Calico Palace (16 page)

Pocket wrinkled his forehead, pinched his chin, considered, and finally said, “Well, it’s not modest, but they’re right strong-minded ladies.”

Gene got down on his knees and unlocked a safe that stood behind the counter. Reaching into the safe he took out an earthenware chamber-pot.

It was a fancy pot with a lid, painted with bright red roses. Holding the pot with both hands Gene lifted it to the counter and took off the lid. The pot was half full of gold.

“We haven’t got anything else to hold it,” he apologized softly.

But Kendra and Marny were gasping, not at the pot, but the gold. In a voice of awe Marny asked, “Mr. Spencer—all that gold—may we touch it?”

“Why sure, ma’am,” said Gene with a chuckle.

They gathered up the gold in their hands. The gold was in grains and flakes and little pear-shaped nuggets and oblong bits like melon seeds. It was cold and heavy, it tinkled against the sides of the pot, it ran glittering between their fingers.

Kendra felt the same tingles she had felt when Ted showed her the bag of gold in San Francisco. She could almost see her fur cloak, her muff with the spray of opals, the new respect of the aunts and uncles who thought her father was the family disgrace. She and Marny looked at each other across the chamber-pot. They both smiled slowly. Kendra wondered if Marny too was thinking about the day when she would go home, carrying bags of gold.

B
RINGING THE WAGONS AND
supplies over the river was a long hard job, and by the time they had finished, the men ached with weariness. They jumped into the river to wash off the sweat of the day, gobbled the beef stew Kendra had cooked for them, and by dark they were sound asleep, all but Pocket, who went off to see a girl he remembered from his days at Smith’s store.

Ning roused them early. “Gotta make Mormon Island today,” he said. “So get going.”

They grumbled, but being good travelers they obeyed. Before they had gone far they knew why Ning had made them get an early start, for the riding was a rough stony climb that grew harder every hour.

At sunset they came to a place where the American River turned and bent back around a big piece of land shaped like a tennis racket. This was Mormon Island. It was not really an island, but at times of high water it looked like one because then the river overflowed the handle of the racket. Two Mormons had found gold here, and now they and their friends were scratching in the gravel and getting rich.

The two leaders of the camp came along the handle to meet the new party and make sure they meant no harm. As Ning had been here before, the Mormons recognized him, and helped stake the horses among the wild oats by the river. Sure, they said, there was plenty of gold. They were taking five to ten ounces a day each, and one of them showed Kendra a bottle that had once held pickled onions and was now full of gold dust. That night Kendra dreamed about golden flakes dancing in the air like fireflies, and in the morning as she was waking up she heard Ted exclaim, “What are you laughing at, when you’ve hardly opened your eyes?” She did not know she had been laughing, but as she looked up at his quizzical whiskered face she laughed again.

Today the riding was even harder than yesterday. Ahead of them the ground rippled upward—a hill, a valley, another hill, and so on and on, each hill higher than the last. The sun was hot, the horses sweated and strained as they dragged the wagons. Sometimes the train had to stop for repairs. “When we get that gold,” said Hiram, as he and Pocket tightened a shaky metal tire, “we sure will have earned it. Pocket, what are you going to do with all your money?”

“I’m going to spend it,” said Pocket, “on a whole lot of beautiful women.”

“I bet you’ll do exactly that,” said Hiram. “And it’s not,” he added, “a bad idea.”

He and Pocket sent yearning glances toward the girls. Kendra was brewing coffee to cheer the men while they worked; Lulu and Lolo were mending clothes for the Blackbeards; Marny was practicing with a deck of cards. She practiced at every stop.

Now they were close to the mighty mountains. The earth had turned from brown to red. They made their way around bushes and pine trees, and vast outcroppings of rock. At last, shortly before noon on Saturday, the sixth of May, their twelfth day out of San Francisco, they came to a rock standing like a castle on top of a hill. Past that castle, said Ning, they would go down into Shiny Gulch.

Kendra thrilled all over with impatience, but Ning was not going to hurry. First, he said, they must have their midday meal, and let the horses rest. Kendra managed to keep calm enough to cook, and as they ate she realized how wise Ning had been, for they had been riding since dawn and they were all famished. When they were done Ted brought water from the rivulet trickling down the slope, and she began to scrub the pans.

She felt strong and happy. Everything was going well. The weather was clear, nobody had quarreled, the horses were all healthy. She was not going to have a baby—not yet, anyway—so she did not have that to worry about. She saw Marny coming toward her, red hair glimmering and skirts awhirl in the wind. Marny was humming a tune, blithely but not well. Music was not one of her talents.

She paused by Kendra. “Excited?” she asked.

“Aren’t we all?” asked Kendra.

Marny agreed. “Even Delbert,” she said, “is showing a flicker of interest. Come on, I’ll help you pack those things, then we can get going. Pocket is saddling our horses now.”

Kendra doused her fire, carefully as Ning had taught her, and gathered up her utensils. She and Marny carried them to the wagon, where Ted was hitching the team and whistling “Love is like a dragonfly.” They mounted their horses, and a moment later they heard Ning call “Catch up!” The train started around the rock castle and down the other side of the hill.

Kendra and Marny rode side by side. The mountain air was clear as glass, the trees were scattered, and they had a good view down into the gulch.

They were looking north. On both sides of them long mountain ranges shot up toward the sky. Below, between the ranges, they saw an open strip two or three miles long and about a thousand feet wide, sloping upward to a point where the two ranges came together. At one side of the strip, along the foot of the range to their left, the earth had cracked open, making a deep ravine about a hundred feet from rim to rim. This was Shiny Gulch.

And shiny it was, the sun glowing on the red earth and sparkling on the stream that bubbled among the rocks at the bottom. Along the sides of the gulch they saw fallen logs, and tangles of brushwood, and great rocks jutting out of the earth. In the strip between the edge of the gulch and the mountain range they saw more rocks, and trees that had fought the rocks as they grew, till the rocks were split and the trees twisted into crazy shapes. But rough as it was, this strip was the only place in sight that had any claim at all to being level, so it was here that the gold hunters had made their camp.

Kendra and Marny could see two covered wagons and three tents, and here and there a lean-to made by tilting logs against a flat-sided rock. Among these various shelters they saw the smoke of campfires, and doll-sized figures moving about. They counted twenty-seven men, three women, and six children. Most of the men were down in the gulch, gathering gold. Kendra could not see just how they were doing it, but she felt the tingles down her back, and she and Marny gave each other the same awestruck glances they had exchanged across the chamber-pot at Sutter’s Fort.

In the camp on the rim the women were washing clothes and tending fires, and even the children seemed busy too. Gazing as far as she could, Kendra did not see a single soul who looked idle.

And why, she asked herself, should they want to be idle? Their life was rough but it had the shine of romance. They had been drawn here by a dream. And unlike most dreams, this one was coming true.

As she and Marny looked down, close to them the wagon wheels bumped over the ground. Sticks and stones, loosened by their passage, rattled down the slopes. All around them was the pungent fragrance of pines in the sun. But they were hardly aware of anything but the camp below.

Then suddenly Hiram was riding beside them. As they looked around he gave them a joyful grin. His beard had little golden flashes, and around his eyes were lines of delight.

“Isn’t it grand,” he exclaimed, “to see all this?”

Kendra nodded vigorously, and Marny said, “I love it!” Hiram went on,

“Nobody ever saw anything like it before. I feel like—oh, what do I feel like?”

“Like Columbus!” Kendra exclaimed. “Discovering.”

“Yes!” agreed Hiram. “We—and those people down there—we’re discoverers. And it’s our secret—have you thought about that? Back in the States, nobody knows anything about our gold.”

Kendra gave a start. She had not thought of this.

Marny had not thought of it either. They talked it over.

East of the Rocky Mountains, nobody knew there was gold in California. People back home could not possibly know, for months to come.

Because, how could anybody tell them?

There was no regular communication between California and anywhere else in the world. Kendra knew this, but in the excitement of the past few weeks she had forgotten it. Now she remembered. Telegraph lines reached from the Atlantic Coast to New Orleans and St. Louis, but no farther west. The westernmost post office on the continent was in the town of Independence, Missouri.

Between Independence and San Francisco lay two thousand miles of country, unmapped and almost unknown. To cross that country with a wagon train, as Pocket had done, took four or five months; to come from an eastern port by sea, as Kendra had done, took as long. And it would take as long to go back, no matter how splendid the news you brought. At intervals the army garrisons sent couriers with military dispatches, but even the best equipped army men took months to go from California to the States.

Of course, the people back home would hear about California gold some day. But it would take a long, long time.

She wondered how long.

T
ED, DRIVING THE WAGON,
leaned out to call to them. “Say, girls! What’s the matter? Catch up!”

With a start of guilty laughter, they saw Ning turning the train to go around a barrier of rocks. In a moment the curve of the hill shut off the view.

The riding grew more and more rough. They went around rocks and trees, and bumped over ledges jutting like steps along the hillsides. Several times they had to stop while the men took axes and hacked a way through tangles of brush. When they finally rode into the camp it was late afternoon. The horses were panting, the men’s faces dripped with sweat. Kendra felt her underclothes so soaked that they clung to her skin like the peel of an orange, and Marny sighed, “I feel like I’ve been beaten up by experts.”

In the camp it was time for supper. The gold diggers were gathering around their fires, and the air was rich with smells of wood-smoke and bacon. But at sight of the new party, men and women alike dropped their frying pans and flocked around. Of the diggers at Shiny Gulch, only two or three had come from San Francisco. The rest had been workmen at Sutter’s Fort or settlers in the country close by, and had seen the sawmill men offering gold dust to pay for drinks and guns. Several of them recognized Ning, and they nearly all knew Pocket.

Turning his horse toward Kendra, Pocket introduced two men named Will Gibson and Nathan Larch. He said they had come out last summer in the same wagon train as himself. They were married men, and had brought their wives and children. And here were the ladies, Sue Gibson and Hester Larch. Mighty fine folks.

Will and Nathan wore overalls spattered with mud from the gulch, Sue and Hester were hard-muscled women in sunbonnets and shapeless dresses. They all four had skin like leather and they looked tough as mules, but they had a big noisy vitality that reached out like warm hands in the wilderness. “Glad to see you,” Nathan Larch shouted to Kendra, and Will Gibson boomed, “Howdy, ma’am, make yourself at home.” Several tousle-headed children jumped around, yelling for supper. Hester and Sue told them to mind their manners, and said to Kendra, “Now anything we can do, Mrs. Parks, just let us know.”

They were, as Pocket had said, fine folks. Kendra smiled back at them and thanked them for their welcome. But she was so tired that smiling was an effort, and she could not help feeling relieved when Hester and Sue called their families to supper at the campfires.

Ning had told the others to wait while he and Hiram rode off to find a good site for their own camp. Kendra thought now she would have a few minutes of restful silence, but she had forgotten that when she and Marny looked down from the hilltop they had counted three women at Shiny Gulch. Hester and Sue were two of them. Now the third woman had planted herself beside Kendra’s horse and was examining Kendra with critical eyes. This woman did not look like the other two. She was a small plump creature about thirty years old, shaped like a sausage roll. She wore a blue gingham apron, and she had yellow curls drawn up high and pinned in a bunch, so that she looked as if she were wearing a lot of wilted daffodils on her head.

“My name,” she announced sternly, “is Edith Posey.” She added with emphasis, “
Mrs.
Edith Posey.”

“How do you do,” said Kendra.

“You’re not going to like it here,” snapped Mrs. Edith Posey.

“Why not?” Kendra asked.

“Up here,” said Mrs. Posey, “we
work.
”

Kendra brushed away a gnat that had lit on her nose. “I’m used to work,” she returned.

Mrs. Posey shook her head so hard that the yellow curls bobbled. “You don’t look it. You look like a New York society girl. Where’d you come from?”

Kendra almost told Mrs. Posey to mind her own business, but desisted because she was so tired and it took less energy to give a plain answer. “I was born in Baltimore,” she said. “I went to school in New York.”

“I told you so,” said Mrs. Posey. She nodded sharply and the curls nodded with her. “Society girl. You won’t like it.”