California Gold (68 page)

The light disappeared. Far below, Alex kept coughing. Mack wrote on the pad, then flung his hands under his head and shut his eyes.

No use. Too many worries, steady as the rain. Too many memories. Too much guilt…

Tonight, that involving Margaret dominated the rest.

As Mack strode into the sun-flooded office, Alex jumped up from his corner desk. “Ready, sir? So am I. All packed.”

It was half past ten. Three tickers chattered and spewed tapes of the latest trades and postings from the stock exchanges—San Francisco, California, and Pacific. Mack had also installed a private telegraph wire and key, and a second telephone.

“I want to say good-bye to Jim. Is he outside?”

“No, sir, in the library.”

“On a morning like this?”

He ran down three flights and flung open the library doors. Little Jim sat in a red velvet chair, his feet dangling above the floor. Johnson knelt beside him, watching the boy play with some kind of toy.

Mack stormed in. The dark room smelled of dust and leather bindings. “What the devil have you got there, Jim?”

His son held it up so he could see. It was a Chinese abacus, brightly finished in lacquer. On the frame, tiny hand-painted dragons chased each other, spurting fire from their jaws and smoke from their nostrils.

“Where did you get it?”

Johnson stood, his knee joints popping. “Kim Luck in the kitchen dug it up. Alex says Jim’s a whizzer at ciphering. He’s picked this up real quick. Jim, show your pa. How ’bout five hundred and seven?”

Little Jim studied the abacus a moment. Then his small hand pulled down a five-unit bead on the third wire from the right and clicked it against the dividing bar. He pulled down no beads on the second wire, a five-unit bead on the first wire, then pushed up two one-unit beads. Proudly he showed the abacus.

“
Suan-pan
,” he said.

“That’s the Chink name of the thing,” Johnson said.

“Why are you fooling with that on a sunny day?” Mack grabbed it. “Go on outside and play.”

“Don’t want to, Pa. I want to do numbers.” He reached for the abacus.

Mack kept it away from him. “I said go outside. Get some air.”

Jim’s small hands closed to fists. He jutted his jaw and held his breath, and turned red as he marched from the room. “Jim?” Mack called. “I’ll see you in a week or two—”

In answer, a door slammed.

Mack threw the abacus on a table, then whipped the drapes open. Sunshine poured in. “This place is cheerful as a tomb.”

“You ain’t much better. You rag that boy too hard.”

“I’m not going to raise a hothouse lily. I want him to enjoy the outdoors like everybody else in California.”

“Maybe he don’t take to it. Maybe ridin’ and campin’ and all the stuff you like ain’t his style. He’s a quiet one, but he’s brainy. He can already pick out words in the newspaper.”

“I want him outside, every day.”

“Hell, he’s only three. He don’t have to climb Mount Shasta just yet—”

“Don’t tell me how to raise my son.” Mack walked out.

Johnson sighed. “And good-bye yourself,” he muttered. “Jesus.”

Mack found Little Jim walking along the Sacramento Street side of the house, dragging a stick across the uprights of the wrought-iron fence,
rat-tat-tat.

“There you are. Give me a hug before I go.”

The boy clutched the stick to his shirt.

“Come on, Jim. I didn’t mean to yell. Fresh air’s good for you.”

And Little Jim was pale. Very pale from too much time indoors. The California climate had been good for Mack, and he wanted the same benefits for his son.

Stubbornly, he crouched down and held out his arms. Little Jim hesitated, snapped the stick in two, and edged sideways into Mack’s embrace.

“I’ll miss you,” Mack said.

“Sure, Pa. Good-bye.”

Mack felt the boy’s stiffness. He was holding back, resenting him.
Damn.

Alex drove around the corner with the buggy. Leaving, Mack watched Little Jim standing there without a smile. Joyless as a little old man in the California sunshine.

For the train trip, Alex carried a satchel of business papers and correspondence. Mack’s valise held a similar stack, and some books:
The Octopus
by Nellie’s friend Frank Norris, which he hadn’t read; his marked copy of
The Conquest of Arid America
by William Smythe; and one he plunged into immediately, heedless of Alex’s pleas that they work. Appleton’s had published Nellie’s new novel two weeks before.
Range of Light
was essentially another romance, but a somber, bitter one. Mack stayed awake most of the night in his berth, mesmerized by it.

The story involved a Yosemite hotel keeper seduced by greed and the blandishments of a San Francisco developer, who wanted to buy in and treble the size of the hotel. The hotelman, an older man, had previously brought a young wife to the valley. At first the natural beauty had diverted her from the loveless marriage. When Nellie introduced her, she was restless and discouraged.

A young Basque illegally herding sheep in the valley became her summer lover. In one scene they met secretly at Yosemite Falls. They soon saw themselves as allies in a war against the innkeeper’s avarice and bourgeois mentality. Always, the Sierra range loomed as a presence, its light-flooded purity mocking their furtive love in the shadows on the valley floor.

Finally they decided to risk a meeting in full daylight. They would climb up together to taste the sun—once. The husband learned of their plan, followed, and shot them both during their tryst on Cloud’s Rest, then accidentally fell to his death on the way down.

It made no difference in the hotel scheme. The developer took over the property, remodeled, and turned the hotel into an enormous success, bringing raucous crowds who sang and shouted all night long in the new saloon bar. In the final pages, a drunken guest kicked the bar’s player piano. After the guests left, the piano kept playing “The Blue Danube” faster and faster, louder and louder. The piano started to shake itself to pieces, wires snapping and pinging, the music growing madder and uglier. It dinned from the open windows, drowned the voices of complaining guests, rolled down the valley. Nellie’s last images seemed omens. Frightened deer fled along the banks of the dark river and wild birds flew frantically across the face of the full moon while the music of civilization played on.

He closed the book. Critics might never guess why the “female Zola” painted such a dark portrait of the lovers. He knew one possible answer.

Or was he flattering himself?

Not that it did any good. She was in Carmel—maybe with someone else—and he was here, in a stuffy berth, rattling through the California night, alone.

“Filth,” editorialized the
Los Angeles Times.

We need no further outpourings of prurient prose and foreign ideology from Miss Ross, Mr. Norris, or any of their debased deviate cronies who purport to be artists and loyal Californians. Let them ply their trade in the sewers of corrupted Europe.

Despite this valiant crusade by General Otis to safeguard the morals of others, Californians bought every available copy of
Range of Light
within a week of publication.

It became a national best-seller. Every literate person in America knew the name Nellie Ross.

The wind raged. Yellow dust hid the mountains and attacked the eyes. Mack leaned into it, gritted his teeth, and held his hat, Alex staggering along behind. Mack had picked a devil of a day to trek out to Indio to reveal his latest scheme.

“Here’s the marker. I bought a hundred acres. Fifty of it goes into date palms, the other fifty we’ll turn into a camp.”

“Camp, sir? What kind?”

“For consumptives. People who need the hot dry climate but can’t afford to stay.”

The blinding dust hid Alex’s immediate reaction.

From an inner pocket Mack took a folded paper. The screaming wind almost tore it away. “Here are the details and the numbers. We’ll put up tents first, then build regular dormitories. We’ll bring in cows and chickens. Invalids who can afford to pay something will be charged three dollars a week. If they’re indigent, they’ll pay nothing. We must hire at least one doctor, and a professional manager. We’ll set it up on a nonprofit basis.”

“Why are you doing this, sir?”

“Because I’ve taken a lot from California and I want to give some back. Thousands of people with tuberculosis come here with nothing but hope to sustain them. We can’t help all of them, but we can help a few.”

Alex’s stalwart strength finally gave way. He wept.

“God bless you, Mr. Chance. You are a good man. Such a good man.”

In Riverside, Mack inspected the groves and went over the books. He spent an evening with Billy Biggerstaff and the manager’s wife and seven children, but their boisterous happiness made him melancholy.

He went up to Ventura for two days with Haven Ogg, then over to San Solaro, where the Wardlow brothers had completed the water system, and Hazard’s realty company had already brought in twenty-three families. Cottages were under construction, clear water flowed in the canal, and the derricks continued to draw oil out of the earth.

Back at Villa Mediterranean, he and Alex met with Enrique Potter on a Saturday morning. The attorney, slightly stooped and paunchy now, presented a plat of the Los Angeles region with a webwork of red lines radiating from the center.

“Here are two more interurban lines Henry Huntington has announced. This one adjoins land that you own outside Redlands. This one cuts right through your property in Whittier. Pacific Electric’s real estate department approached me last week.”

Mack leaned back and tented his fingers. A warm spring breeze rustled papers on his desk. T. Fowler Haines occupied its customary corner.

“I bought some of this property because I was sure the city would expand,” he explained to Alex. “You can only go so far west and then you’re swimming. Ed Huntington talked about interurbans at the Bohemian Grove, and that’s when I started buying more land. Since he incorporated P.E. last year, he’s gone faster than I ever dreamed.” Mack rubbed his chin. “Sometimes I feel guilty making money this way. Like one of the SP sharks, profiting from knowing ahead of time where the line will be built.”

“A quadruple increase in land values is damned good medicine for guilt,” Potter said. “Furthermore, Henry Huntington didn’t coerce you into buying land; you did it on your own initiative. Spare me this Southern Pacific shark business.”

Mack laughed. “All right. You know my bottom price in each case. Don’t go below it.” Potter checkmarked something on his legal pad. Mack shifted papers. “What about that new acreage in the Cahuenga Valley?”

The attorney touched a folder. “Here. They’ve accepted your offer. All the documents refer to the incorporated name, Hollywood.”

“Good work. You two handle the rest.” Mack left the desk and plucked a fancy white felt Stetson from the rack.

“You’re in a devil of a hurry,” Potter said.

“There’s a speed-driving exhibition down on the flats. I don’t want to miss it.”

Henry Ford’s 999 racer tore across the flat, leaving a rooster tail of dust. The noise was formidable. On a 109-inch wheel-base and a chassis painted rust red, the young automobile wizard from Detroit had created a brute machine and stripped it for speed. No bonnet protected the four-cylinder eighty-horsepower engine. The driver steered by tiller from a precarious seat only big enough for one.

A crowd of about three hundred lined both sides of the road west of Riverside. Some had taken the train from Los Angeles, some had driven carriages, and five had arrived in automobiles, two of them electrics. One gasoline auto belonged to Mack.

He liked the snappy little runabout with its steering tiller, three-gear lever (two forward, plus reverse), and its one-horsepower engine mounted behind the single seat. The auto, from the Olds Motor Works and thus named “Oldsmobile,” had a smart curved dash, a black lacquer finish, red trim, and rakish brass acetylene lamps. At a top speed of twenty miles per hour, it didn’t go fast enough for him.

Spectators screamed and cheered as 999 turned around down the road and started back, accelerating for the test mile. Mack jumped up on the seat of Ransom Olds’s little runabout and shouted with the rest.

The 999 howled across the finish line and the flagman whipped his green flag back and forth. Not the easiest car to steer, the 999 shot along the shoulder, slowing down. Rather than try another turn, the hired driver put on the brakes.

High on his wooden stand the timekeeper checked his clock. “Time for the measured mile—one minute, eleven and one fifth seconds. A new record for the Ford nine ninety-nine and its demon pilot from Toledo.”

Pandemonium.

The driver stopped the racer, stripped off his goggles and leather helmet, and rushed back to the crowd surging to meet him. Only last year, young Barney Oldfield had been racing cycles in Ohio. He began working the crowd with a stubby cigar in his mouth, signing autographs, reveling in the attention.

Mack left the Olds runabout and spent a few minutes studying the 999. Ford had named the racer for the crack train of the New York Central. Fast driving excited Mack. He needed a faster and more powerful automobile to replace the Locomobile and the Olds. Not a steamer, or an electric; they were rapidly losing out to internal combustion. What should he buy? One of those German machines?

He was walking back along the dusty road pondering that when he noticed three people approaching: a man with a woman on each arm. The man’s handsome face leaped out.

Mack had a strong urge to avoid them but he didn’t, instead striding forward with forced good cheer.

“Wyatt. For God’s sake.”

Wyatt Paul stopped, his women obediently halting as well. Each held a sleeve of Wyatt’s white linen suit, which was most peculiar, severely cut, with a white dickey and Episcopal collar and a white silk kerchief billowing from the breast pocket. Wyatt Paul looked like a photographic negative of a priest.

“By heaven. My partner.”

Wyatt smiled, and the sun put that strange opal blaze in his eyes for a moment. Mack pulled his hand back, annoyed; Wyatt had blandly refused to take it.