Past All Dishonor (4 page)

I won a little too, and when I bought her a little gold bracelet with a ruby in it, that was turned in by a woman having bad luck, she kissed it, and took me out in the street and kissed me, and when we went in the next place didn’t gamble any more, but just stood by and watched me. One thing, though, seemed funny. Every place we went, we had hardly started to play before somebody would be alongside of her, whispering things in her ear, and three or four times I stepped in between and asked what they wanted. The last place, it was a slim, sunburned fellow with a little silky mustache. But when I stepped in between and asked him what he wanted, I was drawn to him like a breeching was behind me pulling me along, because he stepped back and something told me he had a gun and I had to keep close to him because my only chance was to hit him before he drew. The place stopped gambling like it had suddenly been froze, and he kept going backward and I stayed right with him, my belly almost touching his. But in one way I had the best of it. I could tell when he was going to bump the wall, and when he did I let him have it, right on the chin. He went down and I banged his head on the floor and felt his pockets.

When I had the gun I stuck it in my pocket and pitched a ten-dollar gold piece at the proprietor. “Will you have that mess cleaned up?”

“I’ll attend to it, sir.”

Back at the table she was looking at me with eyes as big as moon agates, but when I started to play again she hooked her hand in my arm and took me outside. She flagged another cab, and when we got in she kept holding tight on to my arm. When we were in the shack she took me in her arms and held me tight and began taking off my coat and hat and necktie. “I just love it you hit him for me.”

“The dirty son of a bitch.”

“I was so scared he’d shoot you.”

“Me too, but I got him.”

But later on, when it was just getting light, and I said I was going to give her a wedding ring a half inch wide so the bastards would know she was my wife and let her alone, she raised up and looked at me so long I knew it was the same old thing on her mind, whatever it was, that had set her off yesterday. And in the half dark her eyes always got so much bigger and blacker than they seemed in the daytime that it gave me a creepy feeling up my back, because I knew they said something I didn’t understand. “Roger, you got no more idea than a June bug what I am, have you?”

“What do you mean, Morina?”

She burst out crying, and it was deep, ugly crying that shook her way down inside, so I knew that whatever it was about, it was terrible to her. I took her in my arms, but when I woke up she was gone, and so were her things and her trunk and my boat. It wasn’t till three or four o’clock in the afternoon that a boy came rowing across with it, with a note. It said she had to leave and good-bye and she loved me.

I addressed my envelopes, put in my dispatches, and wrote Annapolis a note about the battalion of recruits that had started downriver that morning on a transport, bound for San Francisco. Then I rowed across, mailed my stuff, came back, and ate my supper. But when I brought a chair outside and sat down to wait till it was time to go to bed, I thought I’d die. Every boat that went clunking by reminded me of her, every frog in the tule patch made me pine for her. I tried to tell myself I was glad she was gone, that she was a thief, that she could only mean trouble and I ought to be dancing a hornpipe I was rid of her. It was no use. Around nine I put on my gray suit and white shirt again and rowed over to the city, looking for her. First I went to the restaurants, thinking she might still be at dinner. Then I went to the hotels. I didn’t ask for her by name. I was afraid to, for fear they’d been notified to watch out for her, and it didn’t look smart to, because she’d know better than to give herself away. I would go up to the desk, spin the register around, and start looking over the names, figuring I could spot her if she had come in that day. If they said anything, I told them I’d heard that a bunch had started out from my home town for the West, and I didn’t know who they were, but could spot my friends if there were any. That looked harmless and I didn’t have any trouble. Then I went to the gambling halls, which was where I really expected to find her. I visited every roulette wheel, but what I found was nothing.

“
Ah! que bonitos

Son los enanos

Los chiquititos

Y mejicanos.”

I
T WAS THREE NIGHTS
later, and I’d looked until I was sick of looking, and found there was kind of a gang that went from one place to another, first the bunch of army officers that were all over the town, then the losers that wanted to change their luck, then the girls that hooked a man and wanted to take him some place else so nobody knew how they got him, and then these here Mexicans that play and sing and pass the hat for coppers. There were two or three bunches, but the one with this song had a leader named Paddy, that was short for Padillo, and he was a bandy-legged little man with white teeth and a funny grin. He sang the song slow, so I could copy it in my notebook, and then I asked him: “But why do you stoop down when you sing this song?”

“Estoop? How estoop?”

“You don’t call that standing up, do you?”

“No estoop—eshrivel! Thees song, is about liddle
enanos
—how you say—dwarfidos! Smalle pipple. So, sing song, make me small!”

He sang it again, and the other four joined in, and the song was pretty but the singing wasn’t, which was why I wanted the words, so I could learn them and sing it to myself. So he kind of apologized for it: “Me, am really a miner. I sing in
mariachi
while my brodder, he get married, bring liddle
muchacha
wife from San Mateo.”

“Well, I knew you weren’t any singer.” That got a shout from the others, and after a while they said I should come up to their shack for supper, but not just yet, because they had quite a little to do before we could sit down to eat. So when the lights began to come on he and I strolled down to my boat and started upriver, but we hardly started out before somebody was calling him from a boat off the embarcadero. We pulled in, and the other four were there, and the idea was they were going to help themselves to a fish from a barge market that had live boxes alongside, in the river. The trouble was it was such a whopping big fish they couldn’t handle it, and on account me being so big they thought I could do it. They took the top off a box and I stuck my hand in and maybe it was a fish but it felt more like a bear trap. I tried again, and again after that, and I was blood up to my elbow before I pulled it out, and it had hold of my thumb, and I saw it was an ocean crab as big around as a dinner plate. They quit laughing when I slung it at them, and a couple of them went overboard to get out of its way, but they hollered they knew I was no fisherman, and that evened it up for the guy about the singing, and from then on we were friends. Soon as Paddy got them quieted down so no wharf guards would get in it they used a bull’s-eye lantern on another float and a big salmon practically jumped in the boat. I had eaten two pieces, and was all full of their tortillas and hot stuff, before I remembered this was stealing too, and if it was wrong for her, why was it just funny for me?

“Rodrigo.”

“Yes, Paddy?”

We were lying in front of my shack, where he had rowed back with me to have a look at my rocker in the morning and maybe give me some tips, and I’d told him a little about Morina. Nothing about the money, or how I’d got her off the boat, but plenty about how she’d left me, and how I’d been looking for her. “Rodrigo, she no estay in Sacramento.”

“How do you figure that out?”

“At estimbo, nobody meet, you say?”

“Not that I saw. She said her family’s dead.”

“And you no come, she meant estop in hotel?”

“That was the idea.”

“She go to Nevada. I show you why.”

We went in by the fire, and I got him pen, ink, and paper, and he drew a map of California, a better map than I could have drawn, a map that looked like something in a book. He put all the rivers in, and showed how they lead up from the Golden Gate, first the Sacramento, leading up to the mouth of the San Joaquin, then bending around and leading up to the northern part of the state, then the San Joaquin with twenty little feeder rivers, leading down to southern California, and showed how the state would never need any railroads, with steamboats to haul you any place you want to go, and even the few railroads it has are starving to death on account of no business. “Now, Rodrigo, you listen. Here is a girl. If she want Stockton, she take boat to Stockton. If she want Aliso, she take boat to Aliso. Any place in California, she take estimbo straight there. But she want Nevada, first she estimbo San Francisco to Sacramento, then she change to estimcar.”

“What’s she holding out on me?”

“Maybe her business roulette. Maybe she deal faro, big Virginia City place, no want to tell you, you think she is no nice girl. You go there, you find.”

“She’s not here, that I’m certain.”

“You go, write me, I come. Thees gold here, all wash out.”

That stuff he had figured out about the rivers and all wasn’t new to me in any way, because I’d ridden the boats myself. Why I’d been shying off it was that I wasn’t supposed to go to Nevada. I was supposed to stay in Sacramento and do my duty exactly the same as a soldier. I tried to tell myself it was not like being a soldier, that I ought to go to Nevada anyway, to see what was going on there. But all that got me was I woke up one night with the word
deserter
whispering in my ear.

You go by the cars to Folsom, and from there on over by stage, and I never saw such a road in my life. The way it’s built, with grades and cuts and width and sprinkling carts wetting it down where-ever it’s a little dusty, you’d think it was built for Bragg’s army. And from what was moving on it you’d think it was being used by Bragg’s army, too. There was every kind of wagon you ever heard of, from prairie schooners to oxcarts to hayricks to Conestogas, besides an article I never saw until now, and even after you see it you’re not sure you believe it. It’s a Washoe wagon, that runs in three sections coupled together with three-foot tongues, all twelve wheels higher than a man’s head, and the freight piled as high as a two-story house. They were run by different companies, each company with a different color, so of course the mules had tassels on their bridles the company’s color, and when you saw twenty of them hustling a wagon along, all matched for color and size, all slicked up till you could see your face in their hide, all with harness oiled black and buckles polished yellow, all with sleigh bells jingling over their hames, and all with a muleteer in the saddle, cracking his whip and singing like hell, it was a sight. There were stagecoaches in a trot going uphill and a dead run going down, with drunks hollering inside and messengers outside taking potshots at bears. There were thousands of sheep, cattle, and pigs going on foot, and when they met mules it was war, but they gave what they got, I’ll say that for them. There were hombres on horseback and occasionally one on foot, all headed for the Washoe country, all after those silver bricks they were digging out of Mount Davidson.

My coach was an Overland, and we’d stop at one of the stables that ran for a mile outside of every town and change horses, then jog in to the hotel to pick up passengers and let them off. So I had two chances to get down and look around, specially at coaches going by on the road, to see if she might be in one. But all I saw was sports and drunks and women with paint on. I stopped for the night in Carson, made Virginia the next day, and put up at the International. Then I kept on like I had in Sacramento, looking in hotels, saloons, dance halls, and gambling places, every place I could think of.

In a bar that night a Union recruiting sergeant went up to a big, good-looking man at the bar and began to talk about signing him up. The man listened awhile and then he turned around and said: “How many times have you give me this spiel?”

“Three or four times, I guess.”

“And how many times have I told you no?”

“Jack, there’s a war going on.”

“Then here’s something that maybe you don’t know: I’m paying for your goddam war, or at least a big part of it, with this silver mine I’ve got, and if you haven’t been told about it, suppose you stop by my office tomorrow and I’ll show you a letter from your own Secretary of the Treasury begging me to keep my output up and assuring me that I’m doing more to help win this war right where I am than I would be in command of five regiments.”

“All right, Governor, now I know.”

“That was when I volunteered.”

“No need to get sore.”

“Have a drink, and from now on let me alone.”

I pricked up my ears at that, and next day when I inquired around I found it was all true and everybody in town seemed to know about it. The silver from the Comstock Lode went down in a steady stream to the mint in San Francisco, and gold and paper came back. It wasn’t just thousands, it was millions and hundreds of millions. I knew I had found out something then, something that would make this trip all right, even to Annapolis. I packed and caught the night stage for Carson, so I’d lose no time getting back to my post and reporting about it.

Going out of Virginia, we passed the big omnibus that ran between Virginia and Gold Hill, a place about a mile south, and out of the back door I saw the flutter of a skirt, black silk with white dots. I didn’t ask my money back, or even wait. I had the driver stop, get out my carpetbag, and let me down. Then I ran after the omnibus, carrying my bag. At C and Union it stopped and she got out. I called, but she didn’t hear me and turned the corner. When I got there I was just in time to see her turning into D, down the hill. I ran down, and saw her going into a house. I ran up to it, and had my hand on the bell to pull it before I noticed the light over the door. But then I knew why her eyes made me feel so funny. It was red.

“Y
OU BEEN TO BILOXI’S
lately?”

“To hell with Biloxi. Her place stinks, her beer stinks, and she stinks. She’s got no girls is her trouble. I’m sticking with the Twins. They take your money, but you get something for it. They’ve got the girls and they’ve got the sports, specially the big ones. What Biloxi’s got is nothing.”