California Gold (5 page)

“That’s what you think of California? Being free to do whatever you want?” It was an odd new thought.

Wyatt obviously believed it, though, because he responded heatedly. “Damn right. California is Kansas forty years ago. Maybe with those mountains standing up there, keeping out most of the weaklings, it’ll stay that way. At least I hope it stays that way till I make my pile. That won’t be long.”

“You’re pretty confident.”

Wyatt took the compliment with another toss of his dark head, as if it were routine, nothing but obvious truth.

With the occasionally foolish enthusiasm and naïveté of young men, they continued exchanging information and philosophies for another half hour. They were arguing the merits of California above and below the Tehachapi Mountains, the state’s mythical dividing line, when Mack suddenly stopped and yanked at the dirt-splotched cuff of his trousers. There was some mite of an insect burrowing under his layers of socks, and he killed it between his fingernails. “God, what I’d give for a bar of soap and some hot coffee.”

“I can take care of that first thing in the morning,” Wyatt said.

“How?”

“Didn’t you see that sign we passed at the crossroads—‘Good Luck, two miles’? Bet it’s an old mining town. I’ll go in and get us some supplies.”

“You don’t have any money, do you?”

Wyatt shook his head.

“Then how?”

Wyatt unfolded his lean body, stretched his arms over his head, and gave Mack that now familiar broad, warm smile. “Why, I’ll turn on some charm. I’ll just ask them for what we need. They’ll take pity on a couple of new Californians. I’m sure of it.”

It was a few minutes before 8
A.M.
as the old German with white side-whiskers trudged along the alley. He was tired, as played out as the dead and dusty hamlet half a mile from the American River. It had once been a boomtown, but first the placer mining had gone, and then in ’84 that damn judge had ruled that the hydraulic mining had to stop because blasting away hillsides with huge hoses poured debris and filth into the rivers and streams, killed fish, and spread poisoned silt on the farms of the Valley. What a damn crime. What good was settling on land if you couldn’t strip it of all the wealth
Gott
put there? Since when were trees and fish and water more important than property rights? Some of these Californians, they were crazy. That damn judge, especially. He was the final ruination of Good Luck, whose population had dwindled to 119. The German hung on, operating the only store, too exhausted to start over.

A cat hissed at him from a refuse heap. The German yawned, then suddenly noticed a young, dark-haired man standing by the rear entrance of the store. He was one of the foulest, dirtiest specimens the storekeeper had ever seen.

“
Ja
, what it is you want?”

“Need some supplies, sir. Soap, coffee, a tin pot, maybe some hardtack,” the stranger said. “You’ve got those, don’t you?” he added with a sunny smile that allayed the old man’s suspicions.

“I got them if you got cash.”

He’d scarcely uttered it when he found his pudgy neck clamped in the stranger’s left hand, and his head flung back against the plank wall. A knife with a five-inch blade hovered a quarter-inch from his Adam’s apple.

“I don’t think I need a fucking penny. Not if you want to stay alive. Now turn around and unlock this fucking door or you’ll be washing that step with your blood.”

Wyatt poured steaming coffee from the enamel pot he’d brought back. The American River rushed by with a purling sound, bright in the sunshine.

“I tell you, you’re making a mistake heading to Frisco,” Wyatt said as he held out one of the tin cups.

Mack tore the small crusty loaf of bread in half and exchanged a piece for the hot cup. “But there isn’t any other place in California that can touch it,” he said. “That’s why they call it the City, capital
C.
”

“Just the point,” Wyatt nodded. “Too many people there already. Got all the money they need, and they won’t want to share it with the likes of us. They’ll shut the damn door in your face, Mr. Macklin Chance. When they do, you come on down to Los Angeles and I’ll give you a job in the town I’m going to develop.”

“But you don’t have any money to buy land,” Mack said, half teasing.

Wyatt’s eyes caught the sun as his head snapped up, the blue changing to that disconcerting opal for a moment. “I’ll find it, the same way I found this food. There’s always a way if a man has his wits and a good story.”

“What story did you tell the storekeeper?”

Wyatt relaxed again. “A smart man doesn’t give away all his secrets.”

Mack gnawed on the bread. “All right, suppose I travel down south someday. How will I find you?”

“Just ask anyone around Los Angeles for the town with the big arch at the gate. I’ve already planned that in my head.” His slim hands, scrubbed white at last, described a graceful curve in the air. “You’ll see the name of the town—I haven’t figured that out yet—and then ‘The City of Health.’ That’s what I’m going to call it, The City of Health. Why do you think people are coming out here by the trainload? For the climate.” He spread his arms to embrace the golden morning. “The sun shines three hundred days a year in California.” He dropped his arms and grinned. “So I’ve read.”

“I admit the weather’s important, but I thought the main reason people came was the chance to get rich.”

“Jesus, Chance, you’re dumb. Most people in this world don’t know how to get rich. They don’t have the brains—or the nerve. Be thankful. It leaves more room for a couple of smart fellows like us.”

Wyatt whipped his cup over, throwing the rest of his coffee on the fire. It hissed and smoked as he jumped up.

“Where are you going?”

“South,” Wyatt said. “Time’s wasting. You can keep the coffeepot.”

In a few minutes, he was ready to go. “I appreciate what you did for me in the mountains,” he said, extending his hand to Mack. “You come see me in Los Angeles, at The City of Health. Meantime, good luck to you.”

When Wyatt Junius Paul smiled like this, Mack thought, he could charm the angels out of heaven. With a final wave, Wyatt went splashing into the shallow river and soon vanished among the willows and oaks on the other side. Mack stared after him, shaking his head in amazement and not a little relief. Undoubtedly he would never see Wyatt Paul again, and he had to admit he didn’t mind. Lighthearted as the Kansan might be sometimes, there was something hard and calculating about him too.

Mack poured the last of the coffee and realized that his brow was sweaty. He rolled up the tattered sleeves of his shirt and squinted at the huge butter-yellow sun in the hazy sky. Hot weather coming. It couldn’t get too hot for him. In half an hour, he was moving west.

H
E PASSED BELOW SACRAMENTO
and into wheat country, where fields of tasseled stalks stood two and three feet high in the spring sunshine. In those left fallow for the year, he saw sweating, cursing men behind eight-horse hitches that pulled seven-blade gangplows. In one field he saw ten gangplows moving forward together, like an army, filling the sky with dust. What amazed him most was the openness of the country. He never climbed over a single fence, or saw one. Did all this land belong to one man?

The morning of his third day in the wheat country, he was trudging along a dirt track leading to a smudgy line of trees. Here the wheat, bleached pale by the sun, grew tall as his head. His mouth felt as dry as the sandy loam in which the wheat was planted, and sweat stuck his smelly shirt to his back—he’d peeled off his rancid suit of long underwear and left it behind. The wheat plain baked. He’d never been so thirsty.

Maybe the trees ahead shaded water. He’d seen several riparian groves on his journey. He started to run but cut it short, his panting making him even thirstier. A pebble or wood chip in his left shoe set him limping, but he was too exhausted to stop and remove it.

Sure enough, where the dirt track snaked through the woods to a ford, he came upon water. It was brown and sluggish, a stream several yards wide in a streambed ten times that width. He staggered through the uncut stand of oaks, sycamores, and willows festooned with wild grapevines and fell on his knees at the edge of the turgid brown water. His face was nearly to the water when a gunshot reverberated across the hot pale wheat fields, and a man came riding toward him at a gallop. On his feet now, his heart thudding, Mack could see two other riders as well, moving at a more leisurely pace behind. He watched the gunman ride down on him and rein his big powerful gray with a cruel yank that pulled the horse’s head back and made him whinny.

“You’re on my land, drinking my water,” the man yelled, poking the air with his gun, a Smith & Wesson Schofield .45. “You got no right, mister.” Hatless, his forehead red and peeling from the sun, the man had a peasant’s face: small pale eyes, a lump of a nose, a deep dimple on his round chin. A few strands of whitening yellow hair lay flat on his head, combed across to hide baldness. He was dressed too formally, too heavily for the hot day, in a frock coat and large brown cravat. Mack estimated him to be in his late fifties.

The two other riders, a well-dressed man and a very attractive woman, trotted up behind him now and stopped. The gentleman wore a fine white hat, white breeches, and shiny high boots. Beside him, astride a beautiful black horse, the girl was dressed in a white blouse and tight, mannish trousers— definitely not the kind of feminine riding costume he’d seen in magazines. A long gold-colored silk scarf tied in her blond hair trailed down between her large breasts.

“So what have you got to say for yourself?” the gunman shouted. Standing there stupefied, Mack noticed other details now. The gunman’s frock coat showed spots and stains, and under it, the right-hand shirttail was hanging out. He had a belly big as half a watermelon. His small, fierce eyes almost hid in sockets of sunburned skin.

Mack finally screwed up his nerve. “I’m thirsty.”

“Yah?” The man snorted; it was hardly a laugh. He lowered the S&W and rested it on one ham of a thigh. With his other hand he scratched his crotch. The young woman didn’t see; his back was to her, and she had all of her attention on Mack, as did her companion, whom Mack judged to be somewhat older than he, maybe as much as thirty. He was a well-set-up gentleman with trimmed side-whiskers and a small mustache, and sat easily on his horse, conveying strength and clear contempt for the ragged stranger by the water.

“You wanted a drink, hah? I tell you something, Johnny. This is my ranch. My land, my water. Around here, trespassers get shot.”

Mack decided his situation was so bad that cowering was pointless. Besides, the man angered him. He slashed an arm back at the trees, the hidden fields. “I didn’t see any signs posted.”

“Never mind
signs
,” the man yelled, dancing the gray nearer the flat brown stream and Mack. “You come from back that way, you been trespassing on my land for twenty-eight miles.”

Mack was speechless a moment. Twenty-eight
miles
!

The man seemed annoyed at his lack of response and shouted, “You damn fool, I’m Hellman.”

Mack just stared. The girl leaned forward over the neck of her horse, resting her hands on me high pommel of her silver-studded Mexican saddle and watching the older man, whose anger seemed to amuse her. Then she looked down at Mack with a smile of sympathy. She had a wide mouth, starkly pink but unpainted by cosmetics, and eyes of a deeper blue than Wyatt Paul’s.

“Does that name mean nothing to you?” the younger man asked.

“No, sir, not a thing.”

The young man stepped his beautifully groomed chestnut nearer the water. “After Mr. Henry Miller of Miller and Lux, Mr. Hellman is the largest private landowner in the state.”

“Yah,” the gunman shorted, “Otto Hellman—you some kind of bumpkin, some kind of
Scheisskopf
, you never heard of that?”

“He’s a stranger in California,” the girl said. “Anyone can tell that. You can at least be civil.”

“Keep out of this, Carla.” She didn’t like that. She was feisty, certainly the most modern creature Mack had ever seen.

Otto Hellman walked his gray into the water. Mack’s eyes blurred with running sweat. He was sure the man could hear his heart hammering. The name Hellman meant nothing to him, but obviously the man was important and not to be fooled with, despite his slovenly, somewhat comic appearance.

“I don’t understand why you’re sore,” Mack said finally. “All I want is a drink. You don’t own the water.”

Otto Hellman barked rather than laughed. The young man leaned over and whispered something to the girl, who laughed and said, “Shameful, Walter.” They were a contrast: her smile large and lusty, his tight and contained. In all of Mack’s life, he’d never seen a woman so fair.

“Jesus, Johnny, you don’t know much,” Hellman said. “Don’t own the water? Sure I do. You never heard of riparian rights?”

Mack shook his head.

“This water’s mine because I own the land on both sides.”

Mack’s disbelieving look prodded Hellman to turn to the younger man. “I guess you better explain to him, Walter. He don’t know how we do things in California.” He swiveled back to address Mack. “Mr. Walter Fairbanks the Third is a lawyer from San Francisco. One of the finest. He’s so good, Cholly Crocker and skinflint Huntington and Governor Stanford, they want to hire him for the SP’s law department. You tell him, Walter.”

“If you think he could understand a principle of law,” Fairbanks said, cool and disdainful as he stepped his horse forward again. Mack turned red, then noticed the way the young woman Carla flicked her glance back and forth between them, as if watching duelists.

“The English common-law doctrine of riparian rights says simply that rights to water belong to the man who owns the land through which it flows. Mr. Hellman holds the title to the land on both sides, so he can put up a dam or channel the water in any way he pleases. He can charge for its use in irrigation, if those with land somewhere near the water but not abutting it care to pay the price he sets.” The lawyer took off his wide-brimmed white planter’s hat and applied a starched handkerchief to his forehead. Sunlight had put several light streaks in his sleek auburn hair. “He can also exclude anyone who won’t pay. There’s no coercion. They’re perfectly free to let their crops go without water.”