Chapter 4
Finally came a hale, old voyaguer whom Longley greeted heartily as he swung open the toll gate:
“Greetings, Monsieur Francois Gendron, and from whence came you today?” The big Frenchman handed over the “six-bits” toll for himself and his horse.
“From New Helvetia.”
“Ah--Sacramento.”
“And I am bound for the North Fork Dry Diggings.”
“Auburn?” smiled Longley.
“Bah! the new names! In my day we called them differently. I came across the Rockies in '32, Monsieur. But I must be en route--here are sheep coming.”
After the sheep were counted and gone, Longley glanced scowlingly across the bridge and hastily closed the tollgate. A band of Indians, several on ponies but most of them on foot, crossed the bridge and halted before him.
“Go back, ye varmints!” growled Longley.
“No Indian pay,” said the old chief. “He go the bridge and the road--no pay.”
“Well, the Chinamen paid.”
“But the Indians, no! No pay. Me go Whiskey Bar--big pow-wow. Plenty ox, plenty bear meat, plenty firewater--”
“You go back!” roared the tollkeeper, swearing, “and go ford the river. That's good enough for a Digger! The ferry's been taken off, but the water is not so high.”
The old Indian scowled, and the young bucks began a guttural complaint which he silenced with a gesture and a grunt of command.
“Water is cold, and those,” pointing to the sheep, “have passed.”
“You go back, I tell you! I hate every filthy brute of you! My best pal was sent to glory in that funeral fire on Murderer's Bar, and no Indian will ever get aught from me.”
“Me pay,” said the Indian leader slowly, “Me pay cayuse, me pay boy.”
“No, you won't pay! You'll go back and wade the river like the low beasts that you are.”
The chief began a fierce oration. Longley ran into the tollhouse and came out with a sawed-off shotgun.
“Now, will you go?” he cried, defiantly.
The Indians were sober, and they went. As they came abreast of the pier under the bridge the toll-keeper jeered and laughed at them, and pelted them with rocks.
They looked up with hate, but went stolidly on their way.
With darkness, the roistering at the barbecue became louder. The Indians' money was gone by this time, and the fun was getting rougher. The toll-keeper, after a weary day, was dozing beside his candle. He did not see nor hear the stealthy forms which crept up the bridge. A board creaked, and he jumped up and swung about, to find himself quickly overpowered by a dozen lithe redskins.
They robbed the till, then held a palaver as to the disposition of their prisoner. They finally left him tied with his own new rope to a huge drift log at the base of the pier, and went back to buy more firewater.
It was a wild night!
John noticed, very late, that the Indians seemed to be having a special pow-wow of their own on the river bank near the bridge. There was a great fire, and mad dancing and war whooping. He started toward them.
“Don't go there, pardner,” called an old trapper. “Them bucks is crazy with drink, an' if I knows anything about Injuns, it won't be no safe place for a white man.”
So passed Longley's last chance for his life! His cries for aid were mingled with the savage whoops of his ferocious enemies. Even the people living across the river who heard his continued shouts, took them to be part of the celebration.
Maddened by drink and by the ever mounting excitement of their incantations, one of the most ghastly deeds ever perpetrated by Indians upon the whole river was finished before daylight.
The condition of Longley's body upon its discovery roused the entire settlement, but the Indians had vanished over the hills and across Bear river. The chief had gone home at sundown, and it was as impossible to find those who were on the bar that night, as to distinguish one grain of sand from another.
The old pier stands to this day, notwithstanding the fierce battering of the floods of nearly seventy years; a monument enduring long after the Digger Indians are gone off the face of the earth, as though to commemmorate the power of the white race and that member of it who gave up his life at its base.
Grizzley Bob of Snake Gulch
VI
“Be the battle lost or won, Though its smoke shall hide the sun, I shall find my love--the one Born for me!”
--Bret Harte.
Names of settlements in the '49 days were often as “Rough an Ready” as the reasons for their being!
Most of them spoke, more or less eloquently, for themselves and no man picked by fame in glowing wise from the heterogeneous mass of persons could hope to escape a nickname.
A miner was discovered roaming down a river bed minus his nether garments, and lives to this day in the appellation of Shirt Tail canyon. Two men fought. One of them lost an eye in the manner indicated by Gouge Eye. Hundreds of wild geese were wont to gather on a sunny mesa above the river. It made a splendid level town called Wild Goose Flat. The plains were covered with “Antelope.” The end gate of a prairie schooner was lost on a hill, and Tail Gate mountain came into being.
Humbug Creek panned light with gold. Red Dog, Hangtown, Round Tent Claims, Dry Diggings, Let 'Er Rip, You Bet, Yuba Dam, One Horse Town, and Hell's Delight shriek for themselves, or should!
This, then, is the tale of Grizzley Bob, who mined in Snake Gulch at the foot of Bear Mountain.
“The bear made straight for me! Old Bull-doze was hangin' onto him below, somewhere, but I dropped my Killer (gun) and grabbed my knife, 'cause I knew if I didn't get in on him with Slasher it was all up with both of us. Bear and I took a tight grip on each other and I hit straight for his heart just as he gave me a swipe in the face.
“We both fell, the bear on top, and then I didn't remember anything for awhile. When I woke I felt something heavy on my stomach, but I couldn't see anything for blood.”
“Hu-ray!” cheered old Solly Jake, thinking the tale was finished.
Sick Jimmy, from behind the bar, prodded him good-humoredly.
“Dry up, Soll.”
“I am dry,” whimpered old Soll, “I'm dryer'n before I got drunk!”
“Here, then,” pushing a bottle across the redwood slab used for a bar, “the drinks are on Grizzley Bob and Handsome Harry, tonight.”
“Was it such a big strike they made?”
“It sure was. Go on, Bob,” he called to the tall, magnificently built young spokesman, “then what?”
“After awhile I managed to crawl from under that old grizzley and when I'd wiped the one good eye that was left, I saw him lying there as stiff and dead as a mackerel, with Slasher sticking in his heart clean up to the handle. It was pretty near dark then, but the sun was just showing hisself over the top of Bear mountain when I got to Rattlesnake Bill's cabin, and you'll scarcely believe me but I didn't have enough grit left to signal Bill I was there. I just settled down all of a heap-like and that's the way they found me. Bill, he got a doctor from Angel's and after awhile I pulled out all right, but I ain't been much of a beauty since. Well, what th--,” as the door banged open to reveal an exceedingly handsome blond youngster dragging in a cringing newcomer.
“Hi,” he called, while two frolicsome imps danced in his splendid blue eyes. “Any of you chaps got a rope handy? Time this fellow was strung up over a limb to be a picture for coyotes to bark at!”
“Hall, you let go, there. There'll be no chaffing a tenderfoot whilst I'm around and you know it.”
“Who says so?” laughed Handsome Harry.
“My foppish friend,” spoke up The Senator, “the reputation of Grizzley Bob says so. A reputation that is the terror and admiration of every mining camp in the mountains. A dead shot, a sure thing with the knife, a heart to succor the oppressed and often to protect the shiftless,” acridly.
“I thank you, Senator! Your species of implication is worthy the splendor of your mighty apparel. The old swallow-tail retains its pristine glory, I perceive, though your other habiliments have one by one yielded to the ravages of time, and been replaced by the rough and ready garments of the frontier. Perchance--”
“Hall, have I got to make you let go of this pore devil!” Bob's powerful figure came forward into the full light of the huge fireplace. One-half the face above the comely form was hideously repulsive. It had been literally torn away and what remained was so scarred and seamed that it scarcely bore any resemblance to a human countenance.
His one remaining eye was large, dark and glowing with kindness as he bent over the victim of his partner's latest joke.
“Ye-ah,” drawled old Doc Smithers, precipitating a large mouthful of brown liquid into the fireplace. “Bob, he'll pet 'im, an' that ol' bulldog o' his'n 'ull lick im, an' next thing we know Bob'll be givin' 'im a claim, just like he took in Handsome Harry hisself goin' on two years ago. Look at the dandy, struttin'! Bob buys 'im all them fancy togs an' loves to see 'im wearin' 'em. White hands, an' red cheeks, an' straight nose like a gal. Swan, ef he wasn't so ornery an' long-limbed I'd a mind to call 'im one. Ef 'twant for his hidin' behind Bob so, I'd--”
What he'd have done was never known, for the whole room-full of prankish, loud-voiced, roistering men was suddenly struck dumb by the unwonted sound of a lady's voice out in the darkness.
Bull-doze reached her first, Bob next, and Handsome Harry third. She was only a slip of a young thing and the fright she got from the kindly rush of the old bulldog was immeasurably increased by Bob's frightful caricature of a face. She turned, shuddering, to the handsome, richly-decked young Englishman.
“My father and mother, sir, are very ill. I was going after a doctor, but I am tired out. I can go no further. Oh, could one of you go on to Angel's, whilst I rest with some lady of your town?”
Harry was apparently speechless from the thrall of her fresh young beauty, because it was Bob who answered.
“You certainly can, Miss! Grizzley Bob's word on that. Where'd you come from?”
“From Roundtree's, sir,” timidly. Bob had turned to call orders through the open door and the girl gasped as the strong, manly profile of the unscarred half of his face was turned toward her. Bull-doze licked her white fingers, and she stooped to pat his ugly head so that the long curls at her temple might hide her face from the look in Hal's bold eyes.
“Hey, Antelope Bill, saddle that ewe-necked cayuse of yours and vamoose, pronto, after the doctor. Plug Hat Pete, you've got the best cabin in town. We'll want it for the lady.”
“Help yourself, Grizzley,” answered the gambler. “It is a privilege.”
“I am to stay with Mrs.--Pete?” asked Becky, anxiously.
“Child, you're a-going to be as safe as if there was a lady in this law-evadin' camp; which there isn't, exceptin' your own sweet and lovely self.”
“Oh!”
“You're a-going to have old Bull-doze watchin' inside the cabin and ten decent and sober men watchin' outside it and nothin' short of a messenger from up-skies could touch one pretty, red-gold curl on your proud little head.”
“Bob, I'll take her home to her mother,” spoke up Harry who had never once taken his bold gaze from the girl.
“No, you won't take her home to her mother, neither!”
Beckey was strangely comforted by the protective drawl of the big man's voice. Accustomed as she had grown to the rapid transitions of the West, she realized the fallacy of her first impression from his appearance. That night laid the foundation of her regard for him, which was deeper than a mere surface appeal, and which was never to waver.
* * * * *
“H'm,” snorted Cornish Jack, shuffling a greasy pack of cards in Sick Jimmie's place and watching two men go by, “that's the most willin' pair on the gulch! Bob, he's willin' to do all the work, an' Handsome Harry, he's willin' to let 'im. Fine house Bob's just built. Must of cost a heap.”
“They say that Miss Beckey and her mother are going to live in it,” answered Plug Hat Pete. “I'll raise you ten.”
“Handsome Harry's bin a-dancin' round that gal ever since they moved here, six months ago.”
“Yes, and the look in her eyes in another direction, is plainly to be read.” The implication was lost on Cornish Jack.
“Ol' Bob, he does all he can to throw 'em together. Air ye goin' to the house warmin' tonight?”
“Certainly,” said The Senator. “Particularly if we manage to keep old Tommy Norton and Black Joe from getting intoxicated, so there will be a pair of fiddlers on the gulch. Tommy, on such occasions, always has an attack of religion which precludes the possibility of his assisting at any profane scene of mirth, and Joe falls into a deep sleep from which nothing can rouse him for twenty-four hours.”
“There's Antelope back. I hear his roan.”
“Well, who do you think I met down around the curve of Blackjack Hill? That gal o' Bob's on her pinto and that sneakin' Handsome Harry on his black mustang, ridin' full-bent-for-leather!”
The men rushed with one accord to Bob's cabin, where he sat before his fireless hearth.
“We al'ays knew he was a sneakin' thief, but you wouldn't hear nothin' agin him. Took all the bags of gold dust from your claim, too, didn't he?”
“Now, boys, that isn't fair to call him a thief. He was my partner and what was mine was his, and a man has a right to take his own wherever he finds it.”
“But the gal?” asked a chorus of voices.
“That girl wasn't in any way bound to me, and you can't expect a pretty creature like her to care for such a beauty as I am, when there's a fellow like Handsome Harry around. It don't stand to reason.”
“Come, fellows,” said Poker Bill, “if Bob's satisfied I reckon we ought to be. Time to get into our biled shirts for the house warmin', anyway.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, boys, but there won't be a house warming. I built it for them and they're gone. It'll stay locked till they come again. This old cabin is good enough for me.”
So they left him. Bob relit his pipe and settled back on his bench. Once he roused a moment to mutter. “But they'd ought to know me better. They needn't have run away from their best friend.”
Soon after dark a pinto paced home through the quiet, mourning camp with a very weary bulldog at her heels. Beckey slid from her side saddle and crept to Bob's open door. By the light of a full moon she could see the big lax figure in an attitude of utter despair.
“Bob!”
“You! Girl, I thought you'd gone.”
“I went because--because I thought you'd come after me. I'd tried everything else that a woman can do to make you understand * * * He's begged me so many times to run off. When he understood, he was beastly. He put me off the horse and told me to walk, then. It was the dog who fought him, and then I ran for Pinto and came back.” Her low voice failed her, but she controlled herself, and went on, “I thought if I pretended to go you'd see--”
“See! Girl, you've known ever since you came creeping into Snake Gulch that night that you were the very heart and soul of me.”
“Yes, yes,” she sobbed, “that is not what I would have you know.”
“You mean--no, I am a great fool. No woman could bring herself to--A face like mine! Even if you did, it would be from gratitude. I could not permit such a sacrifice,” he finished, with a touch of pride.
The girl waited, then when he was silent she turned with a sob to go to her mother's cabin. The soft footfalls died away. Bob stood motionless. Suddenly a scream rang out on the still night air. Bulldoze scrambled off the door-stone with a snarl of battle-rage and charged for the sound, but he was easily outdistanced by the huge miner, who ran with the lithe grace of an Indian. In an incredibly short time the little form was safe in his arms.
“Oh, there's a terrible animal in the mining ditch. I heard it! It's coming this way! A grizzley, I know!” Bob peered into the ditch.
“Why, girl, it's only drunken old Solly Jake going home holding his jug out of the water. He gets into the ditch so he won't lose the way.”
“But how does he know when to get out?”
“Well, when he bangs his head on the overbrace of the first flume, he knows he's home and crawls out.” Bob began gently to withdraw his arms.
“If you let me go now,” she whispered, “I'll wish that it had been a grizzley.”
“I must take you home.”
“Oh, you have! I am home,” clinging to him desperately, “I want no other in the world than this one.”
“But my scarred--”
The girl reached up, drawing down his tall, dark head in her arms. She kissed his mutilated cheek, then pressed it tenderly against her soft, bare throat. It did not stay long, as Bob felt that such kisess should be returned without delay.
“Hu-ray,” cheered Solly Jake, waving his whisky jug, “tale ended right! Time f'r 'nother drink, boys!” and standing up to his middle in water he proceeded to demonstrate his idea.
Curley Coppers the Jack
VII
“On Selby Flat we live in style; We'll stay right here till we make our pile. We're sure to do it after a while, Then good-bye to Californy!”
--Canfield's “Diary of a Forty-Niner.”
The beautiful Casino at Monte Carlo stands in one of the loveliest settings on earth. Facing the blue Mediterranean and enhanced by the exquisitely kept marble villas of Monaco, it may justly be called the acme of gambling institutions. It has become an institution through the years. Time has brought it stability.
Its absolute antithesis were the gambling dens of '49. Built over-night, destined to remain if the mines were rich, and to melt away if they pinched out, the gambling hells were sometimes the veriest makeshifts. Canvas covered, dirt floored, except for the dancing platform, rough red-wood bar and tables; surrounded by all the sordidness of Hurdy Gurdy town in which fortunes, and reputations, and lives were bid, and shuffled, and lost, as indiscriminately as grains of dust blown into the ever-changing sea.
The thirst for gold is universal. In those half-mad days of delirious seeking, the princeling rubbed sleeves with the scoundrel and the clod, and each man's ability was his only protection. Fortune played no favorites. The tale is told of the judge who drove home in his coach through a shallow creek. Ruin faced him for the lack of a few thousand dollars. He took out his derringer and shot himself.
Not half an hour later a Chinaman crossed the creek under his pole between two swinging baskets. He found a nugget there which brought him over $30,000.
This, then, is the tale of what Fortune did to Curly Gillmore.
* * * * *
“Whoop-ee! Ki-yi-ee hick-ee! Yi-ee-ee!”
“There comes Curly,” said Teddy Karns, “never altering the steady flow of the whiskey he was pouring into a tin cup for Sailor Jack to drink.
“Made a big strike, I hear.”
“Yea-ah. About $25,000, they say. Might be a million, the way the female critters run,” Ted laughed, as the hurdy-gurdy girls with shrieks of laughter pounced upon the noisy newcomer.
“Well, hel-lo, Nance, and Liz, and Babe, and Bouncin' Bet, old gal! All ready to help me sling it, ain't you? But where's little pale Alice?”
“Oh, Allie? She's back in the tents. Sick tonight. Awful bad, she's took. She'll be shufflin' off 'fore long, an' rid o' mortal misery.”
“Poor little soldier!”
“Sweet, she was, an' born to be good. Why, I remember (we came 'round the Horn on the same sailin' vessel) that they wasn't a ailin' baby on board but what Allie could get a smile out of it, nor a sick soul that didn't bless 'er for 'er kindness an' care. Sick o' body, sick o' heart, Allie did for 'em all, bless 'er.”
“She was happy, then,” put in Babe.
“Yes. Comin' out to Californy to 'er lover, she were, all her folks back in the States bein' dead. She'd took care of 'er mother, last. 'Twas why 'er man came on ahead. An' when she got here--”
“Aw-w, Bet, don't you cry,” said Babe. “Y' see, when we got here, Curly, we found her boy'd been shot in a fight over a mine. Allie, she hadn't no money left, and no gumption much, like Bet an' me, to fight her way, so we took 'er along o' us. We tried to keep her the little lady that she was, but--Well, we got snowed in last winter up on the divide an'--Faro Sam--Well, it broke her pure heart, an' most Bet's an' mine, too. An' she ain't never got over the cold she took, up there in the snow.”
“Life's hard for a girl anyways you put it, an' she'll be happier over the river where there ain't no cold nor sorrer. Bet! Aw-w, she'll sleep on a finer bed nor you an' I could give 'er, an' wake happy, with ever'one she loved best around her. She's layin' there so white an' small an' still it'd most break your hear to see 'er. Like a little snowdrop you've picked, an' worn, an' slung away. So gentle--”
“Well, what's this, anyway? A wake?” broke in Faro Sam's icy voice. “Do I hire fiddlers to play a funeral dirge? Get on with you,” scattering the girls in the direction of the card tables and the dancing platform. “Which ones do you want, Curly?”
“I want Babe and Betsy. Where's that little pale printer's devil, the one they call the gambler's ghost? I know Sam won't let you girls leave here.”
“He's workin' up on the paper, I guess. They ran out of coal oil and had to fire up with pine knots.”
“He's comin, now. He ain't no gambler's ghost tonight, though; he's pot black!”
“Ghost,” said Curly, “you take this around to Allie.” It was a $50 octagonal slug.
“Yessir.”
“And you say that there's more, all she wants, where that comes from.”
“Yessir.”
Then, shaking his mop of brown, curly hair as though to relieve his head of a burden, he took the girls for what he felt was a much-needed round of drinks.
By midnight the place was wild!
“Sam,” shouted Curly, “what's the limit on your pesky old game?”
“The ceiling's the limit.”
“Well, I'll put up one bet! Bein' on Easy Street I was goin' back to the States to marry my girl, but I'm blamed if I don't put up my swag for one turn of the cards.”
He sent for his “dust,” and piled the long, buckskin bags criss-cross before Faro Sam's table.
“I'll copper the jack, gentlemen,” he shouted. “All on the jack!”
Teddy Karn's face turned a pasty hue, and the tip of his tongue slid along his puffed lips, but the lines of Faro Sam's face never changed, and his eyes retained the blank impassivity of a snake's as he slipped his cards. There was a sudden, tense silence. The girls pressed forward with hurried breathing and the men waited, rigid as stones.
Somebody's mongrel paced to the middle of the platform and scratched for fleas, with soft thumping on the floor. That was all.
Suddenly a man swore! A woman's voice shrilled hysterically! Faro Sam rose to his feet ceremoniously. “The house is yours.”
“By Jinks!” yelled Curly, “I've coppered the jack! I've broken the bank! I've--”
One of the doors swung open quietly. Silence dropped once more, with the speed of tropical night, upon the blare of the place.
The gambler's ghost stood there silhouetted against the light from a log fire outside. There were pink streaks down his dirty face, washed by tears, and his young shoulders drooped woefully. The dog came forward and licked his twitching fingers.
“Allie is dead,” he whispered.
“Curly, I should like to apply for the position of dealer over at your place, which yesterday was my place,” said Faro Sam, next day at noon, meeting Curly on the street.
“Sure, you can have it, Sam. Too bad it's the custom for the house to go, too, when somebody breaks the bank. I've turned it over to George Spellman, with a thousand to start with. He and I come from the same place back in the States. Great friends we were, till we both got to sparkin' the same girl. When she took me, George, he got pretty ornery, but I guess he's all over it by this time. I'm goin' home to marry her, now.
“I've just been around to the tents seein' about little Allie's funeral, an' he'll keep on the girls, too. I'm pullin' my freight for Hangtown (Placerville). This town's a little too small for a fellow of my means.”
Faro Sam looked after him with a cynical light in his narrow eyes.