basket handle and she’d climb the ladder that led to our drift mouth and pull it up. In the mine a little way was a spring of the cold water they generally struck at the upper levels, and in a toolbox I found an old lunch bucket, so we were all right for something to boil in. For firewood I used mine timbers that I broke up with a pickaxe that was in the box. Late the first day, in the brush, I spotted some quail and got two before they rose. Broiled, with an old mine needle run through them for a spit, they were pretty good. The second day, while she was down in the town, I looked up from the paper she had brought the day before, and in front of me, coming across the ledge, was a young goat, what they call a kid. In Virginia there’s no grazing for cows, but goats can make out, and a few people keep them, for the milk they give, and to eat. I got out my gun, and laughed at how I’d clean my visitor and skin him before she got back, tell her it was a lamb that must have strayed from some butcher’s yard, and then have a joke on her after she’d eaten a few slices. But then I thought: How the hell did he get here? We used a ladder, but he couldn’t, even if he was a goat. And there wasn’t any other way up there, that I knew of.

He kept coming and I kept quiet, where I was sitting at the head of the ladder, so I could watch the mouth of the gully. When he saw me he stopped, but after he thought it over he came on again and turned into the drift. The blankets and stuff slowed him down too, but pretty soon he went in. I tiptoed over and peeped. The water was what he wanted, and as soon as he sucked up a bellyful he came out, looked me over again, and started back. I followed, and he ran. And then he just wasn’t there. It was like some trick on a stage, where the fellow waves a tablecloth and the rabbit is gone. I went over to the last place he was, and all I could see was a straight face of rock. But then I happened to step to one side, and all of a sudden, from that angle, you could see a hole, kind of a crack, about four feet high, and ten or twelve inches across at its widest place, which was at the bottom. I lay on my belly and looked. As far as you could really see, the crack went straight into the rock, but further inside there was some sort of a reflection that looked like there was an opening. I got some candles from the toolchest, lit one, and crawled in.

The crack, I suppose, kept on for twenty or thirty feet, but then it led into an old stope, one of those rooms they kept working on until it’s as big as a three-story house. This was that big at least, but the weight of the top had crushed the timbering, so everything had caved in, and probably opened the crack I had come in by. But when I worked past the rubble my heart almost stopped beating at what was dead ahead of me, part of the raw rock that had been uncovered by the fall of the top. It was ore, and while I couldn’t tell and nobody could tell, until the assayers got busy, if it would run $3,000 to the ton or $300 to the ton, anybody could tell it was sulphuret of silver, a beautiful blue-black, as nice a strike as had been made on the lode since Comstock sold out for $11,000. I climbed over on a fallen twelve-by and dug a piece out with my knife. It was soft, and crumbled in my fingers. It was wonderful, just to touch it.

Somewhere a pebble fell, and I remembered my little goat. I had to know how he got here, because if I had followed him in, anybody could. I put out my candle and waited. After a long time, a half hour maybe, my eyes got used to the dark so it wasn’t quite black any more. Then, opposite the crack I had come in by, I saw where the light was coming from. It was the upper part of an entry, the bottom all blocked by rock. I got over there and looked. A few feet inside was a winz that dipped down to a drift mouth on the other side of the hill, and that explained it. When animals go in a mine, they’re generally looking for salt, and that’s what had probably brought my friend in. But I kicked down enough rock to block that entry altogether, so he couldn’t come back.

“I won’t give it up, Roger, all that beautiful money.”

“We’ll have to, until after the war.”

“Why do we have to? All you do is take an option. On an old run-down mine like this, that’s been abandoned for years, they’d think they were lucky to get a hundred dollars for a thirty-day look-see. Then when your papers are signed you uncover your bonanza, and you can get all the money you need to start mining, from the bank. It’s done every day.”

“I’m talking about the army.”

“They let you buy your way out.”

“Either that or they shoot you.”

“They never do that.”

“They almost never do it. It’s only occasionally they do it, when it’s necessary to make an example of somebody to remind all soldiers that they can do it when they want to, and they will do it if they have to. Unfortunately, I don’t know if now is the time they feel they’ve got to make an example, or just the time when they take a broad-minded attitude.”

“We’ve got to have this money.”

“I’m all for it. But how?”

“And now. Somebody else might find it.”

“I was even worried about the goat.”

“You’ve got to think of something.”

“If we could only buy it.”

“You mean now?”

“So it would be waiting for us, after the war.”

“How much would it cost?”

“Ten, fifteen thousand, maybe. Maybe less. This outfit that owns it is always in trouble, and especially lately. But a lot more than we’ve got.”

She lay there a long time, and when it began to get light her eyes were still open, staring at the sky outside. Then: “Roger.”

“Yes?”

“You know Red Caskie?”

“I guess so.”

“You know what he does?”

“He’s the Brewer dog-robber, isn’t he?”

“He does all kinds of things, but mainly he makes one trip a month down to San Francisco. You know what that trip’s for?”

“...I can guess.”

“Yes, it’s for gold. The silver goes down on the stages, by Wells, Fargo, every day, and nobody bothers it because it’s heavy and not a great deal goes by any single coach. But once a month the mint pays for the bullion in gold, and Will Brewer stays down there to take care of that and whatever other business the company has. And then Caskie brings it back.”

“When does he go?”

“Never the same day of the month, never the same boat down to San Francisco, never the same coach line, always a little bit different, so nobody can be waiting for him along the line.”

“How much does he bring?”

“How much do they send down?”

“In silver, they’re running a thousand a day.”

“Thirty thousand a month?”

“Around that.”

“Then that’s what he brings back.” She stretched, yawned, and snuggled into my arms. “So then, after we get it, I’ll slip up here with it, and buy this mine, and when the war’s over we can have anything we want.”

“Wait a minute, not so fast.”

Because sitting here, reading what I’ve just written, all I can see is two people fixing to commit a crime. But then, especially after that week I spent in the Union army, it seemed like I had to do something that was some good to my country, and that this could be it. I mean, if $30,000 in gold was coming from California, to pay men to dig $30,000 in silver, to pay men to shoot my people, and I could get it, it looked like the right thing to do. I wanted her to get that part straight, and I was solemn as hell while I was explaining it to her. But all she did was pull me closer, and kiss all around my mouth, and into my mouth.

The old shack, across the river from Sacramento, was exactly as I had left it, even to the rowboat back of the pump, where I had dragged it so it would be out of sight, and after we had aired the rooms out it hardly seemed we had been away. I had rented it from a fellow named Mouton that had the farm along that part of the river, but instead of walking over there and telling him I was back I decided to lay low for the few days we’d be around, and tell him nothing. If he hadn’t even bothered to unlock it and get it ready for the next fellow, it didn’t look like he got over there very often, and it might be that he kept track of those dodgers over at the post office that told about the men wanted by the army, and had spotted my name. Every morning I’d stroll over the bridge and buy a glass of beer across the street from the Sacramento Valley Railroad, which anybody would have to use coming from Virginia City, unless he was going to put himself to an awful lot of trouble, no matter how he mixed up his steamboats and stagecoach lines. It ran as far as Folsom, and it was there that the coaches started. And sure enough, one day in October, here came Caskie. He had a bag, and he stayed on the train to Front and K Streets, and went aboard the Yosemite. It left at six, so when he came off a little later without any luggage, that just meant he was passing the time in town, so I went on across the river.

“When’s he due back, and how?”

“Well, that ought to be easy, Roger.”

“Will you tell me what’s easy about it?”

“Well, can’t we watch some more?”

“Which line do we watch? There are six boats he can come by, all leaving San Francisco the same time, and all getting here within a few minutes of each other. Which hotel does he stop at? We can’t go around asking for him, or looking at the registers, because he knows us both, and that’s all he needs to know, that we’ve been snooping after him. How do we know he goes to a hotel? Maybe he goes direct from the boat to the train, like he went from the train to the boat, and he’s here and gone before we’ve even got started on what we’re going to do about him.”

“There has to be some way.”

“There doesn’t have to be anything.” We talked about it all afternoon and half the night, and the more we talked, the clearer it became to me that the only part of his trip we could be certain about was the train ride from San Francisco to Folsom, and if there was some way I could go on ahead and find out in advance when he had started, then we might be able to do what we figured to do with some chance of getting away with it. In the middle of the night I woke her up. “Come on, let’s pack.”

“What, now?”

“In the morning we leave.”

“Where are we going?”

“Folsom.”

We got to Folsom around seven thirty, let a hotel hack take our stuff over the river to the town, and then stood around to watch how they did, transferring passengers and express to twenty or thirty stages that were pulled up there. It was like I remembered it, from my first trip up there. The runners were all over the platform beating up business for whatever line they worked for. As fast as the passengers would make up their mind, the runner would take his luggage over and stow it in the luggage carrier on back of the coach. But the messengers, they weren’t paying attention to luggage or stuff like that. They were up front, at the baggage car, with the Wells, Fargo man, checking it over what they were responsible for, and some of it was regular packages coming up the line, or maybe around from the East by boat and up, but after they had been transferred they got down to the real thing, which was the metal boxes to be transferred, some to one coach, some to another. They held money, and the messengers split it up which one was to stand by while the Wells, Fargo man helped the others carry them to whichever coach they were consigned to. But on those boxes there was no way to tell if they held $5 or $500 or $5,000, or were coming back empty. The messengers, they rode guard on all boxes.

I held my watch, to see how long it took, and the first coach didn’t pull out till a half hour after the train got in. We walked over to the town to find a spot she could stand on and watch what Caskie did, once he got off the train. That wasn’t easy, because for stuff like that you think of a saloon, but at that hour of day a girl pretending to take a drink and watching a railroad station would attract attention, and in that country just to start somebody wondering what you’re up to is to get in trouble, because they don’t generally figure out that you’re up to something good. And besides, the saloons didn’t give a good view. At Folsom there’s the American River, with the town on one side, the railroad on the other, and a bridge in between, but half the saloons got their back to the river, and they block the view from the ones that face it, so that idea looked pretty sick from the start. We had walked clear down to the stables on the west end, where the old town was, when I hit on what we needed, or thought I had. We came back to the hotel, and I said: “I have business up the line, but my wife is staying, and I want her to be comfortable, in a nice room. Can we have one up high, in front?”

“I can give you third floor, a beautiful bright room overlooking the river, with unobstructed view of the valley—”

“That’s fine.”

“Of course the rate’s a little higher—”

“How much?”

“For your wife, four dollars.”

“That’s all right, but I want to see it.”

“I’ll take you up myself.”

If I had built it special it couldn’t have been better. It looked right down on the station, so she could see everything that went on down there, and if she raised the window, she could even hear what was said. “Now remember, after you spot him you check out and send your baggage over. Then you tell the porter you forgot something, come up here—”

“They’ll have the key, though. At the desk.”

“That’s right. You’ve checked out. Let’s see—”

“Couldn’t I leave the door open?”

“Right. Come in here, watch Caskie—”

“Spot the coach he’s traveling on—”

“Have your wires ready.”

“I go running over to the station, hail the driver of Caskie’s coach, have my things put aboard, go into the station and file my wire, the one that says meet me.”

“And if he doesn’t come tomorrow—”

“File the other one, that I’ll be a day late.”

“Wear the white hat, but if anything comes up that looks suspicious, or that causes us to call it off, take off the hat and put on the red coat.”

“When Caskie sees me—”

“Say hello and act natural.”

“Hold me tight, Roger. I’m so excited.”

The local stage I had to take to Placerville was slow and I didn’t get there till three o’clock in the afternoon. I went to the Pioneer stables and bought me a couple of horses with money she had given me, with bridles and Mexican saddles, for easy riding. I left one there, got on the other one, and rode back the way I had come, so I could use the last hour of daylight to check up things I had to know. Placerville is in the first of the foothills, and below the town is rising ground, where anything pulled by horses has to slow down to a walk. I put the horse up the bank and skirted the edge of the woods at a walk, until pretty soon I found what I wanted. It was a bend, where I could stay in the trees, yet at the same time have a view of the road, not only what was coming up but what was going down. Then I rode into the woods a way, and found out there was no timber-cutting, charcoal-burning, or anything like that going on, though here and there were places where they had been doing plenty, and not so long ago. But right now anybody in those woods pretty much had it to himself. I rode on up in the hills a mile or so, and saw there was clear passage over to the river without having to follow any trail where people were likely to be. Then I rode right down to the river and saw there was pretty good footing along the bank, but by that time it was dark. I rode back, had some dinner at a chuck wagon, then went to bed.

Next morning, after I had something to eat and went back to the hotel, waiting around for that wire was an awful long time. I had given the telegrapher at Wells, Fargo the name of Bob Davis, which I was using at the hotel, and which she was to use when she wired me, and told him if anything came in I’d be over to pick it up. Finally, when it was time to go over there, he was just copying it down when I came in the door, and it said: “Sorry darling unable to make it today better luck tomorrow.” I went out and had a drink. When I walked back to my room my legs felt light. When the liquor wore off I wanted more. And then I knew why I felt like that. I was glad it was called off, even if it was for only a day.

I did some more riding around in the afternoon, partly to get a better line on the upper stretches of the river, partly to get acquainted with both horses. They weren’t either one of them really good, but they weren’t so bad either. They were Western mustangs, small but tough, and why I wanted them for what we had to do was they could probably get along on light rations, and, if they had to, forage up what they needed at night. That was one reason I was following the river. At least, somewhere along the way, there’d be grass and some kind of life I could shoot, or catch in the water, or something.

Before eating that night, I had the stable put me up four sacks of oats, ten pounds apiece. I wanted more, but kept remembering the weight of the gold that had to go on those saddles along with us. I weigh a hundred and eighty, and even if I put all the gold on her horse, we’d be traveling awful heavy. And yet I had to have something for the horses to eat. No way to feed rabbits to them.

“Leaving now by Pioneer dying to see you Josie.” I had about an hour. I went to the stable, saddled up, paid my bill. They had done like I said, fixed up the oats so they’d ride back of the saddle, and given me a halter to lead with. I started out. On the streets people turned to look at me, though a rider leading another horse was about the commonest thing you could see at that time in the West. Or maybe I just thought they were looking. The horse I was on acted all right, but the other one didn’t want to be led, and he kept hanging back and fighting me. And then when I came to the hill, and the spot where I wanted to go into the woods, my horse would go up the bank and the other one wouldn’t. It took me ten minutes, getting off and fighting them both, to get them up, and another five minutes to get them both quiet. Going through the woods it was worse, because the second horse would take a dive on the other side of some bush, and I’d have to wheel and back up to get him clear. I meant to tie them both up to trees, but I couldn’t have them too near the road. They might nicker, for one thing, and I had to have room to make a quick dash after we got the money.

At last I was at the bend, and behind a tree, with my red bandanna handkerchief ready to slip over my face, but my heart almost went through my heels when I looked at that road. It was crawling with traffic. I don’t think I ever saw so many freight wagons, not only loaded ones going up, but empty ones coming back, and not only wagons, but long strings of mules, where they could pull the empty wagons back with six and eight, and saved brake-men if they sent the mules on down in strings. And just to make things worse, a fellow showed up with a snatch team wearing the tassels of Pioneer, and it was easy to see he was there for the day. Unless it just happened that he and his six mules were at the bottom of the hill hooking on to a wagon, or up at the top, casting loose, he’d be in the way all the time. I began to feel cold in the feet. And then, down the road, I saw a spot of red. It got nearer, and sure enough it was an Overland coach, coming along behind six grays, and she was on top, with no hat and the red coat that was to be the danger signal. I could slip off through the woods, get my horses, and ride back to town without having to throw down on anybody at all. I was so happy I could sing.

“Roger, did I do wrong to get scared?”

“You got to think fast and decide.”

“I did everything, exactly as you told me, and it seemed funny that it was all coming out the way you said it would, from the porter getting worried I would miss the coach, to the driver doing all he could to accommodate a girl that was asking a favor, to the old telegraph operator that had jokes about how anxious I was to see my husband. And all that time I hadn’t run into Caskie. But when I came out of the station to climb up to the top, he jumped out of the coach, where he had already gone aboard, and looked at me without speaking, and then told the driver to go back to the company office. They looked like they thought he was crazy, but they did what he said and he went in there. When he came out he had two more guards, with rifles, and they climbed up behind me and I didn’t know what to do. But that meant three rifles up there, and I thought it was too many. I took off the hat and put on the red coat, and — did I do wrong, darling?”

We had got to Placerville almost the same time, and she was in front of the Cary House coming off the coach when I got there with my two horses. We lay down after lunch and she started to talk, and I listened like I was a brave hombre that was a little disappointed but would forgive because I really had a big heart. But her eyes were so black, and she looked at me so serious, that pretty soon I had to laugh. She laughed too. “If you love me I’ll tell you something.”

“I’ve always loved you, Roger.”

“I was scared too.”

“But you’d have done it.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“I am.”

“Then I’d have made a mess of it.”

“I wish I’d worn the hat. I could have cried when I saw that coach drive on, with him in it and all that gold, that lovely money.”

“I laughed, I was so happy.”

That night we lay close, but we didn’t have much to say. On her end of it, she had lost the money and the chance to get hold of the mine, and I guess I cared about that part, too. But mostly I hated it that I wasn’t doing anything for my country at all. If I was grabbing gold that the North needed, all right I was a hero. But if I wasn’t, I was nothing but a gunman laying up with a girl, and not much of a gunman at that, because I hadn’t even done what I figured to do. She began running over it again, how it had all happened: “It was all so wonderful. There he was, stepping out of the baggage car with the Wells, Fargo man, and in a minute there went the money over, and I knew which coach it was, and—”

“Out of the — which car, did you say?”

“The baggage car. Where they had the money.”

“Not a passenger car?”

“No, the front car.”

I thought and I thought, and then I really told her how crazy we had been to think we could do it the way I had laid it out. In the first place, we were right on top of it and we still had no way to carry the stuff, even if we got it. In the second place, we were foolish enough to think we could face armed men that were always expecting trouble, and get away with it. In the third place and the worst place, we had made no provision for a real getaway, beyond riding up a river we had never seen, headed for what we called the “cattle country,” with no idea how we were going to get out of it once we were in it, or with anything worked out better than faith, hope, and guesswork. “Go on, Roger, I’m listening.”

“We’re getting that money. Next trip.”

“But how?”

“We’re stealing that train.”

“But the people—”

“Won’t stop us for one second.”

“Oh if we only could!”

“And the key to the whole thing, the getaway, we make a real one. That’s the trouble with these punks out here, these fools that think they’re bad men. They don’t know how to shoot, and they don’t know any geography, so they can start some place and have some kind of a chance of getting there. But me, I do. I studied it all the time I was sending those dispatches, I know how the land lays and I know every little thing that goes on. You know how we’re getting out of here?”

“Tell me.”

“Mexico.”

“But we can’t get there!”

“Why not?”

“Either we have to head south and travel over all the southern part of the state, where there’ll certainly be word about us, or we’ve got to go back to San Francisco, and that’s terribly dangerous, or — but how?”

“The Colorado River.”

“...Where’s that?”

“Not too far away. We grab that gold just a little the other side of Folsom, and we light out toward Sonora. Then we hit the Stanislaus River and go up over the pass to the Owens River country and go down to the lake. No trouble so far. Game, water, grass for the horses, everything we need. Then we got it bad a few days because we’ve got to cross the Mojave Desert. But probably that’s really good, because there’s hardly any communication across that part of the country, and nobody’ll be looking for us, or know who we are. Then we hit Callville and a steamer.”

“For where?”

“Port Isabel.”

“I never even heard of it.”

“It’s there. Then the C. S. A. Later, our silver mine.”

“Oh, it’s wonderful!”