GOLD
UNDER ICE
by
Carol Buchanan
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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PUBLISHED BY:
Carol Buchanan on Smashwords
Gold Under Ice
Copyright © 2010 by Carol Buchanan
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
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In Memoriam, William B. French, who first inspired my love of Montana history and told great stories. Thanks, Dad!
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Part I:
Alder Gulch
~ 1 ~
AS IF ALL THE CANNONS OF NORTH AND SOUTH fired a ragged volley, as if all the black powder in Alder Gulch blew, the ice over Alder Creek broke, boomed, split into clashing chunks; echoes rebounded on echoes, pulsing in Dan Stark’s ears, and blanching the faces of two men who had been skating just a minute before. The fat man walking on the ice disappeared.
“Get a rope!” yelled Dan over the rolling thunder. “Run!”
Martha McDowell hoisted her skirts to run stumbling through soft snow up Wallace Street, where men already hurried toward her with ropes in their hands.
Dan could not wait for them. “Your scarf!” One of the skaters wore a muffler several feet long. Dan bolted toward an outcropping into the stream, cursing the snow that mired his ankles and pillowed the banks, obscuring their outlines. As he ran, a sense of relief rolled below the uppermost thought – save him, save him—
From the time the ice riming the shores had joined in the middle and thickened, all of Alder Gulch had waited for it to break and melt away, so they could return to work their gold claims. Now, in mid-April, the ice was breaking.
The skater made a ball of his muffler, and pitched it to Dan, who caught its fringe, made a hasty loop, and ran as in a nightmare, seeming to get no closer. The black water foamed white, flung up slabs of ice, damming itself, then tore the dam apart, rampaging against its banks, scouring away snow, rocks, contraptions, claim markers, and hope. A few yards upstream, the fat man, arms flailing, broke the surface, gasped and coughed. How long could a man survive such cold?
Dan threw the loop toward him as hard and as far as he could. Fell short. The man fought the water. Dan reeled the loop in, pushed through the snow as close as he dared to the tip of the outcrop. The sodden loop threw better when Dan flung it out and slightly downstream. The fat man plunged for it, and the creek hurled arm and shoulder into the loop. A slab of ice hit his head, and he sank. Dan braced himself, wrapping the scarf, stretched to a rope, around his hands. Squatting against the water’s jealous pull, he dug his heels into the snow. Yelled for help.
Up the man came again, unconscious, his body given to the water and the cold, his arms limp. The roiling water tossed him, played with him, sent him past Dan. Though thinking he was dead – then why fight the flood? – Dan braced himself, hauled on the rope. His boots could not find purchase; the creek dragged him toward its brink. He would drown, too, if he did not let go, but he could not bring himself to unwrap the cord biting into his hands, though the bank, leaning outward, settled under his feet.
Christ, he thought, don’t let us both be carried away. The man rose higher in the water – or did the ground sink? Dan clenched his jaws and dug in his heels, almost sat in the snow: Goddammit he would win this battle with the creek, even if for a corpse.
“Hold on!” A new man grabbed him around the waist from behind, stopped his slide toward the water. They fought the creek together, bringing the drowned man a couple feet closer to the bank.
A third man seized the cord ahead of Dan, and then more men arrived to battle the current for the stranger’s life. The soaked ground sank a little more as slowly, too slowly, the man’s grey face came up above the edge, and then his torso, and two more men risked the sinking bank to pull on his arms and coat, and haul him up. The bank cracked near the dead man’s knees. “Pull!” They all pulled as one and scrambled back, dragging the body.
A one-armed man in a Confederate greatcoat wrapped the rope around his upper arm, and they all yanked Dan back from the bank as it broke off into the water. He lay and gulped for air, as if he’d been the one drowning rather than the fat man lying inert in the wet snow. “My God,” said the one-armed man’s Southern voice. “I think he’s alive.”
“Roll him over!” Dan unwound an inch or two of rope from his hands, gasped at the pain. Peeling the cord out of bloody cuts, he held his lower lip in his teeth, damming an outcry behind them. Men rolled the stranger over onto his stomach, head downhill toward the creek, and turned his face to the side. A man straddled him and leaned on his back. Water ran out of his mouth and nose.
Someone said, “Careful with him! Don’t break a rib.”
They pressed, and again. And again.
The fat man sputtered, gasped, coughed, and vomited.
“If he don’t die of pneumonia,” said the skater who owned the scarf, “he might live.”
“We better get him up to the recovery,” said another man. “Someone go for a doc.”
They made a stretcher of the stranger’s greatcoat. “One, two, three, now!” Together they raised him up. Someone said, “Too bad this ain’t you, Jake, you wouldn’t be half the weight.”
Jacob Himmelfarb laughed. “The ice I do not walk on.”
“Let’s go,” said one. “We can’t be standing here with him all day.” Grumbling at his weight, they set off up the slope toward the recovery, where men with no place else to go recuperated from accident or illness.
The muffler, stretched thin, three times its length, and soaking, lay on the snow. The skater who owned it stooped to pick it up. “My wife knit that for me last year, before I come out here.”
Dan said, “I’m sorry about ruining it.”
“Don’t be. I’ll tell her it saved a man’s life, and we’ll both treasure it.”
“Who do you suppose he is?” The skater asked.
“He come in on the stage about an hour ago,” said the man who had come first to help. Timothy. In the battle to save the fat man, Dan had not realized it was his own stepson. He’d mistaken Timothy McDowell for a man. Or had he? Timothy was only sixteen.
The boy was saying, “Everyone looked mighty glad to make it. They had theirselves a time in the passes, the driver said. Nigh killed the horses.”
Dan scrabbled to pull his feet under him. “Maybe something in his valise will tell who he is.” He tried to stand, fell back. Strength had drained from his legs. Timothy bent to him, and Jacob, too; the fringes of Jacob’s prayer shawl escaped his overcoat and brushed Dan’s face. Together they raised him up, slung his arms across their own shoulders. “Let me go,” said Dan. “I’ll be all right.”
“Puny, ain’t you?” The one-armed man picked up Dan’s hat. His Confederate greatcoat was faded almost to the color of squash. Butternut, they called it
“Go to hell, Fitch.” Dan smiled as he said it.
Laughing, the Confederate handed him the hat and walked away.
“Let me go.” His friends stood aside, and Dan set the hat on his head. “I’m grateful to you both, but I can walk.” He tottered, not at all sure where his numb feet were. “Whoever he is, he’d be dead without you. Me, too, maybe.” Me, too. Understanding shivered up Dan’s spine. “My God, that was close.” Another step, and he wobbled, stumbled, would have fallen had not Timothy and Jacob taken hold of him again.
Timothy said, “You don’t know how close. There for a bit I thought you was a goner.”
Applause and cheers made Dan look up. Most of Virginia City seemed to be gathered at the foot of Wallace Street.
Dan tried to free his arms. “I had better walk home under my own steam.” He smiled. “Don’t tell your mother.”
“Too late.” Laughing, Tim held onto him.
Martha emerged from the crowd, relief and pride glowing on her face, and she touched his cheek as if to reassure herself that he stood here in the flesh.
Some in the crowd called out, “Good work!” “You saved him!” “Hurray for Dan Stark! Hurrah for —”
A shrill boy’s voice shrieked, “Damn Vigilante!” People stepped aside from a as if avoiding a dog’s mess. “You should’a drowned, you goddam murderer –” The sheriff strode toward him. “–you and your whore!” The boy pointed at Martha, screamed, “Whore!”
Dan jerked his arm from Timothy’s grasp and rushed for the boy, but Timothy outstripped him, cuffed the younger boy into the mud. Fending Timothy off with an elbow, the sheriff hauled him to his feet. Dan caught sight of Martha’s face, her dark eyes shocked in the bleached mask of her face. He drew her to him, wrapped his arms around her, and held her, trembling like a small and fragile brown sparrow. “You are my wife,” he whispered, “nothing less.”
Seeing a few secret smiles on some faces, Dan shouted at the boy, “Jacky Stevens, you should be horsewhipped for slandering my wife!” It would not prevent people from thinking as they liked, but at least it made his intentions clear.
~2~
MARTHA TOOK COMFORT from Dan’l’s arm holding her close enough to grow together as they made their way up the rising ground toward home. Timmy walked alongside Dan’l, and Dotty ran ahead and held their yellow dog, that barked and wriggled and wanted to play.
While Dan’l changed to dry clothes, Timmy stirred up the fire in the iron cook stove and Dotty put hot water on. Martha hung her cloak on a peg to the left of the front door (the rifles laid across pegs to the right), and put her outside shoes on the mat next to the others. They didn’t hardly need it, and the wood pile was getting low, but she built a fire in the round stove standing next to her rocker. She didn’t think the house could be too warm. Huddled in the rocker, her arms around herself, she tried to take comfort from this clean big room, better than any house she’d ever lived it. It had a window with real glass in three outside walls. The cook stove stood kitty-corner from her. In front of it, an eating table big enough for the four of them and a few guests did double duty as a work table. In the right-hand corner, between the two bedroom doors, stood the trunks where she stored their off-season clothes and extra bedding.
Even though the fires needed building up, the room warmed her, because here they took their meals together, argued some, got to know Dan’l. They were forging a family, and already she’d begun to think of her and Dan’l and the two young’uns that way, though she and Dan’l had come together just over two months ago. After McDowell left them, like they was – were – so much extra baggage, a stick of furniture or a dry cow. What they’d have done without Dan’l she didn’t know, made out somehow, maybe, though she might have had to work as a hurdy-gurdy dancer, but dear Lord never worse. Never. There’d have been no schooling for Dotty, and no comfortable cabin with separate bedrooms, so the child didn’t have to be aware of what grown folks did in bed. There, as everywhere, Dan’l treated her like she had feelings and wasn’t just something for him to, well, do what men did with a woman. They were getting to be a family like they hadn’t been with McDowell, though he was their real Pap. And her lawful husband.
That’s why the thought of him coming back scared her so. He could take her away and beat her for going with another man, and no one would stop him. He had the legal right.
At Dan’l’s touch on her shoulder, Martha started. She hadn’t heard him come out of the bedroom. Turning her head to smile at him, she caught sight of his hands. “Lordy,” she gasped.
His smile twisted. “I’d forgotten my gloves.”
Martha fetched the bandages and medicaments she kept handy, her being a healing sort of woman. Sitting at the eating table, the young’uns across from them, she laid his hand out under the ceiling lamp.
She felt Timmy’s anger beating its wings to be free. He’d be wanting to give Jacky Stevens a good whipping, and that scared her. It was something his Pap would do. Dotty, only twelve, liking pretties and how things looked, slumped in her chair and showed herself plumb mortified. The meaner ones at school would say plenty if they hadn’t already.
She set to work, tried to put her whole mind to this task. The muffler had been knit from a hairy sort of wool, and being strong like most wool when wet, it had stretched thin enough to cut. Tweezing wool hairs out, she felt him flinch, heard an occasional hiss, but she worked steady, just like her stomach wasn’t about to give up its doubts. When she’d bandaged his left hand, she couldn’t keep them to herself. She could be some temporary arrangement for Dan’l. He’d had a fiancée back in New York. Martha had seen her picture once – blonde, beautiful, and stylish – and her just a little brown mouse.
“Only I’m not your wife. Not all legal-like.” Tears started, and Dan’l reached out and wiped them away with his thumb.
“You are my wife.” He took her chin between his thumb and two fingers and turned her face up to him. “We are legally married, under common law, till death do us part. When we can, we’ll do it right.”
“A wedding?” Dotty sat up straight. “A real wedding?”
“Whatever your mother wants.” Dan’l kept her chin prisoner and looked into her eyes, his own a changeable blue like a lake she could drown in.
Blinking fast, Martha pulled her chin out of his grip and bent to work on his right hand, but her feelings spun too fast to take hold of, and she couldn’t see proper.
“How can you get married, with Pap still alive somewheres?” Dotty, playing with a blonde curl, twined it about her index finger. In build and coloring, both young’uns took after their Pap.
“Your mother can divorce him on grounds of desertion.” He spoke to the child, but Martha understood he was talking to her more’n the young’uns, letting her know how things stood, not just between them two, but between them and everyone else that thought it their business to have an opinion.
“That takes a court, don’t it?” Timmy’s deep man’s voice, that she still was not used to. “Can the People’s Court do it? Or, or the, the —”
He stumbled on Vigilante Tribunal, knowing Dan’l to be one of its prosecutors, but Dan’l said, “Neither court can grant a divorce. The People’s Court handles disagreements about property under fifty dollars. We” – meaning the Tribunal – “hear suits for more than fifty dollars.” Almost like an afterthought he added, “And capital crimes.”
They were all silent, thinking, Martha guessed, about the winter’s events, the twenty-four men hanged. Or was it twenty-two?
“Two and a half months aren’t enough to say he’s deserted us?” Martha gave the words an uphill tilt that made them a question.
“The only courts that have jurisdiction over divorces are the Territorial courts – Ah!” as Martha pulled out a long thread “– in Lewiston. If we traveled there and petitioned them to hear your mother’s case, they might refer it to the Legislature. Then we would have to wait until the next session.”
Martha thought about the journey to Lewiston, 500 miles over the Bitterroots, the snows twenty feet deep in the passes. Spring hadn’t begun even here, more’n a mile up, while another three or four thousand feet higher, it wouldn’t be thought of till maybe June. They could travel sooner, down to Salt Lake, then up the west side of the Bitterroots, a round trip she’d bet on being almost as far as from here to New York City, and taking longer. Besides the expense.
She sighed. “Nothing for it, then, but to wait on Mr. Edgerton.”
“Pooh!” Dotty tossed her curls. “What did that ugly old man want to see his pal Abe Lincoln for, anyway? Dratted Yankees.”
“None of that!” Martha scolded, Dan’l being himself a ‘dratted Yankee,’ but he answered Dotty like she’d asked a regular question, except for an extra edge in his voice to correct her.
“Chief Justice Edgerton went to petition Congress to split our side of the mountains away from Idaho, into a separate territory, called Montana, so we don’t have to make that long journey across the Bitterroots. We won’t know whether we’re in Idaho or Montana until he returns.” A secret joke lit in his eyes. “We might arrive in Lewiston only to find that we had made a useless trip and could have stayed home.”
Timmy reared back in his chair and slapped both palms on the table. “That damned Jacky Stevens! If he crosses my path, I’ll kill him.”
Dan’l’s head snaked around, quick as a biting horse. He aimed his finger at Timmy. “You will not. Do you hear me? If the Tribunal tried you for murder, I would not be able to save you. You will leave that boy alone. Do you understand?”
This was another Dan’l, the hard man, the Vigilante, who had, so folks said, put the noose around a few necks himself during the winter. For certain, his nightmares tormented his sleep, so that a time or two she’d cradled his head between her breasts to comfort him.
And while they all sat there dumbfounded, Dan’l said again: “Do you?”
Timmy slumped back in his chair, mouth open, eyes staring at Dan’l, and Dotty half rose, like to run.
When he found his voice, Timmy said, “Yes, sir.”
Martha breathed again, realized that she clung onto Dan’l’s wrist, and loosed her grip.
“Good. Now apologize to your mother and sister for your language. And for scaring them.”
The boy mumbled out something, and Dan’l told him to speak up and be plain. Martha wanted to say it was enough, but seeing in Dan’l’s profile still the man who could do what he had done, no matter what it cost him, she held her peace, because Dan’l was in charge, and knew what he was about. It was only when Timmy had spoke plain and they’d forgiven him that Dan’l’s face relaxed into the man they knew.
Later, listening to his breathing in the dark, Martha understood that he’d bent Timmy to his will without offering his fist. Unlike Timmy’s Pap.
~ 3 ~
MUD EVERYWHERE. Heavy clay mud, what folks called gumbo, that clogged wagon wheels and hooves ankle deep so that horses or oxen, straining as they might, hauled a load a mile in an hour. Martha felt like she spent most days on her knees, scrubbing the floor, though Dan’l and the young’uns was – were -- good about leaving their muddy shoes on the mat, and most storekeepers had laid down boards for walking on.
After lunch, when Dan’l suggested they go for a walk, it being such a beautiful spring day, she had her reasons for saying no.
Like always, his yes overcame her. “Men don’t hide their wives,” he said.
“I’ll just put on my outside shoes.” She wanted to put on McDowell’s old boots, but Dan’l wouldn’t want to go walking with her wearing those old things, so she wore her own shoes, though they weren’t much, except they fit better. Fingers trembling, she changed into her good dark blue walking skirt, too, which she’d hemmed three inches shorter than fashion, to keep it out of the mud, with a hem protector for good measure. She struggled a mite to button the waistband (living with Dan’l making her put on weight). Pausing a moment, she made a prayer on account the idea of this walk scared her, being paraded around.
They walked just about twenty feet from their door when she changed her mind. A man walking up their street, Jackson street, greeted Dan’l and touched his hat to her. Dan’l introduced her as Mrs. Stark, and the man bowed a little and said as he was happy to meet her. That was new to Martha. Men hadn’t bowed or touched their hats to her when she was connected to McDowell. She loosened her grip on Dan’l’s arm.
After the winter quiet, the town was noisy. Horses neighed and oxen bellowed, a dry axle screeched. Carpenters hammered and sawed, the blacksmiths’ anvils rang, and music escaped the saloons and hurdy-gurdies through open doors and windows.
On the corner of Wallace and Jackson, three men stood talking in a vacant lot, mud to their ankles. They talked loud, not arguing but just to be heard over the Creek running high and the reawakening sounds of commerce, Wallace Street being the center of business in Virginia City. One man came forward, pulling his feet out of the sucking gumbo.
Dan’l introduced her as Mrs. Stark, and added, “Solomon Content, my dear.”
Mr. Content took off his hat. His dark eyes smiled, full of humor, and made a little bow. “If men are bringing their wives into this wild country, it will be civilized in no time. Ladies have a civilizing effect on a man.”
Martha wasn’t sure about that, considering she’d had no civilizing effect on McDowell, a-tall. Judging it safest, she smiled at him and said nothing while the glow spread through her. No one had ever called her a lady before.
“What are you building?” Dan’l asked.
The man seemed fairly to expand, like a grouse or some such, he was so proud. “I intend to put up a two-story brick building.”
Imagine that! Martha couldn’t hardly credit it. Two two-story buildings in one town. “Like Kiskadden’s?”
Mr. Content smiled. “Not exactly. It’ll be built of brick, with Romanesque windows on the upper floor. Rounded tops, you know. It’ll be a fine building. A good addition for our fair city.” A man with a ruler in his hand called to Mr. Content, who touched his hat brim to her. “Will you be in your office later, Stark? I have a proposition I’d like to discuss.”
Dan’l nodded. “I’ll be at there in an hour.”
At that, Mr. Content said, “I’ll come see you then. I have a proposition.”
When they had crossed Jackson, watching for horse droppings and puddles, Martha asked, “What did he mean by that?”
“I’m not sure, but I think it’s the Masons. They want me to join.”
Before she could ask anything more, they crossed Jackson, and he held open the door to John Creighton’s store for her to walk in. Martha lingered in front of the display cabinet to admire the ladies’ watches, one on a velvet ribbon and two on gold chains. At the back of the store, men sat around a square stove. On seeing Dan’l, Mr. Creighton himself stood up to greet them, and Dan’l put his hand at the small of her back and ushered her forward, instead of leaving her to noodle among the new items for sale. The other men stood up, and Dan’l introduced them. They all smiled and nodded or bowed and mumbled polite greetings.
Sheriff Fox reached for her hand and bowed low over it. “Your virtues and your courage are well known, Mrs. Stark.” Almost she wondered if that were an insult, when a thin man, whose gaunt face and deep shadows under his eyes showed that he’d come through a great trial, said, “You helped my brother and me in the typhus. You truly have the healing gift.”
“Oh, we – we all helped,” Martha stammered. “All the women helped.” She blushed like a schoolgirl, and plumb forgot about the things she’d thought she wanted to look at.
When they continued their walk, she couldn’t ask Dan’l why they’d stopped in there because he was too busy greeting and exchanging pleasantries with other men, and introducing them to her. The few ladies out doing their day’s shopping smiled at them, and Mrs. Wilbur Sanders stopped with her two little boys to comment on the balmy spring day. “We must enjoy this while we can. I’m told winter is never far away in this country.”
As they walked on, there was to Martha’s mind an odd sound to the day, and she listened hard to all the parts, something like splitting a band into its separate instruments. Over the Creek’s thunder, men hammered and sawed, like they kept time with the tin pianos and fiddles that played in the saloons and hurdy-gurdies, and the blacksmiths’ hammers clanged metal on metal, sharp and clear in a tum-te-tum rhythm she could almost have danced to herself. Men shouted to their friends across street, horses whinnied, and oxen lowed. All that was ordinary, the town getting ready for gold season.
A snarling dogfight rolled under a yoke of oxen, and only the mud slowing the oxen’s hooves saved the dogs from being trampled. A teamster yelled words she didn’t allow in her house, cracked a whip, and the dogfight broke up, dogs kiyi-ing and yipping as they ran away.
The yell and the whip crack told Martha what puzzled her: the silence under the noise.
Being in their cups and taking a dislike to the way another’s mustache drooped, men used to holler angry insults and end their irritations with bullets, but now all was calm amidst the other noises. She used to listen for those shouts, and judge how close she was to Kiskadden’s so’s she could duck into one of the stores behind stone walls if the shooting started. You could never tell where bullets might fly.
Not now. Now she could walk about with Dan’l and visit with folks on street, there being no need to worry about stray bullets. They’d done that, Dan’l and the other Vigilantes. They’d made the town safe, except if someone went on another rampage.
They turned up hill on Van Buren Street, and Martha began at an angle to what she wanted to know. “With all this building, it won’t be long until everyone lives under a roof.” During the whole of Virginia City’s first year, men had lived in tents and wickiups like Fitch and Berry Woman, or the wagons that brought them west. Some even dug into caves like the man who’d spoken to her in Creighton’s store.
“True enough,” said Dan’l. “I marvel that they survived the winter.”
“Virginia City will be a real town before long.”
On Idaho Street, that ran parallel to Wallace, they stopped, and Dan’l pointed to where a crew hammered stakes for a new street crossing farther on. “See where they’re laying out logs? There’ll be a new street up there. And another one after that.”
“I see.” Martha didn’t particularly notice the street being marked. She’d seen someone else, much closer. Berry Woman stood alongside Major Fitch, who directed some men laying out logs. Berry Woman, wearing a deerskin dress, tall moccasins, and a red shawl that Martha had knit for her, shook her head at something Fitch said. He waved his hand again, and the men holding one of the logs moved a few inches outward, all the time keeping their eyes on Fitch who gestured this way and that at them. Martha wondered what they thought of moving that heavy log a trifle here and a trifle there.
In picking one foot and then another out of the mud, Berry Woman turned enough to see Martha and Daniel. She smiled and waved, and Martha sketched a little wave in return. Her friend was due before summer’s end, and when she clasped her hands under her protruding belly, Martha knew her back hurt.
Fitch looked to see what had caught Berry Woman’s eye, and gestured at them to come on.
Dan’l said, “We’d better go see.”
“They’re laying out their new house,” said Martha. “Berry Woman told me, it’s on account of the young’un.” Berry Woman was a full-blooded Crow, to Martha’s one-quarter Eastern Cherokee. “It must be the young’un. The Major always wants to keep what’s his.” Yet why he was keeping her didn’t so much matter as him doing it, on account so many white men who took Indian women for convenience, sent them back to their tribes – along with the young’uns – when they could marry a white woman. Mr. Dempsey, who owned the stage station at Ramshorn Creek, wasn’t like that, though. His Indian wife had give him a passel of young’uns, and they all lived happy enough, as far as Martha had ever heard.
Knowing that Fitch wasn’t fixing to throw Berry Woman away, why, that made her think better of him. Not much, but some. She recollected him with McDowell, their heads together in the lamplight, across the table, clicking their beers together and laughing about how rich they’d be. And all the time she knew what McDowell was doing with the dust he collected from Major Fitch, from her, from Timmy’s labors in Alder Creek’s frigid water. It all went to the cards and the rotgut whiskey, and to the women at Fancy Annie’s Saloon. Which was why she hadn’t let him touch her since they come here. Thank the Lord he’d been too drunk to force her.
While the men trucked around, they talked about outside walls and which side would catch the best sun and which would have the best view, almost like they was friends, Martha talked in sign language with Berry Woman. Having carried two to term and lost one between Tim and Dotty, Martha could help her be more knowing about her condition. Aside from Lydia Hudson, the Quaker who befriended everyone in the name of Jesus, and herself, Berry Woman had few friends here, being Crow Indian. She felt sorry for the Crow woman. The Shoshone had stole her as a child from her own people, then traded her two years ago to Fitch for four ponies.
The workmen laid the logs down and dusted their hands. Fitch said, “That’ll have to do, I suppose.” He gave an order to the crew about a load of lumber.
The men rejoined them, and then the back of Martha’s neck prickled because in answer to Dan’l saying it would be a fine house, Fitch got a prideful tone in his voice and said, “This is only the start. You’ll see. Someday I’ll have the finest house in the Territory, and Berry Woman will queen it over all them that won’t give her the time of day now.” He put his good arm around her shoulders, and Berry Woman blushed.
“Louise,” she said.
“That’ll be her white name,” said Fitch.
“Louise.” Berry Woman cocked her head at Martha, as if to ask what she thought.
“‘Louise.’” Martha tasted the word, said it again. “‘Louise.’ That’s real pretty.”
Berry Woman smiled.
~4~
OPENING THE RECOVERY DOOR, Dan regretted his impulse to visit the fat man. The odor of used chamber pots in the steamy air assaulted him almost to gagging, and he had to stand while his eyes adjusted to the gloom. There were no windows, and one lamp on a table by a cot showed him where to go. He rounded his shoulders to pass under the low rafters. Short men must have built this cabin, he thought, if this was the highest they could lift the wall’s top logs. Why had they not used a block and tackle?
The fat man, too weak to sit up, lay on the cot by the table, while Tabby Rose, the Negro woman who helped as needed in the recovery, spooned up soup for him from a bowl. The dark-stubbled skin of his cheeks folded in on itself, testifying to some weight loss overnight. As Dan stood beside her, the woman rose from her stool.
“Hello, Mrs. Rose.” Dan greeted her.
She nodded an unsmiling response, but he was accustomed to Tabby Rose’s disdain for white people, even those – like him – of the abolitionist mind. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbows, revealing muscular forearms a man might be proud of. Water bubbled in two buckets on the stove, and a pair of wash tubs squatted on a long table. A scrubbing board stood in one, and a stout stick lay by the second. On the floor a pile of dirty cloths waited for washing. She handed him the bowl and went back to her washing.
Pulling up a stool beside the cot, Dan offered the soup. When the fat man shook his head, Dan set the bowl on the floor and hung his hat on one forefinger.
“Who are you?”
“I pulled you out of the water.” He looked, Dan thought, to be in his forties. Old to travel this far in winter.
He offered a soft, plump hand. “You must think me a fool, but I’m grateful.”
Dan took the hand. The fat man’s grip was strong, seeming oblivious to the healing rope cuts, and he winced. “You could not know the ice would break just then. Two other men were skating there.” He pulled his hand back, hid the pain behind his hat.
“My name is Joel Van Fleet.” He smiled, but his eyes assessed Dan, as if wondering about him. “May I know yours?”
“Daniel Stark.”
The fat man’s belly pumped. He was laughing. “Do you appreciate irony?”
“Somewhat,” said Dan.
“I owe you my life and you’re the reason I’m here.” Van Fleet’s voice was hardly above a whisper, yet Dan recognized a New York accent that put him on his guard. “I was sent out to find you and bring you back.”
The hat dropped to the floor. “To find me? Has something happened to my family?” Only a dire need could force anyone, especially one as apparently accustomed to his comforts as this man, to travel nearly three thousand miles now.
The scrub board bumped and rasped as Tabby rubbed cloths down and up over its rounded wooden rungs. Dan bent closer to hear Van Fleet.
“Have no fear on that score. Everyone was well when I left. Your mother had a slight rheum, I believe, but nothing more. They send greetings. I have letter from your mother and grandfather. No, I’m here on business. I represent the Bank of New York.”
“The Bank of New York?” He had seen the list of everyone to whom Father had owed money, but the bank was not on it. He retrieved his hat from the floor, felt like a schoolboy at the teacher’s deck, anticipating the ruler across his knuckles.
“Yes. The Bank has bought the debt instruments.”
“I see.” The Bank of New York had bought the papers Dan had signed agreeing to reimburse the debtors in full at 10 per cent interest. Why? Banks never did anything unless they saw a profit in it. Meaning, Dan thought, that the bank considered it a sound investment to pay off the three outstanding debts so it could collect the gold from Dan. Again, why?
“That’s the irony, you see. Thinking I was tracking down a debtor, I find myself indebted to you. For my life.”
Dan said nothing. Tabby rumbled the washing over the scrub board, and then lifted a bucket of hot water off the stove, poured it into the rinse tub, and dropped in the clean wash. Taking up a flat stick, she stirred the cloths around.
“So you see,” Van Fleet said, “our duties are plain. Mine, to collect the debt and bring you back to New York. Yours is to accompany me forthwith.”
Like a damn criminal? Heat flared along Dan’s veins. He turned the hat round and round, studied the bandages on his hands. “I have never intended to default.”
“I am happy to hear you say that. It gives me hope that my long and arduous journey will be soon rewarded.” He regarded his broken fingernails, and his upper lip curled. “You have tarried here so long, your grandfather doubts your intentions. As does the bank.”
Clamping his jaws shut on his thoughts, Dan swore to himself. Grandfather had sold the papers to the bank. Had he set their dog on him? This dog in particular? The old son of a bitch.
Van Fleet said, “I expect we might leave for New York as soon as I have strength to travel.”
What had the poet – Donne? – said? Something about lovers bound by strands of gold beat to airy thinness? Obligation and duty could bind more than love, could draw him back to New York, and choke him. Dan leaned both elbows on his knees and willed his mind to clear of the anger pounding at his temples.
“What have you heard from your grandfather?”
“Nothing since October.”
“The mails are so slow, then?”
“They can be. This is remote country.”
“You will be happy to have your Grandfather’s letter in my portmanteau, then, wherever that may be now.”
“It will be where you left it.” A letter from Grandfather. There could be no good news there. “I can fetch it to you, if you wish, but it is safe where it is.”
“At Oliver’s Stage office?”
Dan nodded. A bug crawled up between the floorboards near his foot, and he shifted his toe to crush it. “I can’t leave yet.” He concentrated on scraping the bug mess through the same crack. He would not return before time. He had not collected enough gold. Above all, he must safeguard Martha against McDowell’s return.
“Surely you can pack quickly. I was able to travel here; you can travel out.” Even whispering, pausing between breaths, Van Fleet spoke as one sure of his ground, convinced he held the moral initiative, that Dan would do his bidding. “Your grandfather expects it.”
Dan almost laughed out loud. Did they expect Grandfather’s domination to have extended over such distance and time that at his mere command Dan would not delay? “No, I cannot. I have not acquired enough gold to accomplish my purposes.” Dan looked him in the eye. “You may depart whenever you like. I shall return when I am ready.”
“I had expected, if you were truly dedicated to repaying your family’s obligations, you would be prepared to return with me immediately.”
Dan’s temper might have broken then and led him to say something regrettable, but as his mouth opened, his right hand folded into a fist and his middle finger gouged a rope cut in the palm. Blood reddened the bandage. Dan smiled inwardly at the twisted black irony. Blood on his hands. His hands had held a rope to hang a man and suffered no injuries, but that was an irony he doubted Van Fleet could appreciate. He kept silent, though his amusement must have showed in his eyes, to judge from Van Fleet’s baffled expression.
“I shall return when I have enough gold,” Dan said. “You may suit yourself.”
Watching Van Fleet’s changing ideas scud across his face as the banker reassessed him, Dan spoke to him in silence: I am not the man you expected to find; I am no longer the grieving son who signed those papers. I am not the bewildered greenhorn I was.
~5~
SOON’S SHE PUT this venison pie in the oven, Martha promised herself, she’d curl up in her rocker, wrap herself in Grandmam’s quilt, and read the Good Book while she drank a hot cup of tea. She’d be having a reading lesson with Lydia Hudson soon, and she wanted to keep up with Dotty so’s the child wouldn’t be ashamed of having an ignorant Mam. Folding the top crust around the flat pastry stick, she laid it across the pie, then, lower lip between her teeth, she turned the stick to begin unfolding it.
Barking and growling, Canary, the yellow hound, set up a fearful row outside.
Martha jerked, the crust tore. She let out a word in Cherokee, her Grandmam’s tongue, and snatched up the butcher knife. Why hadn’t she barred the door? It was on the latch, the string out. McDowell could walk on in if he got past the dog.
“Mrs. McDowell, will you call off the dog? Please?”
Not Sam McDowell. Praise the Lord, not him coming back, but someone reminding the world that she wasn’t married to Dan’l, which was the next worst thing.
Martha stepped over her threshold, under the overhanging front eaves that gave some shelter from wind and snow-mixed rain. Straining at his rope, Canary faced Tobias Fitch, late Major in the Confederate States Army, who kept just outside the dog’s reach, his hat streaming water onto the cape of his greatcoat.
Putting the knife in her belt, Martha reeled Canary in until she could close his jaws, but the snarl wrinkled his lip under her fingers and the growl rumbled in his throat. “Mr. Stark isn’t to home.” She might be friends with Major Fitch’s Crow wife, Berry Woman, but she couldn’t welcome him. He brought back bad memories of life with McDowell. She could not like him.
“Yes, I know. I came to see you.”
Drat the man, picking himself a time when he knew Dan’l would be at work. “You best come back when Mr. Stark’s here.” Her reputation had already suffered, maybe beyond repair, living with Dan’l when she had a live husband someplace. Entertaining a man not related to her in Dan’l’s absence would finish it off.
“He’s not involved in this. It’s business McDowell left unfinished, about the contracts. This is between you and me.”
The contracts. Before McDowell ran from the Vigilantes, he and Fitch had been partners. In exchange for his expenses and a half share in each claim he found, what the miners called grubstaking him, McDowell had prospected all over the area and located eight claims, and the two of them, Fitch and McDowell, had writ it all out on paper. Two papers Dan’l had won from him at poker, but she kept the others hid in the chifferobe, under her nether garments.
“I won’t leave until I speak my piece.” The wind, as if telling her it wasn’t Christian to keep him out here, veered around and slapped wet snow in his beard. He used his short left arm to brush at it.
Holding Canary’s rope, Martha stepped aside to give him room to walk past them before she let go and followed him in. Fitch waited on the mat, his hat off and his eyes glancing around the room. The man irked her no end. Near as tall as Dan’l, he had a way of looking down his nose, like he wouldn’t bend his neck to the likes of her. To meet him eye to eye, she would have to invite him to sit. At least, if they sat at the table, she could keep it between them.
He hung up his hat and coat on pegs driven between the logs while she went about repairing the pie crust. His muddy boots tracked across her clean floor.
“You can set yourself there.” She pointed her chin to a chair. “What have you got to say?” Laying the knife to one side, she attended to piecing and patching the crust.
She felt him watch her, and kept her hands steady.
“I had rather you gave me your full attention.”
“I can listen and work, together. This pie is our dinner, and Mr. Stark and the young’uns will come home hungry.” Her fingers worked just like common, like she wasn’t facing off a man used to commanding soldiers in battle, now trying to command her. She’d knowed worse. He couldn’t raise his hand to her like McDowell done. Like Dan’l never even thought of. Yet, hissed a tiny doubt in the back of her mind.
His irritation hummed in the silence, like a plucked string after the pick left it. Martha let it draw out while she finished patching the crust, put it in the oven, and seated herself.
“All right, then,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“I want to buy the contracts Sam McDowell and I made.”
She cocked an eyebrow at him. “I can’t sell. They ain’t – aren’t mine.” If she knew that, he had to know it, on account he was an educated man, his family had owned slaves in Virginia before the Union Army burned their plantation, and she was an ignorant hill woman just now learning to read. “They belong to McDowell.” Martha picked some crumbs of pie dough one by one into a little ball.
“Begging your pardon, he is probably dead.”
“Only we don’t know for certain.” Her worst nightmare, that was, not knowing if McDowell lived or not, that he might come back and catch her alone. “Till we know if he’s alive, the contracts belong to him, and I have to give them to him if he comes back.”
“This would protect you. You’d only have to send him to me to get them.”
Before he had finished, she was shaking her head. That would only infuriate McDowell, his temper being too quick at any time. He’d only to think a thing for it to be true in his mind. Her fingers rolled the dough ball a bit faster.
“I’ll give you three ounces of dust for those pieces of paper.”
Dust. He meant gold dust, the fine grains and flakes that miners washed out of the dirt, occasionally with a nugget. Gold dust traded for $18.00 an ounce in Virginia City. More, other places. She had enough ciphering to figure that he offered nine dollars each for those bits of paper. Timmy earned a dollar a day clerking in Dance and Stuart. Fifty-four dollars was two months’ wages.
Her bump of suspicion swelled. Why did Fitch want those papers so bad? As she tried to figure that out, he added, “Each.”
One hundred and eight dollars? Some claims brought thousands, but not generally before an assay. “That’s generous,” she said, “but they still aren’t mine. I can’t sell them.”
“Suppose we call it the right to store them. I’ll pay you for having stored them for me.”
A bribe. He was offering to make it so her conscience would give him his way. However she looked at it, though, it was a bribe. He was asking her to whore herself, only in a different way than Jacky Stevens meant. That bump of suspicion burst into full-blown anger. “How dare you? Offering me a bribe. I’m keeping those papers safe for McDowell, for when he comes back.”
“Wait a minute. I have no intention of offering a bribe. None whatever. You’ve misinterpreted my attempt to be of help.” He placed his right hand over his heart, and his eyes were full of hurt that she would think him capable of such a base act.
Not believing a word of it, Martha was forced to apologize, hating herself for every syllable. She had caught him out, and they both knew it, yet he had won.
Fitch pulled a piece of paper from an inner pocket and smoothed it out on the table. From another pocket he took a pencil and tapped a place at the bottom of the page. “This paper is called an option. It says you’ll let me buy the claims someday. If he’s, uh, no longer living.”
“He could be alive and well in California.”
“True.” Fitch tapped the pencil point on the paper. “If you wouldn’t mind signing here.”
“I don’t understand,” Martha lied. She knew full well what this meant. She didn’t own the shares unless McDowell was dead, and this paper bound her to sell to him whenever they discovered his death.
“I’d need to read it first.” Martha rolled the dough ball between her fingers. “You leave it here, and I’ll let you know what I make of it.”
“You mean you’ll have Dan Stark read it for you.” The contempt of the educated for the uneducated – and a woman – thickened his voice.
Her temper threatened to flame, but she piled ashes on it. Losing it would let him win again. She smiled as sweet as she could. “I’d be a fool not to, wouldn’t I? A good lawyer like him.” Maybe if Fitch wasn’t trying to bully her into giving up the claims, she wouldn’t take pleasure so in the way his jaw muscles bunched.
“I didn’t have to offer you anything. I could just jump his part of those claims. You’d do well to accept my offer, because it will be withdrawn when I walk out that door.”
Stifling the urge to throw the dough ball at him, she said, “You can’t jump them yet. The Creek is at high water.”
By the way he worked his lower lip, she knew she had rattled him. Did he think she was a witless ninny? Dan’l called it the winter dispensation. During the summer a claim was considered abandoned if the owner didn’t work it for three straight days. Other times, when no one could work account of ice or high water, that rule was suspended.
His voice struck a higher pitch. “Pah! This offer expires when I walk out that door. I wanted you to have something from this, but if I jump them, you’ll have nothing. Besides which, you will have enough to do just to keep the one claim that’s registered to McDowell. That son of yours wants to clerk in a store rather than work hard, and don’t tell me Dan Stark would pay to have that claim worked either, because he’s saving all his dust to take home to New York, and he won’t come back.”
Maybe because she was scared of just that, she answered him sharp. “I said I’d let Mr. Stark look at it. And I’ll think on it. That’s my answer.” She stood up, closed her fists around handfuls of her apron. He could do nothing but stand, too, and not for the first time she wished she was big so’s men like him and McDowell couldn’t loom over her or think they could bully her.
“Dan Stark won’t find anything irregular about my offer.” Raising the stump of his left arm, he rubbed his jawbone. He’d left his hand at Antietam, Martha had heard. A defeat for the South, and him not one to take defeat easy. Especially from a female.
She held Canary close to her skirts until Fitch had walked away. Shivering, she went inside, but she couldn’t settle herself to read the Good Book. Her thoughts, like scared rabbits, jumped here and there. What if McDowell came back? Why did Fitch want to buy the claims? If McDowell showed up while Dan’l was in New York, could she send him to Fitch? Fitch had that look in his eye: like he knew something she didn’t.
Sly. That’s what he was. Sly. A knowing lurked behind his eyelids, a secret. Fitch was up to something, but what? Or was it just that he thought he knew what sort of woman she was?
The easy kind. The kind he could bribe.
Drat the man. She rubbed her hands together to warm them. The dough ball smeared all over her hands, and she’d squished it into the fabric of her apron. “Oh, drat!” Muttering to herself in Cherokee, she took up two buckets. Fitch’s visit wouldn’t disappear from her mind, but she could scrub his muddy tracks off her floor.
Oblivious to fat, wet snowflakes plummeting onto her head and shoulders, she pumped the buckets as full of water as she could carry and toted them into the house. She boosted one onto the stove to heat, and set to shaving soap into the other from the soap block. The knife slipped, and blood sprouted from her thumb. Wheeling, she flung the block across the room.
~6~
“YOU HAVE A CHOICE.” Dan spoke to two men sitting on boxes in front of his makeshift desk, warped planks laid across a couple of boxes that served as pedestals. One crate was taller, so the planks sloped a degree downhill to his left. At his right, Dan’s client stood squeezed into a corner formed by a pile of boxes and the board-and-batten wall separating this storage room from McClurg’s Dry Goods store. Arms folded, he glared at the other two men.
“You can make full restitution, or I’ll report your theft to the Tribunal.”
Someone tapped at the door. “Later,” Dan called, then lowered his voice.
One of the men in front of him wore a beard and hair untouched by scissors since his arrival. His eyes shifted from Dan’s left shoulder to his right and back again. The other man, who smelled of bad whiskey, turned to him. “I’d advise you to own up and do as Mr. Stark says.”
“What sort of lawyer are you? You’re supposed to be on my side.” The thief’s eyes flicked toward Dan’s client and away. “Anyhow, I don’t got the money. I spent it.”
“Then we’ll confiscate your tools and your horse,” said Dan, “and you can get the hell out of the Gulch.”
Something crawled out of the thief’s hair and back in again, but he did not seem to notice. “I’ll be broke. You can’t do that to me, Charlie.” His bloodshot eyes filled with tears.
“Go to hell, Ben. You didn’t give a shit about me being broke when you stole my dust.”
“All right, I’ll give you my tools, but not Babe. That horse is like family. Besides, the tools is worth more’n what I took.”
“Not no more. They’re all bunged up. You never could learn to keep your tools, and Babe will be better off with me. I’ll feed her good. It’s that or the Vigilantes.”
“Take the offer.” The lawyer groped into a coat pocket, and came out with a flask.
“God damn it, you’re all agin’ me. All right! I’ll do it.” He turned on his lawyer. “As for you, give me back the fee I paid you. You done nothing for me.”
The lawyer said, “I did so. I gave you good advice.”
Dan said, “I’ll draw up the formal agreement and we can meet in front of Judge Duncan in a couple of hours to have it registered.”
The thief’s lawyer said, “We don’t need the judge for a simple agreement, do we? This is all between friends.”
“Friends!” Dan’s client burst out. “Friends don’t thieve from each other. Damn you, Ben—”
“We need the judge to ratify an order of banishment.” Dan pulled a piece of paper toward him. “In the meantime, you can sign this.” He uncapped the ink bottle, dipped his pen, and scribbled so fast that the nib caught. A drop of ink splattered onto the plank and rolled downhill, but he did not pause to blot it. He wanted the men gone; their odors were choking him.
When the thief and his lawyer had left, Charlie said, “Thanks, Mr. Stark. I thought Ben would make more of a fuss.” He took a deerskin pouch from his pants pocket.
“That’s why you hire a lawyer, Charlie.” Dan hitched his chair back and stood up. He needed fresh air.
“I didn’t just hire a good lawyer. I hired you, on account of you’re a Vigilanter. Ben knew he couldn’t weasel out of nothing with you.” He sidled around the desk.
Dan snuffed the candle between forefinger and thumb, and followed him into the store. Jacob Himmelfarb and McClurg stood, heads bent as though in prayer, studying two rectangular boxes lying on the floor. The clerk leaned over a display case to stare at them, too.
“What have we here?” asked Dan.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” said McClurg.
Jacob smiled. “It is to you they belong. They have your name.”
“All the way from New York.” The clerk drummed on the counter top.
Dan’s rope cuts tingled. “Open them up.”
McClurg held out the crowbar he had held behind his back. “Here, Pat. Don’t waste any time.” The clerk came around the counter and grasped the crowbar. “Hurry up. But be careful.”
Rolling his eyes at that, Pat set the crowbar’s teeth under the lid. Wood screeched as he pried up the top to expose a large rectangular bundle wrapped in oiled cotton and bound many times with string.
The men looked toward Dan. “Lift it out.”
Pat placed the bundle on the counter and set the crowbar at the second box.
The cuts on both hands tingled now. Newspapers. By its shape, the bundle had to contain newspapers. Something new to read after the long winter. He had read Kenilworth almost to shreds, nearly memorized Henry IV, and worn out his Emerson. Penknife in hand, Dan put it to the string, but McClurg stopped him. “Don’t cut it, save it.” Dan shifted the knife point to the knot and pried it loose, stood aside while McClurg and Jacob unwrapped the bundle. They had the wrapping off, McClurg folding the cloth.