The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (61 page)

Uncle Ned called out in a loud, clear voice:

“There’s a pair of murdering dogs in there we’d admire to have step out and meet the people they’ve wronged.”

Still no sound.

Our bunch was down a ways, crouched behind some barrels.

Uncle Ned spoke up again, a little louder this time.

“I’d fret if I had to take and fire the place. No call for innocent to suffer along with the guilty.”

Then a scuffle exploded within, and that wild man Murrel burst out, iron-gray hair flying, eyes blazing like a maniac’s, with a single-shot pistol swinging in his hand. He stumbled a little before he got down the stairs, but righted himself fast, and cried out to Uncle Ned:

“What’s your grievance? Speak up, or by God—”

“Maybe you misrecollect killing this boy’s pa and ma in cold blood, back in Missouri. We ain’t forgot. When there’s a rattlesnake needs squashing, I say squash it.”

“So that’s it!” cried John in a voice of thunder, staring at Todd. “Then one more won’t matter,” and he swung up his pistol.

Making no effort to fire the first shot, Uncle Ned wheeled around
smartly to present his right side, away from the heart, and covered his head with his arm. The ball raised dust from his shirt, high up on the chest. He made a brief motion of brushing himself off, pulling the cloth out from his body where it began to stick with blood. Then he whipped up his rifle, took a very quick bead, and shot John low in the forehead, just over his nose.

Maniac that he was, he didn’t kill easy. A Bible sentence began and died on his lips. “ ‘The Lord goeth out—’ ” the glare seemed to fade in his eyes, and he toppled forward on his face.

At almost the same instant, Shep flung out of the tap, beet-red with drink, but when he spied the boy he went all to pieces. I think he’d known from the day on the riverbank that this Todd would finally catch up and undo him. He turned a kind of belly-white, put one hand out as if to ward off something, and said, “I haven’t got no g—”

Todd shot his rifle from waist high, the bullet plunking into Shep’s stomach with the sound of a paddle slapping a tubful of butter.

Then Shep brought out his right arm from behind him, holding a pistol, so the sentence he hadn’t finished was a lie, of course, and a piece of trickery, and tried to bring it up level. But he sat down in the street instead, feeling himself in bewilderment. Then he said, “You’ve killed me.”

“I could have blowed out your brains,” said the boy, slobbering, “but I didn’t want it fast,” He reloaded the rifle, took another aim, and hit Shep in the stomach again, the dust flying out with a little puff.

“The first was for ma, that was pa’s.”

“You’ve killed me,” said Shep again.

“Sit there and die,” said Todd.

As he spoke, Shep fell over sideways. A number of men ran up, and suddenly the street was full of noise. People came out from behind boxes and bales, from inside stores and houses, from about every kind of cover you could find.

“Back! Stand back, give him air,” cried a big man in a swallow-tail
coat. “Aren’t you a doctor?” he said to my father. “Attend this man.”

“Not me,” replied my father stoutly. It went against his oath, but I don’t think he was sorry, afterwards.

Shep still breathed, I could see that from where I knelt between a man’s legs, but he was bleeding to death. So, after an oath and the observation, “Killed by a shirttail sprig,” he took three or four gasps, as if he couldn’t get his lungs full, and choked to death on a big bubble of blood. It wasn’t pretty to see; he died hard. Everybody said so several times.

The score was settled.

Now began my father’s adventures on the streets of San Francisco, a time I won’t dwell on, since there wasn’t much pleasant about it. Some of it seems funny, though, looking back.

We left a week after the fight, with promises to all (from my father) that we’d find the exact right opportunity and send for them within a month. It had a familiar ring; it sounded like the things he said to my mother nearly two years ago, back in Louisville.

John’s bullet had missed Uncle Ned’s lungs and various other objects on duty there, but had cracked a rib, then bounced on off and out. He was stiff and sore, but as somebody remarked, wasn’t anywhere near as stiff as Murrel, thanks to goodness.

Was it Murrel? Unless the real article should turn up, nobody will ever know. Me, I doubt it. I think this old murderer had been crazy all his life, and had probably branded his own thumb out of craziness, and maybe something like hero worship.

Nobody in town minded the shooting, so there was very little grumbling. For several months, John and Shep had been in and out of Vernon, and wherever they went, making enemies in their easy, effortless style, the people always would have been happy to take up a collection and move them to another place.

Still and all, these miners had their sentimentally side, so they got a bushwhacking preacher out of a tap, held his head in the horse trough to sober him up, and conducted a very nice service. And afterwards, they planted the two scalawags in a new graveyard that was started only the previous year. I didn’t see it myself,
but several mentioned it, and two or three thanked Uncle Ned and Todd for making it possible. There was very little decent entertainment around here, and a service like this helped. The only hitch was, the preacher had been so drunk he misunderstood the history of the corpses. So he went praising along about their “good works” and “lives spent in selfless devotion to others” and such other tommyrot, and finished up by saying what a great loss it was to the community but that the Kingdom of Heaven would be the richer. This certainly came as news to me; I was willing to bet next year’s salary they were already lodged in the other place. To end up, he led the miners in a hymn that told how sheep along with other farm animals came into a corral when deceased, which seemed pretty far removed from the subject, and after this he knocked off, passed the hat, and went back to the tap.

It sounded a little thick to me, but I’ve never had any luck making sense out of sermons, funerals included. As far as those swindlers were concerned, they got clean away; we never got a trace of them again from the day of the fight on.

Coulter wasn’t much the worse for wear, only bunged up about the head; his spirits were as bouncy as ever. Having only one arm now, he generally wore a revolver strapped to a gun belt, and it gave us a safer feeling to leave them like that. Nobody in his right mind would have reached for a gun facing Coulter, and everybody around here knew it. There were several men in town that had run across him in scouting days, him and Bridger both, along with Kit Carson, mainly on the Santa Fe Trail, and I heard it said he’d backed down some Texas gun slingers in a famous fight there, after plugging two of their best men. After that, they said, troublemakers in that area were very well content to leave him alone.

He and Jennie were going to get married.

“I reckon I’m done roaming,” he said. “I never heard of any one-handed trail scouts.”

“Oh, you’ll roam,” Jennie said, “when you get the itch.”

He and Uncle Ned and Todd would go on working the mule pack, and the Kissels would operate the butchery. For now, they
were all right, and in a month, thirty days, as my father put it, using both measurements every time he mentioned it, as if maybe they weren’t clear what a month was, we’d be started toward fortune in San Francisco.

“Think of it!” he cried, fired up with all his old vigor now at the prospect of moving. “A forest of masts in the harbor; ships from the world’s farthest ports; the babble of polylinguality in the streets; building and boom everywhere; and gold, gold by the bucketload streaming in from the richest mines yet discovered by man. We’ll look around, we’ll spot the missing link in this golden chain of commerce, and we’ll charge forward to found our concern. With any kind of luck, we’ll be rolling in wealth by Christmas.”

This “concern” was something that had crept into his speech, but was a mystery to me. I think he’d fixed his notions on building up some kind of business, but he hadn’t let us in on what it was. Like the McPheeters-California Public Clinic, it flourished entirely in his head.

That evening before we left, I took Todd back where I kept Spot tied to a tree, and said, “I’ll leave him with you. You take care of him, hear? He sidles to the right if he sees something white in the path.”

We were going down to Sacramento by the boats.

Todd rubbed his muzzle.

“Not anxious to. I never had any friend before. Back home, there wasn’t any neighbor in rifle sound; Pa liked things solitary. He was a woodsy man.”

“I’ll be seeing you and old Spot in a month.”

“Uncle Ned says not. He says your pa’s one of them with dreams always in their heads. He says your pa’s got to chase his dreams all of his life. But he says it makes things kind of beautiful for backwoods people like us. Said we must pick him up if he stumbles. Uncle Ned ain’t an altogether ignorant man in some ways.”

“He’s fine,” I said, feeling bad. “You both are.”

“I’m not forgetting about the watch. How you toted it all them miles.”

Right here it struck me that everything I liked was going. Mr. Coe had gone, and Po-Povi—and now we were leaving Jennie and the Kissels and Coulter and Uncle Ned and Todd. I hurt inside. Another part of our adventure was over, and even then, I realized that nothing ever comes back again quite the same. Things roll on, new sights take the place of the old, and the only way you can do it over is remember. So, after a lecture from Jennie about minding my manners, along with a quick hug and kiss, I went to bed, sore at my father, refusing to answer when he called, “Good night, son.”

But nothing looks very bad in the morning, when you’re a boy. For I was a boy still, though on the edge of manhood, as my father had said, studying me over as if he hadn’t seen me for a while. We were up and off long before breakfast, eating some biscuits on the way, and spinning down the river by nine.

The boat was a two-master belonging to a syndicate of Chileans that had hired a captain who described himself as a “Yankee.” In fact, he described himself this way about every five minutes, and took a nip out of a bottle to reinforce it. On board, besides, was a poor sort of immigrant group, but we concentrated on watching the river.

This passage had cost us six dollars for my father and four dollars for me, “deck passage,” without meals, as far as Sacramento, where the boat was headed. We had altogether about a hundred dollars and a little over from what was left of our money. The distance was upwards of twenty miles, down a green and fertile valley. Being a sailor, when the wind took a rest the boat commenced to drift broadside. The captain had gone below, drunk, and when they told him the fix we were in, he raised up from his bunk—I was there—and said, “Be we headed downstream?”

One of the men spoke up sharply. “Naturally, you fool.”

“Ain’t floating against the current?”

Somebody snorted in disgust, and he said, “Then we’re laying
the right course. If she begins to float contrary to the drift, roust me out.”

There wasn’t a thing could be done with him, he was in too happy a humor, and when we left, with some mutters and threats, he raised up again to take another snort and cried, “If you strike Sacramento, heave the anchor.”

No matter what, our situation was far from pleasant—there were other boats in this river, along with debris, “sawyers” (or big trees), sand bars, and other obstacles, and two of our Chilean hands managed to say, mainly with sign talk, that we’d better break out a boat and tow the bow downstream. So we did it, nearly all of the men taking a turn, including my father. There was a very hardbitten Australian passenger on board, a rough, seamy-faced fellow with a soiled blue sash tied around his waist, and he suggested, perfectly serious, that they fix a line to one of the captain’s legs and “keelhaul” him.

“They done it to a cobber of mine, and it worked wonders, lads, wonders.”

I got the idea that what they did was toss him overboard at the bow, bring the free end of the line back along the opposite side, and then, amidships, haul him under and up.

“It’s the barnacles perform the miracle,” he said. “Flogging ain’t in it.”

But he was overruled, on the grounds that it wouldn’t be humane, and besides, treatment like that might come under the heading of mutiny, whether he was drunk or not.

It was nearly dark when we reached Sacramento, which was on the west side of the river, and we dinghied ashore but could find no chance of lodging. Then we heard of a place on the outskirts of town, and when we got there, it was run by a Mr. Harris that had been an original member of our wagon team from Independence. He was glad to see us, and made shakedowns on the front-room floor, because everything else was jammed. But he wouldn’t take money, and next morning he gave us a good breakfast, too.

Back in town, we sought passage on down to San Francisco. It seemed a lively place, with the usual half-finished frame and zinc houses, and mud nearly every place you stepped. It was a curiosity to me that those Mormons, working under the worst kind of conditions, in a desert without water and on ground so ugly nobody else would have dreamed of settling there, yet had managed to build a city that was handsome and neat and
planned.
It had no points of resemblance to this ramshackle pile of lumber and clay. Salt Lake City was a place you could take pride in, as far as the looks of it went.

Still, Sacramento stirred with a kind of bubbling excitement. It was a-rise like a loaf of bread that’s got out of control. And in the harbor there were all manner of craft, including two steamboats, a number of many-masted vessels, and a scattering around like ducks of open boats and skiffs. We looked for somebody to talk to about passage, but there were only two or three sleepy-eyed hands lolling about, so early in the day, and these told us the captains and officers were all to be found uptown, in the coffeehouses (which actually were nothing but grogshops), the Empire and United States Hotel.

In the last, we found two fiddlers asleep on the gambling tables lined up along one side, and a red-faced man in captain’s dress stood at the bar, sucking down great gollops of coffee with rum poured in it. He said he’d take us to San Francisco, starting in an hour, for twelve dollars apiece, in a brig, the money to be paid on delivery at San Francisco.