Zachary's Gold (30 page)

May Sang may have been a woman of great ability and much knowledge, but she didn't know how to load a mule. I undid everything and retied the baggage, which prompted her to sulk a bit. Then I helped Rosh onto the horse. He seemed to be much improved since I had last nursed him, partly, I suppose, because the return of May Sang had lifted his spirits. I resolved to find out later whether she was wife, sweetheart, or sister, but at that moment I was intent only on the job at hand. Eventually I would be allowed to sleep. I wasn't particularly curious about the abandoned cabin, as long as it was functional, but she volunteered the background information with a tone of pedantic pride.

“I know every place and every person around here,” she explained. “They all buy their supplies from Mr. Cox, you see, and I am what he calls his ‘right-hand girl.' When there is important mail for these faraway farms, it is me he sends, because he knows I ride horses very well and have no fear of calamities. Mr. Cox has also commented that when I work I never seem to get tired, which I am afraid could not be said about you, Mr. Beddoes. Don't you think we should hurry along before some stranger on the road catches sight of us? Laziness is all right for crooks who have already escaped from the clutches of the law, Mr. Beddoes, but we certainly must not be seen.”

Without a pause, she shifted languages and showered Rosh with what sounded like a mixture of encouragement and admonition. The poor fellow saw my dour expression as I tightened the belly straps of his saddle and gave me a helpless half-smile. He pointed at May Sang apologetically and made signs to me, but his explanation would not translate into our form of communication, and he ended by shaking his head and patting me once on the shoulder.

The aching in my legs behind and below my knees bothered me at first but disappeared once we had started walking, and the dreamy, monotonous plodding reflex took control. The day was once again cloudy and cool, and the world looked wide and flat to me. The rocky creek bed we travelled seemed expanded from its actual width of fifteen or twenty feet to being an immense, badly cobblestoned highway. On the other hand, I felt that if I could manage the energy to straighten up, I might scratch the fluff of the low clouds with my extended arm.

Rosh was silent, as always. The one time I glanced at him, he seemed to be as comfortable as could be hoped. May Sang, on the other hand, was rarely silent. She spoke to either of us whenever she could think of something to say, and to herself much of the time when she could not. She annoyed me in any number of ways. When she was not speaking, she hummed the same tuneless oriental melodies that I had recently heard from my partner's lips. Worst of all, she affected the most unladylike habit of whistling. When she walked, she kept a position to the fore, which was natural enough since she was the one who knew our exact destination, but even her manner of walking disturbed my tranquility. She never moved in a straight line. Like a water beetle, she dodged and wound her way around the slightest obstacle in the path. I suppose her small stature and her long skirts may have had something to do with this, and I grumbled to myself that no man should be forced to walk any distance with a woman.

In this sunken attitude of mind and heart, I kept no track of the hour, but it must have been some time around midday when we arrived at Farrell's cabin.

May Sang informed me that the cabin was abandoned because Mrs. Farrell had finally refused to sleep with her husband until he had built her a new house, and she offered me her personal opinion that the man should not have wanted to sleep with the old turtle at all, but he had built her a new home anyway, just over the ridge and a half mile towards town across the meadows.

I had to agree with Mrs. Farrell. The cabin looked grim within and without, with much more deterioration than one year of vacancy should have caused. It had been built of cottonwood logs, poorly sorted as to size, with only one window and a plank door with cracks in it big enough to slide a slice of bread through. The weight of the sod on the roof had started to collapse one corner of the building, but it was dry and stopped the wind, and there was still a hope that I would be allowed to sleep once we were settled there, so I accepted it readily as my temporary castle.

The animals were unloaded once more and left to graze at the edge of the pine forest that encircled the clearing. I gathered sticks and started a small fire on the dirt floor close to the window while May Sang made as comfortable a bed as she could from boughs and moss.

Some of the smoke from the fire escaped through the window opening and some drifted up through the old chimney hole. I was satisfied that if we kept it low, it would not be enough to draw attention to us from any distance, but I had yet to consider the opinion of the woman of our party.

May Sang wished to pile on enough brushwood to heat the breezy little room to kitchen temperature, and I refused her this luxury.

“Please be reasonable, Mr. Beddoes,” she declaimed, “and think for once of others. Poor Leung has been grievously injured by villains, and he must be kept warm.”

“Keep him close to the fire and under his blankets. He'll be just fine,” I suggested.

“Oh no, no! He was not born in this cold land, you see. Persons from China and such countries need to be very good and warm when they become sick. Not freezing. He has a fever already, you see, and these things worsen if disregarded by thoughtless people.”

“He'll have more trouble than fever if we get all the neighbours poking in to see who's made camp in this cabin. Your poor Leung could very easily end up at the end of a hangman's rope if he gets caught with me.”

I had her at a loss for words for a few minutes and she just glared at me. While she primped and adjusted Rosh's bed and wiped his forehead with a wet cloth, I made my own nest on a corner of the floor and let my throbbing muscles uncoil. She mumbled, to herself but for my benefit, that her poor, poor love should never have allowed himself to be seduced into aiding in my vicious schemes. I ignored her and had almost dozed off when I realized that bit by bit the size of our campfire was subtly increasing until it approached bonfire proportions. Finally I roused myself enough to carry the stock of dry wood from its place near at hand, and stacked it in the farthest corner of the room.

“You say you know this country, do you?” I asked her with a sneer. “Well, you should know better than to heat up an empty building in winter, then. Right about now there's rattlesnakes hibernating down in the cracks between the logs at the bottom of old walls. If you get this place good and warm, you'll have them all awake and crawling in here to get comfortable.”

I flopped back down in my corner and once again she was silent. I don't know if she really believed me, but after that the fire stayed at a respectable size. It was the only time I had reason to think I might have won an argument with May Sang.

She must have allowed me several hours of sleep, although it seemed to amount to only a protracted blink, for when she shook my shoulder, I awoke to the long shadows of late afternoon.

“That will have to be enough slumbering now, Mr. Beddoes. While you sleep away, I have solved our problem, which is food, which we have none of, and poor Leung tells me you have fed him all the way only dry deer flesh and fried wheat paste, but now I have gone off and very sneaky I have become a thief at the Farrells' root cellar. Yes, you have made a thief of even me, Mr. Beddoes! Now come and eat.”

She had found some carrots and a potato or two, which she had boiled in our tin pot. Unsalted boiled roots never tasted better. Even Rosh managed to eat a bit, then fell asleep beside her on the outskirts of the campfire's pale circle of light.

Finally I broke the peaceful silence.

“You loaded up the mule this morning, May Sang. You must have taken notice of the gold.”

She nodded once and continued to stare at the orange embers at the base of the flames.

“Come on now, woman, didn't that do anything for you? Didn't it make you just a little bit excited? There's more gold there than most people will see in a whole life, let alone hold it and have it to own.”

“It is not mine.”

“It's partly Rosh's. Leung's, that is.”

She shook her head.

“He has told me that he felt compelled to relinquish his part.”

I laughed. “There's still a good part of it that belongs to him.”

“Well,” she said, and shrugged. “That will be good for us. Good enough, I am sure.”

When I had wanted peace and quiet, she had prattled on without a pause; now that I was inclined to talk, she was suddenly uncommunicative. She wouldn't volunteer a thing that I did not ask directly.

“It's too bad he and I can't talk things over properly.”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“Your English is certainly good enough.”

“Thank you. I have spent considerable amounts of time and read a multitude of books.”

“But Rosh?”

“Stubborn. Leung is very stubborn.”

“He's smart enough. Even without trying, he should have made better progress with it than he has by now.”

She hesitated a second, then spoke without looking at me. “He is of the opinion that it is dangerous to become too involved in the life of this uncivilized place. If one speaks like a wild person, one might become too much like a wild person. That is his idea.”

“He thinks the white man might be a bad influence, does he? There's a laugh!”

She returned my sneer. “And what is it that you have taught my poor Leung? Wild living and lawlessness!”

She did have an arguable point at that. I didn't want to antagonize her any more than I already had, so I took it philosophically and changed the subject.

“So then, you're his sweetheart?”

“He is my husband.” She said it with a touch of defiance.

“Husband?” I pursued. “What was he doing up in the goldfields then, and you down here?”

“That is no place for a Chinese lady,” she informed me. “I am too proper and too sensitive. He wished me to be sheltered from the wickedness of wild mining men.”

“Not much better down here, is it?”

“At least we are farmers here, not highwaymen, shooting each other for gold.”

“Well, I can see why you'd be angry at him for leaving you behind.”

I hadn't meant to offend her, but she seemed suddenly rather angry. When she spoke, it was in a low, controlled tone.

“And what do you know about such matters, Mr. Beddoes? Are you out here in the wild country protecting some wife that I cannot see? Will you teach us about honour and duty before you run off with your gold?”

I began to regret that I had initiated this conversation. Her assessment held the sting of truth.

“I meant no offence. You're quite right. I don't know the slightest thing about women. Never had a sweetheart, not even a girl who knew me from any other beard and trousers passing by on the street. I know a bit about gold and guns, and all about how to get myself into a proper pickle without even trying—that's what I know.”

It was her turn to placate me then, and after a moment or two of silence, she spoke in a soft voice.

“Leung tells me that you are strong and brave. He says you captured this great mountain of gold from a gang of very fierce bandits. As he understands it, certain corrupt magistrates and sheriffs wish to steal it back from you, and you have been forced to flee from one battle to the next. This is correct?”

I shrugged, choosing not to contradict my friend on matters of detail. I could tell there was something else she wanted to say, and in a few seconds she blurted it out.

“A man named William Atherton has been to Ashcroft and all across the country telling lies about you. He shamelessly bore false witness to the effect that you shot two of his friends and stole his gold.”

I recognized the reference to the scoundrel who had tried to bushwhack us, and I couldn't help but half admire the way he had turned his failed criminal enterprise into a chance for personal profit. May Sang did not feel such appreciation for his subterfuge.

“Mr. Cox already knew your name from a Barkerville newspaper, and he said, ‘Oh yes, this must be true,' and now the whole country believes these lies.”

“Don't worry about it,” I advised her, then had a disturbing thought. “Did this Bill Atherton say anything about Rosh? Did he say I had a partner? Did he say anything to anybody about a Chinaman? This Atherton was the fellow that shot your husband, you know.”

Her eyes flickered with a mixture of anger and fear while she thought back.

“No,” she said finally. “He said nothing of that.”

I gave her my advice as specifically, as carefully, and as adamantly as I could. She must return to Ashcroft, claiming to have escaped from me. She should say that I was on my way down the canyon towards Fort Hope. Rosh could stay at the cabin alone for a while. In three or four days, she should pretend to have received a message that her husband was on the way back from Barkerville, quite sick. If she let everyone think he had been hurt in a mining accident, not shot, then Bill Atherton was unlikely to make any connection, and she could come and collect her husband in safety.

She considered all this carefully.

“What will you do, Mr. Beddoes?”

I laughed, trying my best to be nonchalant.

“I always knew this was going to be a bit of a long shot,” I told her. “I still have a decent chance of getting myself and my goods across the border, but I'll have to try a different route, I think. They'll be watching for me in the canyon, so I'll try going across to Fort Kamloops and south from there. There's a big lake I can follow and a lot of desert country to stay lost in.”

She didn't offer an opinion of my plan, but she looked worried. I suppose she realized as well as I that after the excitement of the last few days, it would be difficult for me to escape.