3
“Ah! que bonitos
Son los enanos
Los chiquititos
Y mejicanos.”
It 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.