The three sudden companions took counsel with one another, and after some debate, sent Frog to Walla Walla for supplies, or, should need prove, San Francisco. Horace fronted them the gold they would need, which was to be two-thirds repaid, per their agreement, from the first measure they jointly drew from the river. Frog was gone almost two weeks, and when he returned, riding his wasted palomino and training behind him Jim Crow’s Appaloosa, the latter was burdened down with a tarp-covered mound of tools and supplies. The poor beast swayed uneasily as she came, as though at any moment she should topple and lie like a turtle upon her overturned back, her legs spinning uselessly in the air.
Upon her, all lashed down with a generous length of hemp rope that Frog had procured there in the town, were the fruits of his journey: a second canvas tent to be thrown up beside Horace’s; two short-handled forged-iron shovels with wooden D-grip handles; a pick with a thick oaken shaft, the long arc of its twin blade almost equal to the length of the shaft itself; a pair of hand picks; a squat grub ax and a toeless thick-headed woodcutter’s ax; a draw knife; several fleece blankets and three sturdy canvas dusters; two good pair of Wellington boots like those that Horace had acquired; three broad and wide-brimmed riffled tin pans, beaten crudely and at request upon the model of the California miners’ gold pans, themselves but the echo of those wooden batea with which the antient peoples of South America had fished gold from their rivers for long millennia before the Old World had so much as dreamed the New; a rough portable scale inset in a maple box, with an ill-fit drawer wherein its brass counterweights rolled and rattled about nervously as the horse moved; and, which Frog was particularly proud of, three sturdy tin buckets with long iron bails that he had pilfered from an aging dairyman there. These last hung at the flank of the horse, just visible beneath the canvas tarpaulin, and clamored softly against one another as though they had been the tongues of so many broken bells. Supplies of tobacco and whiskey, too, he brought them, and flour and jerky and beans such as would last them, if only they would complement these stores with hunting and gathering, for several weeks at least.
Jim was anxious to know that Frog had been discreet, and had followed their instructions without fail: that he had strewn his purchases about the town as much as possible, and hidden everything as he could beneath the tarp they had sent him with, and set out from the town south toward San Francisco, making certain he was not trailed, and only twisted again north, north-east when he was far from the sight of men and could loop wide round unpursued. He set their minds at ease, grinning stupidly and recounting his exploits with a complacent pride.
He recompensed Horace what little change remained from his purchases—most of the excess, in truth, he had drunk off and spent on women—and handed him the agreed-upon bill of sale detailing the items and their costs in a crude pencil-lead shorthand that at points was rubbed out and illegible altogether to avoid any final reckoning of the discrepancy. But Horace only gave cursory glance to the note and nodded and folded the paper neatly and stuck it into his belt.
Later, Jim himself would set out back to Walla Walla to gather his belongings and Frog’s, or such as would be useful to them in their coming work. Frog had offered, not without a certain eagerness, to perform this new commission himself, but Jim would not trust him with the task a second time, saying that twice would rouse curiosity, and in a place where they knew too many souls. No, a quick wit was needed to deflect such suspicions as might arise. Jim knew how to weave stories from the wholecloth to lay like a veil over the lamp of fact. Before his departure, they listed out all they owned, and they made common stock of their assets, such tools and items as they jointly possessed and others that they yet required: lanterns and tinderbox and whetstone, rifles and ammunition for the hunt and, should such be necessary, defense from the Indians, knives for work and utensils and plates for eating and pots and pans for cooking. And with this final index drawn, Jim made his own journey hence, to close the loop and prepare them for their long siege against the river, and later, according to their ambitions, the hillside beyond.
When the new encampment had been set to their satisfaction some distance from Horace Smith’s, as though out of respect for his privacy in that immense emptiness, and they had settled into the shaly basin, they made plans over the fires they built and strategized over their work and their ways. And they drew Horace into this business against his tendencies, for he was a shy and retiring man as Jim had guessed and preferred to stand at a distance from his fellows. But Jim was set on their forming a kind of company, and who could say the why of it. Perhaps so as to bind all of them to closer secrecy, perhaps because he guessed that a greater sinew in their association would make for a greater weight of gold. Or perhaps indeed for some reason underlying the others—some thread of his humanity that had not been hardened or eroded in the rough years of his life. And so he would not have Horace eat by himself, but shepherded the recluse back to the campfire that Frog was forever fretting over, to offer him whiskey and to take rede with him on this or that aspect of the problem, to query him about what segments of that river he had found the richest, and whether he had ever attempted the same stretch twice to see if the stores would not be generously refilled in the dark of night while men were at slumber and only the sleepless waters at their eternal work.
Horace would speak softly and noncommittally and usually signal his answers in a word or a phrase. And yet he would sometimes betray himself, chuckling neatly into his beard as Frog blathered on or Jim recounted his tales. Elsewise Horace would sit alone before his tent, upon a log that he had hewn out into a kind of crude and squat chair, and smoke his snub-stemmed pipe in the still evenings in solitude, the fragrant whorls rising as though in incense to laic gods. But more and more he was drawn into the gravity of his fellows, as that tiny circle of men was itself bound into a ring, wrought of iron but prone to rust.
“Say, Horace,” queried Jim of a night as they sat together in the amber globe of the firelight, “jes’ what is it brung you out here, anyways?”
The Easterner only stared into the firelight quietly for a long moment, before finally murmuring, “Gold, I guess.”
“How now! You been lookin’ for gold all this time?”
“No.”
“Then jes’ what do you mean, gold? Say—you come out here for gold, or didn’t you?”
“A man doesn’t decide what brings him anywhere.”
“Well, now, that’s a damn funny thing to say! Jes’ what the hell d’you mean by that?”
But Horace, smiling inscrutably, stared again into the fire with that intense way of his, and said no more.
In days to come they set to an order, no longer skimming the riverbed haphazard as Horace had mostly done till now, but proceeding with term and regularity, laying out an invisible grid upon that stream in those will-lines that a man of purpose will throw invisibly upon the world. At first they gathered together in a knot at a prearranged point high in the riverbed, where the stony flank of it washed out to a subacqueous plain of gravel and smooth round pebbles and sand and the minor rapids there smoothed and leveled into a softer run, just past the deeper pool of water that had been scooped out at the foot of the steeper decline. Here, where a man in good boots could sink down upon his haunches without soaking himself in that gelid flow, the three of them hunkered into the river some distance yet from its churning too-deep channel, like men seeking some jewel misplaced in the crystal flux, each of them clutching a gray pan in his hands and swirling it slowly and meditatively before him. So they would squat there like monkeys in the shallow parts of the stream or upon the bank, or they would sit upon the stones that broke the surface of the water like the amorphous heads of rude creatures yet to be molded.
Frog was the first to overturn his bucket and make of it a stool, and the others quickly followed suit. And thenceforth there they sat, crooked over in the river, now in converse and now in silence and now listening to the homely songs that Jim in his rich baritone would throw up to the theater surrounding them, swirling their pans before them and washing out the worthless dregs and cherishing the gleam until the feeling had gone from their hands and their feet, and their limbs and backs would protest under the strain of that unnatural posture. But their lust for the metal was stronger even than the flesh.
At first they but plucked the nuggets out of the wash with clumsy fingers and accumulated these in a fourth bucket, letting them fall like celestial hail into the tin pail; but by and by it was Horace who commented on the sheen of yellow dust and flakes that they were ever casting off with the black sand. “Seems a pity to waste all this,” he said—and the three men looked at one another.
So their discussions began to turn on how to wring this treasure too from the dark earth, and in days to come they tried a number of methods to little success. It was Jim who, on one of his trips to Walla Walla, gleaned the secret from some traveler or other there, some grizzled old miner who was heading back East after years of useless struggle in California. This veteran had, ten years prior, partook of the madness of the California rush, and had been afloat out there ever since. He had honed his trade but had burned out on it and lost far more to it than he had gained. And Jim, pretending that he himself was but a greenhorn setting out to the West Coast to try his fortune there, drew from that jaded soul not a few of his secrets, for the old man cynically believed he was spending wealth on a fool who was rushing out to California a decade too late. Malice there was in his words—the poison of a man who had failed and would be solaced by the thought of company in his failure.
So it was that Jim returned to the camp the wiser, and they set to work on what had until but yesterday been the waste of their endeavor. They gathered it together and spread it out thinly on plates and laid these upon the shale-covered earth under the sun or beside the fire until the contents had dried, and drew a lodestone over the concentrate to draw off the iron filings, and blew gently upon the remnants as though in inspiration until the black had been fanned away and all that remained was the shimmer. And this too they tallied to their ever more gravid accounts.
In the still-cold nights of that rising spring Horace would hang his horn upon the tent pegs with raw embers bedded in moss and punk, and the horn would glow there palely in the dark reaches like a crack in the wall of the world. And as he had long done in his protracted loneliness he would cuddle near to himself his sourdough starter, that precious nubbin of unworked culture from which bread itself could be drawn. Like a man seeking any warmth, any fragment of reciprocating life, he would hold it close to his body, while the yeasts burned their own tiny fires and spread out and multiplied into metropolises and kingdoms until such a day would come that they would be submitted to the truer fire, and their minuscule realms smote out for the feast of giants that were careless of this holocaust.
They agreed to a man that they would not repeat Horace’s mistake, but would remain there behind the veil of those wilds, and would not go to the city to flaunt their wealth until some unspecified future day when they had sated their hunger. As for those times they were forced back to the town for provisions, they would maintain the tale that Horace had so clumsily attempted: they were in those places for the trapping. And indeed they purchased and set traps here and there about the hillsides in preemptive corroboration of their lies. As they knew not the art of this trade they had but little success with it, the fox and the wolves being too wary for them, and they too ignorant for the beaver and the bear. But now and then they would capture some unclever beast that they could dress and tan. Whichever of them went back to town would carry behind him these hides, and others still of the game Horace brought down with his long-barreled rifle for their meat.
Thus they sought to obviate all suspicions in Walla Walla. While it had early been discussed that they might strike out for a different city each time they were in want of provisions, the unfeasibility of this plan made itself at once felt in the distances, in that still uncharted wilderness, between them and the outposts of what America called its civilization. Any further destination would cost them too dearly in time. For the fever was upon them to wring the gold from the land before the land up and swallowed it—or, what was still worse, before some other prospector found them out and broached their secret to the world. For though it was difficult to fathom how anyone might discover them, each of them secretly believed that the discovery was but a matter of time.
You have just read a chapter of the serial novel SACRIFICE, by John Bruce Leonard. A new chapter will be published each week. Subscribe below to receive new chapters directly in your email.