Dead Man’s Hand (54 page)

We were given a dinner of beans with a little bacon, and then locked in. The jailkeepers
kept no watch in the nighttime, but went home. I reckon that Sutter Junior wasn’t
paying them much.

Other fellows in the jail enlightened us about the Condor. He’d first appeared just
after the New Year, when he’d begun breaking up fights and apprehending rustlers.
No one knew his true identity or where he was from. One man swore that he could fly
with that cape apparatus of his. I told him I wasn’t drunk enough to believe that,
and then set about escaping.

It wasn’t hard. I don’t think anyone in Sacramento City had ever built a jail before,
and they’d put it right on the ground, as if it were a backwoods cabin. We were able
to break up our beds to make digging tools, and use our slop buckets as well. (As
I say, sailors know how to
do
things.) Before midnight, we were all free. Some of the others in the jail dug out
alongside us, but I wouldn’t let them join our group. If they lacked the enterprise
to dig themselves out of the jail after all the time they’d spent in it, we didn’t
want them in our party.

We broke into the storeroom and found our weapons and supplies. Then we freed our
mules from the paddock, along with some other animals, and took them all. We broke
into Brannan’s mercantile store for more weapons, powder, and food, and then we legged
it into the Sierras.

It was only a few minutes before we ran into friends—the five missing members of the
Gentlemen of Leisure, who had been beaten by the Condor in the fight, but had run
off before they could be captured. They had followed our party cautiously down to
Sacramento City, and had been hoping to rescue us. I’m glad we escaped on our own,
because though I appreciated my comrades’ pluck, they weren’t the brightest sparks
among us, and if we’d waited for them, it might have been the next century before
they’d managed to organize themselves for the job.

We laid down false trails and crossed and re-crossed the American River several times,
but I always knew where we were headed—back to the Middle Fork, where I planned to
meet up with our old friends the Sydney Ducks. We found our old camp before any trouble
caught up with us, and we properly sneaked up on the Australians—when we came out
of ambush with our guns trained on them, they knew better than to do anything but
surrender.

We took their gold and their supplies, smashed the placer, and gave them all a thorough
hiding for good measure. I told them that if we saw their ugly faces in the Sierras
ever again, we’d kill them.

Oddly enough, they took me at my word and cleared out. The Sydney Ducks later became
a criminal gang in San Francisco, at least until the Committee of Vigilance hanged
most of them.

Better them than me, I’ve always thought.

Now that we were no longer accidental criminals but proper road agents, I reckoned
we might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb. We moved up the Middle Fork and
robbed and plundered more or less at random. I’d like to be able to claim that we
robbed only bad people, but in fact we preyed on whoever seemed prosperous and careless
about keeping a proper watch.

One of the groups we robbed was, I swear to God, a band of Freemasons from Nova Scotia,
Traveling Lodge Number Something-or-Other. They’d not just carried mining equipment
into the Sierras, but all their masonic regalia as well, aprons and chains and such.
They must have had cozy little lodge meetings beneath the Ponderosas, chanting all
their nonsense and building Solomon’s Temple out of the stars in the sky.

One of these anointed turned out to be no less than a Past Grand Commander of the
Knights Templar, which entitled him to a military-style uniform, complete with sword,
bullion epaulets, and a cocked hat with an ostrich plume. One of the lads put the
cocked hat on my head, saying “Here you are, Commodore Sir,” and we all had a laugh.
But the hat fit, and so did the uniform coat, and the sword was impressive in its
way, so when we left the scene, I was dressed up as the Commodore in truth. If the
world was going to assign me a role, I thought, I’d play it.

That was the moment when the madness really began to take hold.

* * *

I may always have had it in mind that I’d meet the Condor again. I knew he’d be after
us, so I always tried to camp in a place that was defensible, and we were careful
to build our fire in a hollow where it couldn’t be seen. We couldn’t do much about
the smoke, I suppose, but then the trees were thick and screened us pretty well. We
kept lookouts.

Of course it didn’t help. Of course he found us in an unguarded moment. We had just
forded the river and decided to take a breather and a bit of dinner on the bank. I’d
just fetched a cup of coffee from the fire and was walking along the pebbly alluvial
strand, thinking that if we were ever to take up mining again, this would be a good
place to set up the sluice box. Then came that
Ky-yeeee
cry from the trees, and I looked up in great surprise to see the Condor soaring toward
me on kite-like wings.

The idiot in the Sacramento City jail had been right after all. The Condor
could
fly, or at any rate glide, and he’d launched himself from one of the Douglas firs
that stood like great masts around us and aimed himself right at me.

I was so startled by the sight that my boot slipped out from under me, and I sprawled
on the strand—which was what saved me, because he was aiming to kick me in the chest
with both feet, which would have collapsed me like a piece of torn canvas. He whirred
right over my head, and I felt the breeze from his cape on my face. I jumped to my
feet and drew my sword.

I had a pistol hanging from my belt. Yet I drew the sword. That’s because the lunacy
had me by then.

The other members of my gang were more practical. They produced their weapons and
opened fire, but they were standing all around us and they fired away in a panic.
Bullets hummed all around my head, and I shouted at everyone to stop shooting—which
they did, as soon as they emptied their Colts.

The Condor had recovered from his swoop and turned to face me. The scent of gunpowder
swirled over the scene. The wild firing seemed to have done him no harm.

“So, Commodore,” says he, with what seemed grudging respect, “you want to face me
in single combat?”

He thought I was challenging him, calling for the shooting to stop and standing there
with the sword in my hand. That wasn’t my intention at all—what I really wanted was
to not get shot. But if he was willing to credit me with a noble motive, I was willing
to take that credit.

“I’ve always considered myself a fair gent,” says I.

“But you have a sword, and I do not,” says he. “Is that a fair combat?”

“It was hardly fair to swoop on me from ambush,” says I. “So I’ll hang onto my advantage
for the present, I reckon.”

And then he charged, swirling his cape at me to dazzle my senses. I managed to make
a cut with the sword anyway, and to my surprise I struck sparks—this is when I discovered
that the long gauntlets that covered his forearms were sewn with steel splints to
parry weapons. He lodged a couple punches to my floating ribs, and then I slapped
at him with my free hand—my hard, horny hand, which knocked him back.

And then it was back and forth across the strand, my sword striking sparks, his fists
flashing out. One of his kicks caught me in the thigh, and then I knew to watch out
for his feet as well as his hands.

I thrust with the sword, and he parried it very low, to drive my guard down, so I
reckoned a high attack was about to follow. I ducked, and he leaped clean over me
with a flying kick. His cloak flapped in my face, and I grabbed a fistful of the fabric
and lunged forward, taking the cloak with me. The Condor was yanked right off his
feet, landing hard on his back, and I stepped on the cloak to keep him from rising
again. I looked down at him as, half-strangled, he struggled to release the cape—after
which I knelt, grabbed a rock off the strand, and bashed the Condor right between
his blue eyes.

Those were our humble beginnings, right there. The first fights between the Condor
and the Commodore were these little scrimmages by the Middle Fork, nothing like the
titanic battles we fought later.

But on that afternoon I had no idea of what was to follow, so I gazed down at the
unconscious Condor while the Gentlemen of Leisure ran up to congratulate me. Some
of them were all for shooting the Condor then and there, but I stopped them.

I did not have it in me, then or now, to shoot a helpless man. And while I was happy
to play the robber, and fight in self-defense if I had to, I felt that deliberate
murder was a line I was not prepared to cross. Killing the Condor, I thought, would
have bad consequences somewhere down the trail, consequences possibly involving a
mob, a rope, and a tall tree.

So we settled for stripping him naked, beating him silly, and tying him to a tree.
Once we had his hood off, I looked carefully at the face to see if I recognized it,
but I didn’t. It meant nothing to me. And even if I had known him, he was so covered
with bruises and gore that I might not have recognized him anyway.

We examined his equipment. Not only did he have his gliding rig, but he carried other
gear on his belt that made him a regular Vidocq—spikes for climbing trees, a small
spyglass, a magnifying lens, measuring tape, a small supply of plaster of Paris, a
notebook and pencil, and a phrenological chart. He used all this scientific apparatus
in the pursuit of criminals, not that I knew what to make of it at the time.

One of my lads tried to fly with the cape apparatus and promptly broke an arm. We
laughed, and I ordered the gear destroyed.

That night, the Condor managed to escape his bonds and flee into the darkness. I was
more relieved than anything. Without clothing and his equipment, I knew it would be
some time before he’d be on our trail again.

Once the Condor was gone, I began to try to think of a way out of our dilemma. And
dilemma it was, for all that most of my crew hadn’t realized it.

Our pillaging had been successful. We had more gold than we would have got by working
a full year, but in this remote area there was nowhere to spend it. The thought of
returning to civilization with our gains was tempting, but I’d be recognized if I
ever returned to Sacramento City, and thrown back in their ridiculous jail.

There was no choice but to keep doing what we were doing. But I decided against continuing
along the Middle Fork, where the miners knew to look out for us, and instead led the
lads over the Sierras on a trek to the South Fork. It was only ten miles as the condor
flies, but it took us five days, creeping along under Lookout Mountain and Big Hill
Ridge and a lot of mountains and ridges that hadn’t been named yet, at least by white
men. We encountered nothing but a few Indian camps, and as we saw no women in these,
there was no reason to be friendly, so we left them alone.

The South Fork runs through somewhat more open country, and once we arrived we could
make better time heading downstream. The miners had no warning of us, and we plundered
the more prosperous-looking of them. Eventually, we reached Sutter’s Mill, where the
Gold Rush had begun, and where John Sutter, Senior, hired folks to mine for him. They
were robbing him blind, of course, so we robbed
them
and headed downriver for the junction of the American and Sacramento rivers.

There we avoided Sutter’s Fort and Sacramento City, and headed downriver partway to
the Delta, where we flagged a steamboat.

It wasn’t hard. When the Gold Rush started, there’d been only a single steamboat on
the Sacramento, the
Sitka
, but now there were over a score, as well as dozens of sailing craft. The steamboats
had all been built in New York and Boston and had floundered their way clean around
the tip of South America, their decks stacked with all the fuel they could carry.

Of the steamboats that chugged by that day, I chose mine carefully—I wanted a fast,
rugged craft, a sidewheeler able to spin on the water like a crab, with a flat bottom
drawing only a couple feet of water, and I found one in the
Chrysopolis
. So we stood on the bank and waved a flag—actually a looted Masonic apron lashed
to a stick—and
Chrysopolis
obligingly came near the bank to pick up passengers. That was how things were done
in America—you stood on the riverbank and waved, and the boats were happy to take
your money and let you and your animals on board.

As soon as we got on the steamboat, we produced our weapons and robbed all the passengers.
They were heading from San Francisco to Sutter’s Fort, so they’d spent the money on
good times or on mining equipment and didn’t have much cash on them. We set the passengers
and crew ashore, then took our new prize upriver. It took us a few days to learn her
ways—I knew nothing of steam engines, but some of my crew did—and then we began our
career of piracy.

I’d reckoned that there was no point in robbing individual mining claims when we could
simply take our pick of everything traveling along the river—gold, steamboats, fancy
clothing, furniture, and all. We’d come charging out from a half-hidden slough, or
from behind an island, and swoop down on a boat coming down from the diggings, our
rail crowded with men waving weapons, while I stood by the wheelhouse in my uniform
and commanded our victims to surrender through a brass speaking trumpet.

There was a lot of gold coming down that river. Some of it in strongboxes, some in
the miners’ pockets or their dunnage. They’d try to hide it, of course, but we got
more than our share. And then we’d let our victims go, along with their boat, to go
upriver and dig more gold for us.

By this point I was quite the swell. I’d got myself more bits of uniform from the
captains and officers of the steamboats, and I had a couple pistols in my belt and
my fancy Masonic sword. I shaved my beard except for a proper set of whiskers; very
dashing, I thought. I started dipping into looted gold snuffboxes instead of chewing
tobacco, and using words I’d heard from educated people. I stopped dropping my aitches.
I wore lace and knee breeches and silk stockings, and I had a bullion epaulet on each
shoulder.