The Luck of Roaring Camp, by Bret Harte.

by Bret Harte

There was commotion in Roaring Camp. It could not have been a fight, for in 1850 that was not novel enough to have called together the entire settlement. The ditches and claims were not only deserted, but Tuttle’s Grocery had contributed its gamblers, who, it will be remembered, calmly continued their game the day that French Pete and Kanaka Joe shot each other to death over the bar in the front room. The whole camp was collected before a rude cabin on the outer edge of the clearing. Conversation was carried on in a low tone, but the name of a woman was frequently repeated. It was a name familiar enough in the camp,—Cherokee Sal.

Perhaps the less said of her the better. She was a coarse, and it is to be feared, a very sinful woman. But at that time she was the only woman in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity, when she most needed the ministration of her own sex. Dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear even when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness. The primal curse had come to her in that original isolation which must have made the punishment of the first transgression so dreadful. It was, perhaps, part of the expiation of her sin that, at a moment when she most lacked her sex’s intuitive tenderness and care, she met only the half-contemptuous faces of her masculine associates. Yet a few of the spectators were, I think, touched by her sufferings. Sandy Tipton thought it was “rough on Sal,” and, in the contemplation of her condition, for a moment rose superior to the fact that he had an ace and two bowers in his sleeve.

It will be seen also that the situation was novel. Deaths were by no means uncommon in Roaring Camp, but a birth was a new thing. People had been dismissed the camp effectively, finally, and with no possibility of return; but this was the first time that anybody had been introduced ab initio. Hence the excitement.

“You go in there, Stumpy,” said a prominent citizen known as ‘Kentuck,’ addressing one of the loungers. “Go in there, and see what you kin do.

You’ve had experience in them things.”

Perhaps there was a fitness in the selection. Stumpy, in other climes, had been the putative head of two families; in fact, it was owing to some legal informality in these proceedings that Roaring Camp—a city of refuge—was indebted to his company. The crowd approved the choice, and Stumpy was wise enough to bow to the majority. The door closed on the extempore surgeon and midwife, and Roaring Camp sat down outside, smoked its pipe, and awaited the issue.

The assemblage numbered about a hundred men. One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless. Physically they exhibited no indication of their past lives and character. The greatest scamp had a Raphael face, with a profusion of blonde hair; Oakhurst, a gambler, had the melancholy air and intellectual abstraction of a Hamlet; the coolest and most courageous man was scarcely over five feet in height, with a soft voice and an embarrassed, timid manner. The term roughs applied to them was a distinction rather than a definition. Perhaps in the minor details of fingers, toes, ears, etc., the camp may have been deficient, but these slight omissions did not detract from their aggregate force. The strongest man had but three fingers on his right hand; the best shot had but one eye.

Such was the physical aspect of the men that were dispersed around the cabin. The camp lay in a triangular valley between two hills and a river. The only outlet was a steep trail over the summit of a hill that faced the cabin, now illuminated by the rising moon. The suffering woman might have seen it from the rude bunk whereon she lay,—seen it winding like a silver thread until it was lost in the stars above.

A fire of withered pine boughs added sociability to the gathering. By degrees the natural levity of Roaring Camp returned. Bets were freely offered and taken regarding the result. Three to five that “Sal would get through with it;” even that the child would survive; side bets as to the sex and complexion of the coming stranger. In the midst of an excited discussion an exclamation came from those nearest the door, and the camp stopped to listen. Above the swaying and moaning of the pines, the swift rush of the river, and the crackling of the fire rose a sharp, querulous cry,—a cry unlike anything heard before in the camp. The pines stopped moaning, the river ceased to rush, and the fire to crackle. It seemed as if Nature had stopped to listen too.

The camp rose to its feet as one man! It was proposed to explode a barrel of gunpowder; but in consideration of the situation of the mother, better counsels prevailed, and only a few revolvers were discharged; for whether owing to the rude surgery of the camp, or some other reason, Cherokee Sal was sinking fast. Within an hour she had climbed, as it were, that rugged road that led to the stars, and so passed out of Roaring Camp, its sin and shame, forever. I do not think that the announcement disturbed them much, except in speculation as to the fate of the child. “Can he live now?” was asked of Stumpy. The answer was doubtful. The only other being of Cherokee Sal’s sex and maternal condition in the settlement was an ass. There was some conjecture as to fitness, but the experiment was tried. It was less problematical than the ancient treatment of Romulus and Remus, and apparently as successful.

When these details were completed, which exhausted another hour, the door was opened, and the anxious crowd of men, who had already formed themselves into a queue, entered in single file. Beside the low bunk or shelf, on which the figure of the mother was starkly outlined below the blankets, stood a pine table. On this a candle-box was placed, and within it, swathed in staring red flannel, lay the last arrival at Roaring Camp. Beside the candle-box was placed a hat. Its use was soon indicated. “Gentlemen,” said Stumpy, with a singular mixture of authority and ex officio complacency,— “gentlemen will please pass in at the front door, round the table, and out at the back door. Them as wishes to contribute anything toward the orphan will find a hat handy.”

The first man entered with his hat on; he uncovered, however, as he looked about him, and so unconsciously set an example to the next. In such communities good and bad actions are catching. As the procession filed in comments were audible,—criticisms addressed perhaps rather to Stumpy in the character of showman; “Is that him?” “Mighty small specimen;” “Has n’t more ‘n got the color;” “Ain’t bigger nor a derringer.” The contributions were as characteristic: A silver tobacco box; a doubloon; a navy revolver, silver mounted; a gold specimen; a very beautifully embroidered lady’s handkerchief (from Oakhurst the gambler); a diamond breastpin; a diamond ring (suggested by the pin, with the remark from the giver that he “saw that pin and went two

diamonds better”); a slung-shot; a Bible (contributor not detected); a golden spur; a silver teaspoon (the initials, I regret to say, were not the giver’s); a pair of surgeon’s shears; a lancet; a Bank of England note for 5 pounds; and about $200 in loose gold and silver coin. During these proceedings Stumpy maintained a silence as impassive as the dead on his left, a gravity as inscrutable as that of the newly born on his right. Only one incident occurred to break the monotony of the curious procession. As Kentuck bent over the candle-box half curiously, the child turned, and, in a spasm of pain, caught at his groping finger, and held it fast for a moment. Kentuck looked foolish and embarrassed.

Something like a blush tried to assert itself in his weather-beaten cheek. “The damned little cuss!” he said, as he extricated his finger, with perhaps more tenderness and care than he might have been deemed capable of showing. He held that finger a little apart from its fellows as he went out, and examined it curiously. The examination provoked the same original remark in regard to the child. In fact, he seemed to enjoy repeating it. “He wrassled with my finger,” he remarked to Tipton, holding up the member, “the damned little cuss!”

It was four o’clock before the camp sought repose. A light burnt in the cabin where the watchers sat, for Stumpy did not go to bed that night. 

Nor did Kentuck. He drank quite freely, and related with great gusto his experience, invariably ending with his characteristic condemnation of the newcomer. It seemed to relieve him of any unjust implication of sentiment, and Kentuck had the weaknesses of the nobler sex. When everybody else had gone to bed, he walked down to the river and whistled reflectingly. Then he walked up the gulch past the cabin, still whistling with demonstrative unconcern. At a large redwood-tree he paused and retraced his steps, and again passed the cabin. Halfway down to the river’s bank he again paused, and then returned and knocked at the door. It was opened by Stumpy. “How goes it?” said Kentuck, looking past Stumpy toward the candle-box. “All serene!” replied Stumpy.

“Anything up?” “Nothing.” There was a pause—an embarrassing one—Stumpy still holding the door. Then Kentuck had recourse to his finger, which he held up to Stumpy. “Wrassled with it,—the damned little cuss,” he said, and retired.

The next day Cherokee Sal had such rude sepulchre as Roaring Camp afforded. After her body had been committed to the hillside, there was a formal meeting of the camp to discuss what should be done with her infant. A resolution to adopt it was unanimous and enthusiastic. But an animated discussion in regard to the manner and feasibility of providing for its wants at once sprang up. It was remarkable that the argument partook of none of those fierce personalities with which discussions were usually conducted at Roaring Camp. Tipton proposed that they should send the child to Red Dog,—a distance of forty miles,—where female attention could be procured. But the unlucky suggestion met with fierce and unanimous opposition. It was evident that no plan which entailed parting from their new acquisition would for a moment be entertained.

“Besides,” said Tom Ryder, “them fellows at Red Dog would swap it, and ring in somebody else on us.” A disbelief in the honesty of other camps prevailed at Roaring Camp, as in other places.

The introduction of a female nurse in the camp also met with objection.

It was argued that no decent woman could be prevailed to accept Roaring Camp as her home, and the speaker urged that “they didn’t want any more of the other kind.” This unkind allusion to the defunct mother, harsh as it may seem, was the first spasm of propriety,—the first symptom of the camp’s regeneration. Stumpy advanced nothing. Perhaps he felt a certain delicacy in interfering with the selection of a possible successor in office. But when questioned, he averred stoutly that he and “Jinny”—the mammal before alluded to—could manage to rear the child. There was something original, independent, and heroic about the plan that pleased the camp. Stumpy was retained. Certain articles were sent for to Sacramento. “Mind,” said the treasurer, as he pressed a bag of gold-dust into the expressman’s hand, “the best that can be got,—lace, you know, and filigree-work and frills,—damn the cost!”

Strange to say, the child thrived. Perhaps the invigorating climate of the mountain camp was compensation for material deficiencies. Nature took the foundling to her broader breast. In that rare atmosphere of the Sierra foothills,—that air pungent with balsamic odor, that ethereal cordial at once bracing and exhilarating,—he may have found food and nourishment, or a subtle chemistry that transmuted ass’s milk to lime and phosphorus. Stumpy inclined to the belief that it was the latter and good nursing. “Me and that ass,” he would say, “has been father and mother to him! Don’t you,” he would add, apostrophizing the helpless bundle before him, “never go back on us.”

By the time he was a month old the necessity of giving him a name became apparent. He had generally been known as “The Kid,” “Stumpy’s Boy,” “The Coyote” (an allusion to his vocal powers), and even by Kentuck’s endearing diminutive of “The damned little cuss.” But these were felt to be vague and unsatisfactory, and were at last dismissed under another influence. Gamblers and adventurers are generally superstitious, and Oakhurst one day declared that the baby had brought ‘the luck’ to Roaring Camp. It was certain that of late they had been successful.

“Luck” was the name agreed upon, with the prefix of Tommy for greater convenience. No allusion was made to the mother, and the father was unknown.

“It’s better,” said the philosophical Oakhurst, “to take a fresh deal all round. Call him Luck, and start him fair.” A day was accordingly set apart for the christening. What was meant by this ceremony the reader may imagine who has already gathered some idea of the reckless irreverence of Roaring Camp. The master of ceremonies was one “Boston,” a noted wag, and the occasion seemed to promise the greatest facetiousness. This ingenious satirist had spent two days in preparing a burlesque of the Church service, with pointed local allusions. The choir was properly trained, and Sandy Tipton was to stand godfather. But after the procession had marched to the grove with music and banners, and the child had been deposited before a mock altar, Stumpy stepped before the expectant crowd. “It ain’t my style to spoil fun, boys,” said the little man, stoutly eyeing the faces around him, “but it strikes me that this thing ain’t exactly on the square. It’s playing it pretty low down on this yer baby to ring in fun on him that he ain’t goin’ to understand. And ef there’s goin’ to be any godfathers round, I’d like to see who’s got any better rights than me.”

A silence followed Stumpy’s speech. To the credit of all humorists be it said that the first man to acknowledge its justice was the satirist thus stopped of his fun. “But,” said Stumpy, quickly following up his advantage, “we’re here for a christening, and we’ll have it. I proclaim you Thomas Luck, according to the laws of the United States and the State of California, so help me God.” It was the first time that the name of the Deity had been otherwise uttered than profanely in the camp. The form of christening was perhaps even more ludicrous than the satirist had conceived; but strangely enough, nobody saw it and nobody laughed.

“Tommy” was christened as seriously as he would have been under a Christian roof and cried and was comforted in as orthodox fashion.

Frederic Remington.

And so the work of regeneration began in Roaring Camp. Almost imperceptibly a change came over the settlement. The cabin assigned to “Tommy Luck”—or “The Luck,” as he was more frequently called—first showed signs of improvement. It was kept scrupulously clean and whitewashed. Then it was boarded, clothed, and papered. The rose wood cradle, packed eighty miles by mule, had, in Stumpy’s way of putting it, “sorter killed the rest of the furniture.” So the rehabilitation of the cabin became a necessity. The men who were in the habit of lounging in at Stumpy’s to see “how ‘The Luck’ got on” seemed to appreciate the change, and in self defense the rival establishment of “Tuttle’s grocery” bestirred itself and imported a carpet and mirrors. The reflections of the latter on the appearance of Roaring Camp tended to produce stricter habits of personal cleanliness. Again Stumpy imposed a kind of quarantine upon those who aspired to the honor and privilege of holding The Luck. It was a cruel mortification to Kentuck—who, in the carelessness of a large nature and the habits of frontier life, had begun to regard all garments as a second cuticle, which, like a snake’s, only sloughed off through decay—to be debarred this privilege from certain prudential reasons. Yet such was the subtle influence of innovation that he thereafter appeared regularly every afternoon in a clean shirt and face still shining from his ablutions. Nor were moral and social sanitary laws neglected. “Tommy,” who was supposed to spend his whole existence in a persistent attempt to repose, must not be disturbed by noise. The shouting and yelling, which had gained the camp its infelicitous title, were not permitted within hearing distance of Stumpy’s. The men conversed in whispers or smoked with Indian gravity.

Profanity was tacitly given up in these sacred precincts, and throughout the camp a popular form of expletive, known as “D—n the luck!” and “Curse the luck!” was abandoned, as having a new personal bearing.

Vocal music was not interdicted, being supposed to have a soothing, tranquilizing quality; and one song, sung by “Man-o’-War Jack,” an English sailor from her Majesty’s Australian colonies, was quite popular as a lullaby. It was a lugubrious recital of the exploits of “the Arethusa, Seventy-four,” in a muffled minor, ending with a prolonged dying fall at the burden of each verse, “On b-oo-o-ard of the Arethusa.”

It was a fine sight to see Jack holding The Luck, rocking from side to side as if with the motion of a ship, and crooning forth this naval ditty. Either through the peculiar rocking of Jack or the length of his song,—it contained ninety stanzas, and was continued with conscientious deliberation to the bitter end,—the lullaby generally had the desired effect. At such times the men would lie at full length under the trees in the soft summer twilight, smoking their pipes and drinking in the melodious utterances. An indistinct idea that this was pastoral happiness pervaded the camp. “This ‘ere kind o’ think,” said the Cockney Simmons, meditatively reclining on his elbow, “is ‘eavenly.” It reminded him of Greenwich.

On the long summer days The Luck was usually carried to the gulch from whence the golden store of Roaring Camp was taken. There, on a blanket spread over pine boughs, he would lie while the men were working in the ditches below. Latterly there was a rude attempt to decorate this bower with flowers and sweet-smelling shrubs, and generally someone would bring him a cluster of wild honeysuckles, azaleas, or the painted blossoms of Las Mariposas. The men had suddenly awakened to the fact that there were beauty and significance in these trifles, which they had so long trodden carelessly beneath their feet. A flake of glittering mica, a fragment of variegated quartz, a bright pebble from the bed of the creek, became beautiful to eyes thus cleared and strengthened, and were invariably pat aside for The Luck. It was wonderful how many treasures the woods and hillsides yielded that “would do for Tommy.”

Surrounded by playthings such as never child out of fairyland had before, it is to be hoped that Tommy was content. He appeared to be serenely happy, albeit there was an infantine gravity about him, a contemplative light in his round gray eyes, that sometimes worried Stumpy. He was always tractable and quiet, and it is recorded that once, having crept beyond his “corral,”—a hedge of tessellated pine boughs, which surrounded his bed,—he dropped over the bank on his head in the soft earth, and remained with his mottled legs in the air in that position for at least five minutes with unflinching gravity. He was extricated without a murmur. I hesitate to record the many other instances of his sagacity, which rest, unfortunately, upon the statements of prejudiced friends. Some of them were not without a tinge of superstition. “I crep’ up the bank just now,” said Kentuck one day, in a breathless state of excitement “and dern my skin if he was a-talking to a jay bird as was a-sittin’ on his lap. There they was, just as free and sociable as anything you please, a-jawin’ at each other just like two cherrybums.” Howbeit, whether creeping over the pine boughs or lying lazily on his back blinking at the leaves above him, to him the birds sang, the squirrels chattered, and the flowers bloomed. 

Arthur T. Lee.

Nature was his nurse and playfellow. For him she would let slip between the leaves golden shafts of sunlight that fell just within his grasp; she would send wandering breezes to visit him with the balm of bay and resinous gum; to him the tall redwoods nodded familiarly and sleepily, the bumblebees buzzed, and the rooks cawed a slumbrous accompaniment.

Such was the golden summer of Roaring Camp. They were “flush times,” and the luck was with them. The claims had yielded enormously. The camp was jealous of its privileges and looked suspiciously on strangers. No encouragement was given to immigration, and, to make their seclusion more perfect, the land on either side of the mountain wall that surrounded the camp they duly pre-empted. This, and a reputation for singular proficiency with the revolver, kept the reserve of Roaring Camp inviolate. The expressman—their only connecting link with the surrounding world—sometimes told wonderful stories of the camp. He would say, “They’ve a street up there in ‘Roaring’ that would lay over any street in Red Dog. They’ve got vines and flowers round their houses, and they wash themselves twice a day. But they’re mighty rough on strangers, and they worship an Injun baby.”

With the prosperity of the camp came a desire for further improvement.

It was proposed to build a hotel in the following spring, and to invite one or two decent families to reside there for the sake of The Luck, who might perhaps profit by female companionship. The sacrifice that this concession to the sex cost these men, who were fiercely skeptical in regard to its general virtue and usefulness, can only be accounted for by their affection for Tommy. A few still held out. But the resolve could not be carried into effect for three months, and the minority meekly yielded in the hope that something might turn up to prevent it.

And it did.

The winter of 1851 will long be remembered in the foothills. The snow lay deep on the Sierras, and every mountain creek became a river, and every river a lake. Each gorge and gulch was transformed into a tumultuous watercourse that descended the hillsides, tearing down giant trees and scattering its drift and debris along the plain. Red Dog had been twice under water, and Roaring Camp had been forewarned. “Water put the gold into them gulches,” said Stumpy. “It been here once and will be here again!” And that night the North Fork suddenly leaped over its banks and swept up the triangular valley of Roaring Camp.

In the confusion of rushing water, crashing trees, and crackling timber, and the darkness which seemed to flow with the water and blot out the fair valley, but little could be done to collect the scattered camp.

When the morning broke, the cabin of Stumpy, nearest the river-bank, was gone. Higher up the gulch they found the body of its unlucky owner; but the pride, the hope, the joy, The Luck, of Roaring Camp had disappeared.

They were returning with sad hearts when a shout from the bank recalled them.

It was a relief-boat from down the river. They had picked up, they said, a man and an infant, nearly exhausted, about two miles below. Did anybody know them, and did they belong here?

It needed but a glance to show them Kentuck lying there, cruelly crushed and bruised, but still holding The Luck of Roaring Camp in his arms. As they bent over the strangely assorted pair, they saw that the child was cold and pulseless. “He is dead,” said one. Kentuck opened his eyes.

“Dead?” he repeated feebly. “Yes, my man, and you are dying too.”

A smile lit the eyes of the expiring Kentuck.

“Dying!” he repeated; “he’s a-taking me with him. Tell the boys I’ve got The Luck with me now;” and the strong man, clinging to the frail babe as a drowning man is said to cling to a straw, drifted away into the shadowy river that flows forever to the unknown sea.

END

Double Down.

Zach Neal

There was always the roar of whitewater in the background.

After a while, you got so used to it it kind of went away. Almost anything was better than the desert, but around here it was uphill all the way, no matter which way you looked. It was a little too wet, no matter how you looked at it, in that infernal country.

There were five of us originally, but Sammy Doyle died of a fever three days after we broke off from the wagon train.

There might have been other human beings within thirty miles of us.

There was no one, for certain, within five or ten miles in any direction, or we would have known about it. It was awfully quiet out there sometimes, and the ringing of an axe carried a long ways.

We all had our own thoughts, and there was this hollow sensation in the guts, not from hunger but from sorrow.

That left just the four of us.

Sammy was the one that bought the map from a man, a Mister Stephen Dexter. Headed back east, Dexter was desperate for a meal and a drink. That was at Fort Laramie, which lay far behind us now, and quite a ways south, too. He said Sammy could come and look him up when he was filthy, stinking rich, and they could shake hands, have a laugh over it, and have a drink on it.

We laughed when we heard that. Of course we looked at the map, and laughed again. Off in the distance, the coyotes laughed too, echoing on the chill night air. The moon was just rising and the night was still except for the crickets.

“We never should have let him wander off on his own—” That was Clay, but Sammy laughed just as hard as the rest of us.

He was a persistent devil though.

“Oh, come on, boys! This could save us a lot of time. That is, if it’s legit—”

Snickers and grins finally got to him, and he folded up his map and glowered at us over the glowing bowl of his pipe.

Poor old Sammy. He was a true innocent, but then we all were.

The bottle went around the fire. It was very late and the rest of the camp was asleep. After thinking on it some, and drinking on it some more, we decided it was worth a look. It looked, at most, a week’s hard travel to the north off from the main route of the California trail. A few days looking around and then it would be another week back to where we were now. While we would be pushing our luck as far as the snows were concerned, we had left Independence in plenty of time, May 22, and we’d had good luck so far. Just the other day our wagon-master, Harold Bondy, who’d done the trip several times before, had been saying that we had a few days in hand on this one.

The story was that the fellow, Dexter, the one that made the map, found this creek. He told Sammy he was the one and it wasn’t no second-hand story. He found a deposit of placer gold. He was pulling four and five dollars out of some pans…with a proper hand rocker, you could do all right, and the actual ore bed, which must be nearby, somewhere upstream, well that would be quite a find.

But the season was late, and it was coming onto winter in the high mountains. On his way out Dexter was ambushed by Paiutes, but managed to keep his hair. Sammy seen the scar and Everything. A big old Paiute arrow came in through the shoulder blade and just missed the heart, as Sammy said, stopping only when it hit the insides of the front ribs.

Well, that didn’t mean so much, and we all knew it, but the story was the man spent the next few months convalescing. Mister Dexter was just plain lucky to be alive. With time on his hands, he had reconsidered one or two things, regarding the nature of life and his own place in it.

He needed to get home, back east, where he had kinfolk that could look after him, as he wasn’t ever going to be the same man again.

As for the map, it showed the river and its tributaries. It showed a good number of native villages, the Maidu and other tribes, some hostile and some not so hostile.

We were young, we were game and we were there looking for gold anyways.

That’s where Sammy had a distinct point. One place might be as good as another when we knew damn-all about mining and were pretty much relying on luck and God’s own blessing.

This fellow, he said he had even left a poke of dust and nuggets up there. He’d cached it for safety, as it represented his life’s fortune. He carried what he figured he needed to live in town for the winter. He would buy more tools, more grub and then head on up there again in spring. After being ambushed, and not being able to move around much, and because the Injuns had robbed him of everything, and because he was just prospecting…the man wasn’t even all that sure of exactly where he was, he had staked the claim but never registered it. Yet he had described it right down to a T.

If we could find those stakes, we could find his poke—and maybe the place where them nuggets came out of.

It was a dream, and a chancy one at best. We all thought it was bogus, and yet we were ready for almost any sort of adventure. All them shiny new guns, among other things. I suppose there are worse reasons, but it was an open country up that way and it was sort of a question; as to what all that really meant. But this country had a future.

The five of us had pooled our resources, bought a rig and supplies. We were the Coffee Pot Mining Company.

The problem really arose when we got into a heated argument and decided to put it to a vote.

Predictably enough, it was two against and three in favor.

The real gold rush, down by Sacramento, was still a long ways away and it seemed like everyone in the world had gotten there first anyways.

I was against it, myself. What the hell do I know?

But I thought they’d soon tire of it and we could maybe come back down and hitch up with another wagon train, if there were any more.

Hot as hell, at least in daylight, mid-summer seemed so friendly, so benign.

It was already late enough in the season. I tried to tell them that but they just wouldn’t listen.

#

Turns out to be a lot like work.

That danged map cost Sammy twenty-five dollars. I was mad, where the others just laughed.

We had agreed to save our money as much as possible, not to make outrageous purchases, buying strictly what we needed, not to eat in a diner when we could cook our own grub, and even to share our bottles. We had so much tobacco and we rationed it out.

For the most part we stuck to it, too

Twenty-five dollars was a lot of money. None of us had much more than a hundred or so on us to begin with.

The rig, the wagon, the mounts, pretty much all of our money was tied up in them. If we had to winter up in those mountains, there wasn’t going to be enough food, and even with Sammy gone the situation didn’t look much better.

We buried Sammy on a bench overlooking the Feather River, under twisted pines that leaned back as if from a great wind. Hacking through the roots, we found clean black dirt under there and that’s where we put him.

Sammy was a farmer at heart, always talking about what he was going to do and what piece of bottom-land he was going to buy when he got back home.

Sammy would have liked that dirt.

#

After unpacking what we could and hiding the wagon, we went forward on foot and on horseback, and ultimately found the place no trouble at all.

Now, with as little as two or three weeks until the first really good snowfall, things weren’t looking too promising.

The funny thing was, we found the poke full of dust and everything.

“Dale and I have been doing some thinking.” Clay looked at Jamie and me with a solemnity that I hadn’t seen before.

“So?”

Jamie was a bear-like fellow, narrow of the hips and solidly built.

The friendliest man I’d ever known, he had a way of speaking out and reaching out to everybody he met. It was interesting to watch, and on sheer percentages the technique probably did well enough with the opposite sex.

“Well. We obviously ain’t found it—and we been all up and down this valley.”

True enough. Our campsite was a muddy hell, surrounded by shallow, water-filled pits and the mounded gravel of our diggings here, there and everywhere else.

“Damn!” Jamie saw it coming, I didn’t.

The terrible thing was that we had been pulling gold out of our pans. There were a few tiny grains here and there. It was just that the working of it was very hard indeed. Our pickings were nothing next to Mr. Dexter’s and so we were convinced this was the wrong place.

“Yeah. Well. You got an idea, spit it out.” I spat as if to underline my point.

“Here we are. Right where the man said it would be.” Jamie snorted.

He sucked hard on his pipe. His hand stabbed the air with it.

“We found his campsite. We have his map. It’s just a matter of time…” He trailed off. “That’s what we all figured.”

We found the hearth, just thirty yards up a little side tributary of the Feather River. The flatter part of the creek was shallow enough to walk across at gravel bars and small rapids. The flat ground, all of that appeared marked on the map. The man’s lean-to, his fire-pit and even his partly filled-in latrine were all right there. Or so it appeared. And lifting the stone in the front of his impressive, well-built fire-ring…sure as hell, there was a small, dirty bag of gold.

It was nowhere near as big as we’d been told or had thought possible, or imagined it would be—but it was there, and it was gold. It was mostly sand-sized grains, dust, small flecks that The contents appeared glittery and black at the same time. There were also a few nuggets. The largest one was at least half quartz but the size of a robin’s egg.

There might, admittedly, have been a couple of hundred dollars there—maybe three hundred if we were lucky.

“If we had just taken it—and then just taken off again.” Dale had said that before, several times over the last ten or twelve days. “Sammy would have had a clear profit, and we’d all have a bit more money than we started with.”

That idea held some merit, and we all sort of agreed on that, but by then it was too late.

Like the rest of us, Dale had run up and down the hills, shovel in hand, and making a damned crazy fool of himself.

Just like the rest of us.

“Okay. So what do you have in mind?” I sounded it out slowly, like a teacher with a dumb school-child trying to learn.

I was getting a bit tired by that point. Tired—of all of them and their foolishness.

Clay looked away. He looked embarrassed, and so did Dale.

“We was thinking maybe it’s time we was heading back, Ewan.” Clay stared at me with those small blue eyes surrounded by huge whites, and licked his lips and couldn’t quite keep it up.

While his straggling blond beard and mustache weren’t getting much thicker, they were certainly getting longer.

Jamie looked at me.

“Well. I ain’t going. You boys done dragged us up here—we’ve eaten half our food, and now you want to go gallivanting off again.”

He kept staring at me.

I shook my head.

“I can’t do nothing to stop you boys from running off. What did you have in mind?”

Finally they came out with it.

Dale was the better thinker of the two, but Clay was more of the talker—definitely.

There was one hell of a long silence right about then. Something cracked in the ashes of our breakfast fire, but that was about it.

I sighed, deeply.

“Okay.”

Jamie said it again.

“I ain’t leaving.”

I looked over.

“Neither am I.”

Call me stubborn, call me stupid, call me any danged thing that you want. But there were those itty-little bits of gold sticking in the bottom of my pan—and in the hindermost recesses of my mind, like when I tried to go to sleep at night, or when I woke up in the morning, or pretty much any old time of day when I took a breath or a minute or a pee-break.

Clay explained how they could unload most of the supplies from the wagon and be on their way. If we got hungry enough, we could come and get it. If we wanted out, it was there for us on the way down the mountain. They’d cache it under an oilcloth tarpaulin and put rocks on it. We had horses. Admittedly it would be a heavy load, and we wouldn’t be able to make much time.

They had it all figured out, apparently.

That would be the best they could do. If, or rather when we caught up to them, which was their line of thinking, or at least their line of talk, we could still go on as a company.

I suppose I knew them well enough, and didn’t believe them guys for a moment. They were as good as their word though. It was all anyone really had.

Jamie heaved his big sigh and we exchanged a long look.

“I don’t know, Ewan. What do you think?”

There were too many questions and too many things being left unsaid.

“What happens if we find gold?”

That’s when Dale spoke up, and he looked me right in the eye, which he hadn’t been doing for quite a spell.

“To hell with the gold. We just want out of here.”

“So it’s like that, eh?”

There was more, of course.

We talked it out, pretty well.

We shared a bottle around, more than one of us cocking a speculative eye when the realization hit that we actually had an odd number of bottles of rotgut and that would be hard to split.

Jamie had charge of the map and they were fine with that.

In the end, it was all very sad and we had a hard time saying goodbye.

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when Clay and Dale saddled up and took one last look around.

“See ya, boys!” That was Clay.

Dale couldn’t quite look at us. They had their half of the poke split between them, and who knew when we’d see them again. Probably never, and I think we all realized that. Finally Dale gave me a quick look, a nod, and then his heels hit Pal’s sides. They moved away.

I’ll never forget the clink of their hooves, as they turned their mounts down the first part of the slope below our camp. They were obscured by brush, then abruptly disappeared into the dark timberline down along where the river turned south.

Other than a few raucous birds, the sun was up, the temperature was climbing, and with the head I was developing, this might not be much of a working day.

#

When I woke again, lying beside the ashes of our breakfast fire, Jamie was still awake.

He was on the hard-packed ground with pine needles all over him, so he might have slept too.

He was head down, immersed in that damned map.

“Oh, give it a rest, Jamie.”

“Hmph.”

I sat up, giving him a sour look.

“Argh.”

My body creaked and ached as I rose and went to the bucket. My clothes were stiff with dirt and perspiration. My boots were perpetually damp and when you sat a certain way you could smell yourself, up around the neck area where the shirt was open. When you squatted for a dump you could smell that part as well.

The dipper was right there and I had myself a long drink. My head felt all right in spite of the early drunk. The water in the bucket had a quarter-inch of ice on it this morning, but it was clear now. The sun was warm enough, but there was something about the soft grey clouds down low on the western horizon, and the sighing of a stiff breeze in the treetops, that did not bode well for

our continued presence here.

“Well.”

The bottle stood right there on the end of our primitive table, part of a log split in half by lightning and propped up on an X-frame held together by baling wire. Shaking my head, I took the cold coffee pot out of the ashes. Putting my hand over the fire, there was still heat. I put a couple of handfuls of dry dead saplings, some finger-sized kindling on there.

Blowing into a gap I had created with another stick, I was rewarded by a red glow, some small crackles and a thin ribbon of smoke coming up. The breeze would take care of the rest.

Taking the coffee pot, I went down to the riverbank to flush it out and rinse some of the ashes and pork grease off it.

#

The Coffee Pot Mining Company.

Clouds draped long shadows across the valley. The sky was a blue that no artist has ever matched. The air was lovely, soft and warm and we had to get out of there.

We both knew it. Neither one of us wanted to give it up. The funny thing was, I was against coming here right from the start. Jamie had been the only other dissenting vote.

Where were them boys right about now? A few hours but not that far away. If they camped in the right place, we could see their fire and they would be able to see ours.

It would take them a good three days to get clean off this old mountain. We could catch up if we needed to.

Jamie took a gulp of scalding coffee, thick, black and sweet with three spoons of sugar.

Strong enough to float a bullet, as people said.

“So. What’s the plan?”

As if I had any inspiration.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know…” All around lay the evidence of our labors.

You didn’t dare walk around there at night without a light.

It seemed there wasn’t any place hereabouts where we hadn’t already looked, dug, looked, and then dug some more.

“I’ve always wondered about this map.” He handed it over to me, narrowly avoiding spilling coffee all over it from his brimming cup. “Shit! I’d better watch that.”

It wasn’t like we didn’t all know that map by heart by this time. It would be a kind of a hard thing to forget, at this point.

“So?” I set my cup aside, sighing for another pipe but I’d just put one out.

I set that well clear as well, and spread out the danged map for another look.

“How come there’s no north marked on there?”

“I don’t know, Jamie.”

He was right. The river was there. The name was written in. The curves back and forth, the valleys it ran in, they were all there in faded blue ink, on a soft yellowing paper that showed signs of being chewed on by rats on one end of it. We’d often wondered if something important had been lost in that little section.

“And another thing.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s that pin-hole there.”

I nodded. We’d all remarked on the map’s little inconsistencies. None of the nearest boom-towns were marked, but then they were all too new. They hadn’t been there, or the original prospector hadn’t known about them when the map was drawn. There was the one little pin-hole, and not in a corner or at the top, or anywhere you might reasonably expect it to be.

“Yeah. That one…that one seems to be right where this camp is. We all agreed on that.”

It was a curious point, perhaps significant.

“So, Ewan. We found the poke, and the shelter. It’s all right here. This is where the pin-hole is on the map.”

“I thought we figured that was better than putting a big, black, X-marks the spot…that kind of thinking.”

“Right.” Jamie looked around and set his cup down. “It’s a natural assumption. But just ‘cause we all agreed, that don’t make it true. Right?”

“Fair enough.” We were all idiots, and that’s fair enough too.

Jamie got up, moseyed over to his pile of gear and rummaged around. Coming back, he held up a pin, a simple, straightforward pin that a tailor might use to shore up a cuff or pant-leg before sewing it. Jamie had done some of that kind of work.

Jamie had some notion that he might take in a little work in whatever place we ended up at.

All of us had some skill or occupation before the madness took over and we chucked it to come west.

“Come on.”

I handed him the map and we went to our table. He laid the map down, and stuck the pin carefully into the hole, getting his eyeball right down in there.

“You’ve got an idea.”

Jamie shook his head.

“Not really. But why would he stick a pin there?”

“To keep the wind from blowing it away…?”

“But why not just put a couple of rocks on the corners?” He had me there.

No good reason.

Shaking his head again, Jamie bent and looked at it from the edge of our table.

He straightened up.

“That hole’s too small for a proper thumb-tack.” That was his sole observation.

In fact, we had probably made it bigger by using it again.

Right about then, a strong puff of wind from the left took up one corner of the map and lifted it bodily.

I was slightly bemused to see the map rotate a few degrees on the table-top, still secured by our pin…the nudge of an idea came then.

“Huh.”

“What? I was wondering if that pin was some sort of surveying device—you know, you stick it in and then line it up with something. But that’s just nuts, as we have no way of knowing how big the original pin was, how far he stuck it in, or where the man might have been standing—other than right here, when he looked at the danged thing.”

“Shit.”

He looked at me.

“What?”

“Shit.” I waved him off.

“What? What?” His voice came up in impatience, catching a little of the dawning excitement in my voice.

“I’m thinking, I’m thinking…Damn! I’m thinking…”

Knowing me well enough not to interfere with such an uncertain and time-consuming process, Jamie went back to his place by the log and the fire and I walked around the immediate area of the table, staring fixedly at that table, that map—and that pin. My head lifted and I stared up the side-creek, mentally trying to fix and remember all of its little side-branches.

“Shit.”

After a while, I sat down too. My coffee was getting cold and I wanted proper words for it or Jamie just wouldn’t get it. Hell, maybe I didn’t get it. But we’d been up there, all over, for that matter.

Finally I had it. I sucked back the remains of the coffee. I chuckled, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and sort of enjoyed his suspense for a moment. I rose and he did too.

We went back to the table.

“Okay, Jamie, my boy.”

His lip curled He knew that tone, and his eyes stabbed into mine.

“Out with it.”

I reached over and took one corner of the map, and rotated it ninety degrees or so.

“Anything strike you, good sir?”

He stared at the map, and then at me. He shook his head, and yet he had this gleeful look on his homely mug.

“Nope.”

“Look behind you.”

Jamie turned and looked up the small notch of a valley, the one our little side creek ran in, dropping in great foaming leaps from above and zigzagging down the mountainside in green pools and foaming white torrents. He looked up the hill, and back at the map.

His jaw dropped.

“No.” He stared up the hill.

There were several tributaries up above. They came in from left and right, collecting into one big set of rapids, plunging over the ledges and cataracts. My thinking was that maybe it was a sort of scale model of the bigger river…or something like that.

“No. It’s just too simple.” He stared at the map again. “Can it be…can it be pure coincidence.”

I didn’t know and said as much. But it seemed well worth looking into. We’d been convinced we were right on top of it—the fellow had camped right there after all. We were convinced that he would have found his sweet-spot and set up shop not too far away.

But what if this place—now confirmed almost double, if my hunch was correct, was merely the starting point? What if, in the paranoia that some men felt after being on their own too long, going cold and hungry and without human conversation for too long. What if he got a little tricky and worried that the map might be taken from him?

He might have had one or two tricks up his sleeve, and for that matter, good old Sammy might have held one or two things back from his friends as well. Sammy might have spent quite some time talking to Mr. Dexter.

No one likes to be double-crossed, as I told Jamie.

By this time it was getting near on to suppertime, and we agreed to rest up. We’d been digging for weeks. Surveying the nameless side creek above us wasn’t going to be the work of a moment.

It was with a renewed sense of optimism that Jamie and I had our stew, finished the bottle, knocked out our pipes and turned in by nine o’clock that night.

We would make an early start in the morning.

#

We spent three days trudging up and down those creeks.

It was the usual story.

We found color; a grain here, a few flecks there. A small nugget the size of a bean.

We sat in front of the fire, considering the fact that there was frost this morning and a half inch of ice on our water-bucket.

“I reckon we ain’t ever going to find it.”

That’s when it struck me.

“What if we have found it?”

He gave me a disgusted look.

“That’s just nonsense. Look at what he had—one poor old fellow, all on his own, messing about with a pick and a shovel.”

“Yeah—and he had three hundred or so in a pouch. He had enough money on him to keep him for the winter.”

Jamie shrugged angrily, looking off into the distance, where more purple and iron-grey clouds loomed.

“What I’m saying is, what if we have found it.”

He eyed me with a kind of disdain.

“What the hell are you trying to say?”

“I’m just saying. You and I are sitting on top of a gold mine, James. A bloody gold mine—and the whole silly bunch of us was just too danged foolish to see it.”

It was too much like work—and so that couldn’t be right.

What fools we were. And here we had it all the time. Crazy old Dexter knew what he was doing, all right. But then, that was just the way. It took some doing—and he knew what that meant, too. Jamie and I, and the others to whatever degree, were no strangers to some kind of daily work. But we were also possessed by the madness.

It had blinded us to the real possibilities.

I think it hit me then.

Having risen to reach for the bottle, the way I slumped to the ground, looking stupified and maybe even a bit foolish as I yanked out that cork—the way I slugged and gurgled and gagged on the best handful of corn whiskey I ever tasted.

Jamie flinched when I hollered.

“Hooo-eee!”

He stared in disbelief.

“Halleluyah, brother! Hot-damn! Yee—hah, boy!”

I jumped up and danced around, poking the bottle in his face, whooping and hollering and carrying on something awful.

Jamie shook his head, but he took the bottle anyway. There was a kind of violence in the long pull he took, never taking his eyes off of mine.

“What in the ever-lovin’ tarnation are you talking about?”

“Congratulations, Jamie—we’re rich.” I took a long ragged breath and tears sprung to my eyes. “Or as good as—there’s gold in them there hills, brother!”

Jamie took a mouthful and handed the bottle back. I held the bottle and he swallowed slowly.

His eyes watered.

I threw my head back and laughed like I hadn’t laughed in a while.

It hit Jamie too, right about then.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

And he who laughs last, laughs best.

I forget exactly who said that.

END