“By God, I don’t see any shame in taking what’s ours!”
“But you talk about hurting Stovall at the same time—”
“He deserves it! If he tries to block us, let him suffer!”
Jared shook his head. “I don’t want anything like that on my conscience. I’m satisfied with what I finally made of my life. I married a good woman. I earned a living honestly. I fathered a boy who angered and disappointed me when he went his own way—then I finally realized it was a worthy way. In Boston I was—I was headstrong—vindictive—”
The medal disappeared as he clenched his hand. “I’ve tried to live differently as a grown man. I don’t want to go back to the past! As if we ever could—”
“We can. And it’s our duty.”
“Not mine. I’m an old man. Fifty-one—”
“An old man? Or a weak one?”
Stunned, he stared at her as she knelt beside him. “I don’t think I know you anymore, Amanda.”
She pounded a fist on his knee, not realizing the pain it caused. “I only want what’s rightfully ours! We’ve both lived too long with too little—”
“What is it you’re really after? Stovall’s money? Stovall’s life?”
“I want justice, goddamn it! I want Kent and Son! For myself—and my boy.”
“And you don’t care what you do to get it?”
A brief silence. Then: “No, I don’t.”
In the crucible of memory, Jared saw the face of Hamilton Stovall on the day the printing house burned. He saw the white silk bandana hiding Stovall’s scarred flesh, and remembered his own intense rage—
But trying to undo a wrong more than thirty years old was futile. Futile and destructive. He saw the latter very clearly—on Amanda’s own face.
His anger left him again. Gently, he touched his cousin’s forehead. “Don’t do it. Trying to hurt Stovall, you’ll only hurt yourself. And your son. Do you notice how he looks at you when you talk about Boston? He’s afraid of you—just as I was afraid of my father before he disappeared—”
He pressed her cheeks with both hands. “Amanda, I beg you—don’t go back.”
She jumped up, whirling away. “God, you’ve turned spineless!”
Grieved, he shook his head. He stood up and took a step toward her. Darkness seemed to close in from the corners of the room. He thought he heard a footfall outside, probably Billy Beadle walking in the yard.
“Not spineless. Sensible. The more you hate, the more it poisons y—”
“Oh, yes,” she broke in. “I’ve heard that pious little sentiment before. From Captain McGill, among others. Spare me!”
“Amanda”—his shoulders lifted; some of the age seemed to drop from him; his blue eyes grew nearly as fierce as hers—“I’m afraid this is going to be a short reunion.”
That finally gave her pause. “Short? Why?”
“Because I don’t want any part of rebuilding the Kent family in the way you propose to do it.”
“Jared, Jared!” She came to him, speaking more calmly. “I only want to see the family live again!”
“There’s nothing wrong with that—except the price you intend to pay.”
“I had hoped you’d pay your share.”
His eyes narrowed. “With what I’m taking from the claim?”
“Yes. In a year or two we could rent a decent house in the east. Find that law firm whose name I can nev—”
She stopped, her eyes flicking to the glass beyond the lamp.
“There’s someone out th—Jared, move away from the window—”
Her rush to push him came too late. Two pistols exploded in the backyard. He heard glass shatter an instant before he was slammed forward against the piano, struck in the back.
v
Amanda screamed. Louis burst from the alcove—“You stay in there, Louis!”—and Jared dropped to his knees, trying to grip the leg of the piano. He was short of breath. His spine hurt. The skin beneath his flannel shirt was warm and sticky—
“Sneaky, murdering bastards—!”
He heard Amanda’s voice from afar; she’d run outside. Her revolver boomed once, then again. In the dormitory upstairs, men shouted questions at one another. Billy Beadle yelled in the yard, but the words made no sense.
He lost his grip on the piano leg, struck the carpet, his beard twisted under one cheek. His eyes filled with tears of pain. Peculiar, disconnected thoughts tumbled in his mind.
Too much cold water gets every trapper one day—
I’m old—
Oh, God, I hurt—
“Cousin Jared?”
That was Louis. He tried to answer. The pain was too consuming. He fainted.
vi
Voices. Faces. Indistinct. Hard to identify.
“—some of Felker’s cronies, I don’t doubt. Bloody scum! They got clean away in the dark—”
Who was that? He struggled to focus his eyes. He was lying in the shadow of the walnut table. Above him, a blurred figure in the lamplight, he finally recognized Billy Beadle.
Amanda spoke. “Billy, you run for the doctor. Run like hell!”
The Australian vanished. In his place Jared saw his cousin. But he was only marginally aware of her. His mind distracted him. So this is how it ends. Unexpectedly—at the wrong time—with too many words unsaid—too many things undone—
He cried his son’s name, fought to sit up—
Amanda knelt. Her cool palm pressed him down. He thought he detected tears in her eyes. An inner voice spoke with bitterness: At least she has enough heart left to weep.
Then he thought of the claim—the Ophir Mineralogical Com—
Com—
The last word eluded him.
What would become of his share?
He knew. The knowledge only sharpened his fear. I’ve given her exactly what she shouldn’t have—
“Don’t,” he said in a barely audible voice.
Amanda shook her head so hard, tears flew from her eyes. He wasn’t speaking loud enough.
She rested her cheek against his. How warm her lips felt through the tangle of his beard—
“What did you say to me, Jared?”
“Said—don’t take—the Ophir gold—”
“No, that belongs to your son.”
“But he’s—not worldly. He probably—won’t want—” He had no strength to say more.
“I’d never take it—you know that, Jared,” she said, grief jumbling the words together. “But if Jephtha will permit me, I—I’ll be the—the steward—of it—”
I know why. DON’T!
Pain shot upward through his neck into his head. A heavy haze obscured his sight of Amanda. He realized she was still on her knees, asking another question. Through the roaring in his ears, he finally deciphered part of it: “—attorneys.”
“What?” The sound emerged as a guttural. His lips moved again, slowly. “What?”
“The name of the family attorneys—Boston—can’t remember—”
Merciful God, how terribly he hurt! If only he’d drawn the long lot—never come to San Francisco—he might have seen his grandsons—
But not Amanda. Why were things never clear-cut? Why was there darkness and this unbearable pain? Why hadn’t he been given time to persuade her to abandon her scheme for—
“Jared, please—tell me the name!”
Don’t, Amanda. That’s not the way your father wanted you to live—
“Jared, you’re my blood kin. You’ve got to tell me!”
His lips jerked a whisper: “Ben—”
“What? Jared, try. Try!”
“Ben—” He spoke it as separate words. “Bow.”
“Benbow. Benbow—yes, oh God, that’s it!”
Was he wrong to tell her? The question savaged him as he arched his back and cried aloud, afraid because the lamplight had grown so dim.
Was he wrong? Was she only planning to do what needed to be done—?
No. It would harm her. He didn’t wa
nt her harmed. He loved her. He tried to tell her as she leaned her cheek against his again, their tears mingling.
“Jared, oh Jared, don’t die. We’re all that’s left to bring the Kents into the world again—”
Againagainagain wailed the echoes in his mind. The pain was lessening, the dark deepening. One last, clear thought eradicated his fear, now that he realized even fear wouldn’t help him: I have to go, Amanda. All of us have to go to see the elephant.
Chapter V
The Man Who Got
in the Way
i
THE TWO MOUNTED FIGURES WERE dwarfed by the immensity of the dripping spruces and pines. A gray haze, not so thick as fog and not quite rain, hid the slopes of the Sierras they’d last seen at sunset the preceding evening. The mules struggled over the rocky terrain. Israel, leading the way, frequently had to resort to quirting the animals.
Most of their gear was packed in bags that bulged from the flanks of his mule. His trousers bulged as well. His legs were still wrapped in bandages.
Although the mulatto’s burns could have been far worse, they’d nevertheless caused him considerable suffering. He’d never complained once—but the pain had shown on his face from the first day he’d hobbled out of his shanty and taken half a dozen steps before halting in the center of the backyard, sweating and drawing deep breaths.
Amanda had been watching from inside. Israel resumed walking in a moment or so, wincing each time he put weight on his feet but clearly determined to reach his goal. He’d finally come up the steps into the back room. Even though he’d made rapid progress since that first passage across the yard, walking was still difficult for him. Riding muleback was much less of a strain.
“Israel? How much farther, do you think?”
“I calculate a mile or so. Unless we took the wrong fork a while back.”
“I surely hope not. I’m worn-out.”
“So’m I. And the Sabbath’s supposed to be a day of rest!”
The shod hoofs of the mules rang against rocks on the barely discernible trail. From their right drifted the purling of water, a stream hidden by the murk. Only by copying down the most explicit directions at Sutter’s had they been able to wind their way up to this branch of the Feather.
Amanda’s statement to Israel was no exaggeration. They’d been on the way from San Francisco six days now, making slow progress because of their unfamiliarity with the country. It was a trip she’d decided they must take, hardship or not.
But she’d be thankful when they reached their destination. Winter dampness seeped up the sleeves of her fleece-lined coat and penetrated the fabric of the jeans trousers tucked into her stout boots. Her thighs hurt from the bouncing and scraping of the saddle. With her hair pinned up beneath a flop-brimmed wool hat, and the holster of her revolver showing beneath the bottom of her coat, Amanda hardly resembled a woman. Nor did she feel much like one.
Since the dark of Christmas night, a kind of daze had enveloped her. Even now, more than three weeks into January of the new year, 1850, she hadn’t entirely freed herself of despondency. To find Jared with such abruptness, then lose him just as abruptly, and all within a space of twenty-four hours, had been the profoundest sort of shock.
She had wept over his body for nearly an hour after the breath went out of it. It was Billy Beadle, she learned later, who finally pulled her away. She’d been hysterical. She didn’t remember.
She was ashamed she’d behaved that way. She’d always prided herself on her strength. But flesh could only bear so much, and that one Christmas Day had strained her physical and mental resources almost to the breaking point.
In the days that followed, she’d alternated between periods of depression whose only antidote was a stiff drink and the security of her bed, and other periods of almost frantic activity. During the latter, she tramped San Francisco with Billy, asking in the saloons and gambling halls for information about the identity of the men who had shot her cousin.
That the murderers were cronies of Felker’s she didn’t doubt. But the disbanded Hounds proved to be more than closemouthed. They were elusive. Every known member of the group had vanished suddenly, perhaps fearing civic wrath of the kind that had caused the destruction of the Hounds’ headquarters.
Amanda offered five hundred dollars for information, but got nothing more than a few useless scraps: this man had been seen playing cards with Felker; that one had accompanied him on a tour of the brothels. One man mentioned was at last identified as one of the pair who’d spoken to Billy on Christmas morning. He too was gone. The guilty had fled along with the innocent. Amanda soon realized she’d probably never locate the two who fired the fatal shots.
That wasn’t the only cause of her troubled state. Jared’s burial in San Francisco’s crude hillside cemetery had been an ordeal.
The mourners were few. Amanda, Israel, solemn-faced Billy, Felix, and Louis. Only their nearness, and her own vow not to surrender totally to despair had made it possible for her to endure the brief service. She’d hugged Louis to her side, her other hand clutching Jared’s fob medallion. As the earth rattled on the plank coffin, she closed her hand tighter and tighter on the medal’s edge, using the physical pain to deaden the pain of her heart and her mind—
Afterward, she found herself constantly wishing Jared had been given a few more days at her side. She remembered his eyes during their argument just before the pistol balls shattered the window. He had looked at her with surprise—sorrow—and finally with loathing—
Or did she only imagine that?
Accompanying her depressed feeling was an almost abnormal awareness of the hampering effects of age. She’d been conscious of gradual changes for several years. Her energy seemed to drain away before a day was half done. She was frequently wakeful at night. Routine tasks sometimes looked too formidable until she rested a bit. For a week or two, she dwelled on this deterioration in a morbid way, unable to stop thinking of the ultimate end of the process.
The heightened sense of her own mortality brought on intense self-questioning. However briefly, perhaps Jared had seen her more clearly than she saw herself. Perhaps her determination—the determination that had burst inside her like a long-smoldering fire when she first saw the Headley book—had become a ruinous influence.
She’d long believed it was right to plan and work and save in order to go back to Boston. She thought the Rents’ past and her son’s future demanded it.
Yet recalling Jared’s eyes and his dying plea for her to leave the gold alone, she doubted.
Was she letting the fury of wounded family pride warp her?
Or was she on the right course?
She didn’t know.
But when it struck her that she should at least look after Jared’s interests up in the diggings, she didn’t put the idea aside. Instead, she immediately informed Israel that they were going.
Louis had received word of the forthcoming trip in somber silence. To add to the gloom of the departure, she was worried about Bart McGill. The morning she and Israel set out, his ship was seven days overdue. He’d often spoken of hundred-knot winds that created an extreme hazard on the Cape Horn passage—
Now here she was, winding up a muddy track beneath sodden trees. She felt more than a little out of her element. How ridiculous for a woman almost forty-seven years old to go traipsing into the gold country like the very fools she’d once condemned.
Someone had to settle Jared’s affairs, though—
To whose benefit? was the immediate response of her questioning conscience.
Confused again, she took comfort in remembering what she’d once told Luis Cordoba about the Mandan’s vine to paradise. A human being did what seemed necessary and right, and left it to someone else to judge whether the sum of thousands of such decisions equaled a life lived with honor, or the lack of it. If her plan to recapture Kent’s, tainted as it was by her hatred of Stovall, was impure—why, so was life itself. Despite Jared’s warnings—and Bart’s?
??she would go ahead. She had in effect made that choice the moment she informed Israel about the journey.
A sudden change in the irregular clopping of the mules’ hoofs drew her from introspection. Ahead, between two great shoulders of granite, Israel had brought his mount to a halt.
“Guess we’ve arrived safe and sound,” he called. He pointed. “There’s civilization.”
Amanda grimaced. Just beyond the mulatto, a hanged man dangled from the branch of a tree.
The corpse twisted as the rope unwound slowly. The tree limb creaked. A young man, Amanda saw as she rode up beside Israel. A young man with a black beard and distended eyeballs and flesh discolored by death. She wondered what his crime had been—and what heaven’s verdict on his life would be. The earthly decision was unmistakable.
The two mules clopped by the hanging tree to a place where the trail again descended. Listening, she heard a fiddle scraping “Old Dan Tucker.” The camp itself was still invisible in the mist.
They rode on till they came to a crudely lettered sign on a post driven into the ground:
welcom to Hopeful
Another sign—rather, the sheared-off top section—lay discarded nearby. Amanda leaned forward to read what had been painted on the board:
War! War! ! War! ! !
The celebrated Bull-killing Bear
KIT CARSON will fight a Bull to the Death on Sunday the 15th inst. at 3 p.m.
The rest was gone. Somewhere ahead, a gun went off. Men shouted. Her shoulders felt heavy. Foolish old woman, she thought.
Then she recalled the fob medallion in her pocket, and sat up straight. Two more shots exploded. She said, “We may be sound, but who knows how safe?”
She unbuttoned her heavy coat; laid her right hand on the holstered revolver. Israel fell back to let her take the lead as the mules negotiated the muddy track that led toward lanterns now visible as smears of yellow in the murk.