Shortgrass Song (29 page)

Near the bottom of the bluffs Milt found his two employees lounging in front of their tent. “Joe! Sonny!” he shouted. “Get off your tail ends and make some sawdust!”

“Wait till we finish our coffee, old man,” Sonny said. “We've got lumber piled up head high anyway.”

Milt hung the sign on a peg beside the front door. He would have left it hanging overnight, but somebody would probably have taken it for stove wood. He glanced at Sonny and Joe again and turned back into his saloon, cussing under his breath. It was a wonder he could make a living with the kind of help he had to rely on in a mining camp.

About the time he had finished his breakfast, someone came into the store with the sign Milt had hung out on the peg. “Here, now, put that back, boy!” he said.

“But it says carpenter needed,” the boy replied.

“I am well acquainted with what it says, seein' as how I painted it myself. Now put it back.”

“But, I'm a carpenter. I've come to fill the job.”

Milt slammed a stove lid and went to picking his teeth with a splinter. “You're no carpenter. You've been in Gregory Gulch well-nigh two weeks, and I guess you've told about every worthless soul from Black Hawk to Nevadaville you're a cowboy looking for a ranch to work on.”

“I am a cowboy.”

“Two seconds ago you was a carpenter. Will you be a surgeon with the next breath?”

“I'm a carpenter and a cowboy. I've run out of money. I need work.”

“And I need a carpenter to build sluice boxes. Have you ever built a sluice box?”

“No, sir, but…”

“‘But,' hell! I can't pay a cowboy to build leaky boxes. You have to know what you're doin' to get in my employ.”

“I can build 'em so they don't leak. I've built irrigation flumes that never spilled a drop.”

Milt spit the splinter out of his mouth. “Flumes!”

“Yes, sir.”

“That's the same damn thing as a sluice box, ain't it? Why didn't you say so in the first place? What's your name?”

“Caleb Holcomb.”

“Call me Milt Starling or Old Milt or whatever you please so long as it ain't blasphemous. Where did you learn to build irrigation flumes?”

“On a farm across the Front Range.”

Milt rubbed the bald knob of his head. It looked like one of the hills around Black Hawk, merely studded where once whole thickets had grown. “You're a farmer, too?”

“Yes, sir.”

Milt grumbled, paced on his rickety legs, kicked a spittoon. He placed his face in his hands.

Caleb thought he was weeping.

“I'll give you a try,” the old man finally said. “A dollar a day plus board. Find your own lodgin'. Now git up and git to work.”

“Yes, sir,” Caleb said. “Only, I wonder if you might advance me a meal. I haven't et since the day before yesterday.”

“A meal? A meal!” Milt kicked the spittoon again. “You won't expect me to cook it for you, will you? Help yourself, there's the stove! Hurry, boy, before the coals burn down. Wood's scarce.”

Caleb slapped a slab of bacon into a skillet. “Where am I to build these sluices, Mr. Starling?” he asked as he licked his lips in anticipation.

“Up at the Littlefield Camp.”

“Where's that?”

Milt looped an apron over his head. He smiled at Caleb with the sweet expression of a doting grandmother. “Would you like me to come along and hand you your tools as you need them?” The smile melted to a scowl, and Milt's brown teeth gnashed at his words. “Find it yourself! It's the last damn placer left in Gregory Gulch!”

After his breakfast, Caleb walked around the side of the building where Sonny and Joe were whipsawing lumber from a tree trunk resting horizontally on a trestle ten feet high. Sonny stood on the trestle with one handle of the eight-foot saw. Joe worked below. By pulling the saw through the tree trunk they laboriously turned out rough slabs of lumber.

Caleb learned from Sonny and Joe where he might find his carpenter's tools, his wagon, and his ox team. It took him all morning to collect them, as they were scattered from Black Hawk to Central City at various businesses and boardinghouses. Caleb wasn't really sure who they all belonged to but felt fairly secure in his right to use them. Sonny helped him load some lumber into the wagon and directed him to the Littlefield Camp.

“Bring the lumber from the old sluice boxes back with you,” he said. “Old Milt will have you saw it up for stove wood.”

“How long have you been workin' for him?” Caleb asked.

“Nobody works for Old Milt long,” Joe said. “The work ain't steady enough.”

“Yeah, take your time buildin' them sluices,” Sonny added. “There won't be no work for you when you're done with 'em.”

Caleb had never heard such a suggestion. Make a job last longer than necessary?

“Quit and take up another job if you find it,” Joe said. “Milt keeps saying he's pulling stakes for Montana pretty soon, anyway.”

Caleb found the Littlefield Camp on a small stream above Nevadaville. He patterned the sluices after the old boxes he found running parallel to the stream. Each box was twelve feet long, fourteen inches wide, and six inches deep. Riffles, nailed across the bottom about four fingers apart, caught the gold particles.

The Littlefield men used six sluice boxes end to end. A ditch leading from the creek conducted a steady stream of water through the boxes. The miners shoveled in dirt and gravel from either side of the sluice, the current washing away the lighter particles while the riffles caught the heavier grains of gold. The old sluice boxes were so eroded from such use that the knots stood out a quarter inch from the general surface of the lumber.

To make the work pass faster, Caleb ran a set of rhymes repeatedly through his head. The song he had started to the rune of “Sweet Betsy from Pike” was growing and had taken on a tune of its own. The new tune had a minor chord in it, which Caleb thought lent a lonesome and mysterious aspect to its sound.

When he came of age, he decided to roam.

He said, “There's a life I must live on my own.”

And he promised his brother, that day, one sure thing:

He'd return with his tales of adventure next spring.

At sundown he loaded his tools and drove his oxen back down toward Black Hawk, studying the diggings harder now than he had the two weeks he had been here. As Old Milt had said, the Littlefield Camp was the last placer mine in the gulch. The rest of the miners had gone to sinking shafts and tunneling into the hillsides for gold. As he followed the oxen, Caleb counted rotten shaft houses crumbling over abandoned mines, and idle stamp mills standing in rusting hulks all over the hills. A few active mills used sluices, but there weren't enough of them to keep even a single carpenter busy.

He realized Sonny was probably right. The end of the Littlefield Camp job would bring the end of his carpentering career in Gregory Gulch. Still, there was no call for taking Sonny's advice in making the job last longer than necessary. That seemed dishonest.

“Well, this ain't what you imagined,” he thought. “I'm herdin' cattle, all right, but they're wearin' oxbows.”

One thought comforted him. He was going to eat tonight. Two meals in one day. But he'd starve to death before he went crawling back to his father's ranch.

THIRTY-THREE

Every day, before and after work, Caleb had to take Five Spot to water, then stake her in some fresh grass, which was difficult to find in quantities around Black Hawk. He hid his saddle and other gear in brush and slept near his horse on the bare ground every night, using a tarp to turn the occasional rainfall.

Between work and tending his horse, he found little time for anything else. But on his fifth day of working for Old Milt, he finished the Littlefield job a couple of hours before nightfall and found a spare hour to play his fiddle for Sonny and Joe.

Five customers were trading gold dust for drinks in Milt's saloon when the music started. In less than a minute, they had all vacated the place and gathered around the whipsaw trestle to hear Caleb play.

It took Milt a while to catch on and a while longer to catch up on his lame joints. “Stop!” he said when he finally got close enough to drown out the fiddle. “Stop the music! You're takin' my customers, boy. Play in the saloon if you're gonna play. Why didn't you tell me you could saw a fiddle same as a sluice box?”

Caleb put his hat upside down on the bar and played past midnight. When he looked into his hat on his way out, he found three dollars in money and maybe half an ounce of gold dust. “What will I do with the gold?” he asked Milt, plowing his finger through it in the crown of his hat.

“Let me see it,” Milt said. “Looks like you have about five dollars there. Give it to me and take five dollars worth of supplies from the store.”

Caleb stacked up four dollars' worth of canned goods and gewgaws but couldn't find anything else he wanted.

“Take a whiskey for the difference and leave me be,” Milt said, pouring a shot glass.

The fiddler lifted the chipped glass and held it against the lantern light to inspect the color. He sniffed it. He swished it around in the glass to judge its fluidity. He had never dared to taste liquor at the Colorado City dances. Not with Buster or Pete around, or someone who might tell his father. But now he knew no one would care one way or the other. He stuck his finger in and sucked the whiskey off—the driest liquid he had ever tasted. He slurped a little over the rim of the glass. It seemed to disappear before he could swallow. It soaked right into his mouth. His nose drew the vapors into his head like a chimney with an open flue.

Leaning against the bar, Caleb sipped at his whiskey for some time. His chest warmed. Sonny and Joe were leaving just as he poured the last drop down his throat.

“Go easy on that nose paint,” Sonny said.

“Yeah,” Joe added, “that stuff'll raise a blood blister on a rawhide boot.”

As he carried his fiddle up the hill, Caleb wondered if he was drunk. He knew he wasn't staggering drunk, but he thought he might be a little touched by the liquor. It wasn't at all an unpleasant feeling. Taking a whiskey now and again might not be an altogether bad idea.

*   *   *

After hearing the boy's fiddle music, Old Milt found work enough to keep Caleb around. He sent him to the nearest stand of pines with the ox wagon to haul back more tree trunks for Joe and Sonny to saw. Then he put Caleb to work dismantling old sluice boxes to bring back to the saloon.

“Saw 'em down to stove-wood size,” Milt said. “Stack 'em along the wall, yonder.”

“Can I chop 'em? It'll go faster.”

“I said saw 'em, didn't I? Do I have to repeat everything twice't?”

Milt came out later and caught Caleb throwing the sawed-off sluice-box lumber into stacks. “Hey!” he shouted. “Did I tell you to toss 'em around like horseshoes? Stack 'em easy, or you'll shake the color loose!”

Caleb didn't always understand everything Milt said, but he generally obeyed as long as the old man was paying the wages. That evening he carried in an armload of the old lumber and carefully placed it on the floor beside the woodstove. Then he put his hat on the bar, got out his fiddle and began tuning up.

The place was just getting lively when Old Milt brought Caleb a whiskey. “One of them gents staked you to a drink,” he said.

“Which one?”

Milt shrugged and hobbled back to the bar.

He finished the whiskey rather quickly and went back to playing. The next time he took the fiddle out from under his chin, he found another drink beside him. The warmth in his chest and stomach invited another swallow. He sipped the whiskey between songs, then gulped the last finger in the glass.

The liquor seemed to reproduce itself. With his concentration thrown into the fiddle playing, he didn't see Milt bringing the refills. They just appeared.

After several glasses, Old Milt's saloon acquired a kind of glow Caleb had never seen before. The rough lumber looked smooth; the hardened faces took on expressions of benevolence. The fiddle music, though beginning to slur and warble for some reason, sounded like the rhapsody of songbirds. Caleb downed a whole shot glass at once.

In the middle of “Listen to the Mockingbird,” the saloon became unstable. The fiddler thought maybe the creek was washing the place away. The stool wouldn't sit level under him. The saloon patrons seemed to notice something unusual, too. He could see them staring at him as he played, but they wouldn't stand still. They kept jerking and wavering around. Suddenly he couldn't feel the fiddle in his hands anymore, but he knew it was there. It sounded far away, as if someone else were playing it. Whoever it was wasn't playing very well.

Caleb began to sweat. Milt must have stoked the stove with too much sluice-box wood. He looked for the stove but couldn't find it. He forgot what song he was playing, so he quit in the middle of it and reached for his whiskey. The stool lurched just as he turned the glass up; he dropped the fiddle; the floor swung perpendicular and hit him in the face, reminding him of the handle of a hoe he had once stepped on.

The blow to the head, though he felt no pain from it, hit him so hard that it made his ears ring and made him sick to his stomach. This was no time to be sick. He was missing something hilarious. He knew he was, because he could hear riotous laughter all around him. He tried to find the source of all the amusement, but everything he looked at blurred before his eyes. He tried to get up so he could get some fresh air outside, but the floor started spinning under him. He became ill with dizziness. His stomach twisted and cramped. Then he rose as if sucked into a cyclone, and he heard Old Milt's voice:

“… you drunken fiddler, go sop your head in the crick!”