I didn’t trust myself to believe him. But it is true that the town was to be blessed with luck; and some of it was even to rub off on me.
9
I thought if Zar’s mind was a pony it would win the race. I wanted nothing to do with his happy expectations. But every time something else came up to justify them he would laugh at me, saying: “Wal, frand, am I crazy?” Until I had to go with the signs and tell him one day: “No, by God, Zar, you’re saner than me.”
Now you have to season the talk of a digger with a lot of salt. A digger’s a man who’ll look for pay dirt twenty years of days with just as much fervor and high hope the last day as the first. Why any time you’re near one you can hear his song: “I’m savin’ my money Jack, and as soon as I have me a grubstake, it’s goodbye to the Company. I’m off to Montany and find me that vugg of pure gold! I know where it is, I know the spot Jack, it’s jest a sittin’ and a waitin’ fer me …” And he buys Jack a drink on it; and they both believe it. I didn’t want to put stock in any rumor come down from the camp.
But there was a stamping mill gone up, that was a fact. Alf told me it too: a town called Number Six and it was maybe fifteen miles dead east. Angus Mcellhenny told me something else: the Company shipped on the toll roads leading west from the camp, so it didn’t pay them to cart anything but high-grade ore. But if they cut a road down to us they could get to the new mill across the flats and pay no toll to anyone. And they could make their low grade pay off as well.
The way Angus spoke the idea made sense. And then one morning, early, a man rode down from the lodes and he had a string of mules trailing him. I’d never seen him before but I knew who he was, I’d heard him cursed too many times not to know him, Archie D. Brogan, the mine boss. He had pale-blue eyes in a face of fat, he was much too beefy for the miner’s garb he wore. He sat around drinking and jittery until Alf Moffet drove in with the stage, and then we knew why Brogan had come: three men in black tailored suits and derby hats stepped out and he nearly fell all over himself giving them a proper welcome. They were small men and they stepped precisely in our dirt, but they were the directors from the East and their engineer; so we cheered as Brogan put them on the mules and took them, bouncing, up the trail to the lodes.
“I shall build a hotel!” Zar cried after them and he even hugged Isaac Maple in his joy.
A few days later the Company men came back down to meet a special coach. And while waiting they fanned themselves with their derbies. “I never seen men with such white hands,” Adah said in a whisper, “why it’s indecent!” They talked to nobody, only asking Zar, at one point, if he carried wine. Zar was anguished because he didn’t, and when they rode off he shook his fist after them: “I shall build a hotel!” It was a vow this time and somehow it made the prospect surer.
Not long afterwards we had a visit from a man owned a public house along the toll road leading west from the camp, and he looked us over carefully and measured out a lot for himself next to Swede’s wagon; and without my saying a word he put a ten-dollar gold piece in my hand — to hold it — and rode away saying he’d be back.
Well you see all this was a bloom in the heart, a springing of hope, and even when I tried to tell myself it was just like the afternoon sun — so cozying on the face, like a warm hand, that a man could dream of anything and expect it — even when I pressed myself with doubts, the hope squeezed out like a nectar. And as I sat with Molly another evening under the sky, with a new moon making us shadows to each other, I talked so easy I almost didn’t know myself; and she talked with me and it was as if we were two new people sprung from our old pains.
“Molly I swear I feel good times coming. The life here is working up. They’ll have to cut a road to get those Concord freighters through here. And to do that they’ll need lots of people, they’ll have lots of jobs!”
“I hated those three. Stepping around like they was afraid to get their feetsies dirty.”
“We don’t have ever to see ’em again, they just came out here to make up their minds—”
“Money for their flouncy city ladies—”
“Lord, what do we care! We’re going on the map!”
“You really think?”
“I know it. It’s our turn.”
“I am living better now than Avery ever gave me, I’ll say it Blue.”
“Molly I mean to make good for the three of us.”
“You always fancied Flo over me.”
“You were so forbidding—”
“I can’t forget him. I see him in my sleep.”
“If I can be alright in your eyes I’ll be alright in my own.”
“I keep hearing his voice: ‘I’ll be back,’ he says. It’s what he said to me.”
“Well then, if that’s so, I doubt it but if it’s so, if he does come back then we’ll be ready for him. We’ll all be ready.”
She was quiet for a minute. “We’ve both suffered,” she said. And I was holding her hand in my hands. It was enough to start me keeping the books again.
No, maybe I’m not telling it right. When I dipped my pen in the ink it was not just for celebration, it was something that had to be done. Zar and Isaac both came to me to claim frontage on the street once they saw Jonce Early’s ten-dollar gold piece. What other way was there to fix people’s rights? I don’t think I was such a fool as to be blinded by my feelings. We had bunks to sleep on and another room with a door, and they were good nights as we lay in one bunk, hugging like the two poor married creatures we were — she had the shyness of a bride, she was so becoming, I never knew such joy. But wasn’t this time of our conjunction the time of Jimmy’s dismay? And the sight of her smiles at me, like the closed door at night, a greater reason for his hate? She might waver and relent but it only fixed him more. He stayed out all the day long, I didn’t see him from one meal to the next. He wouldn’t talk to me and when I’d catch sight of him outside as I’d be going about my business he’d slip away fast like he hadn’t heard me call. How good could it have been for two of us when there were three?
The pages are full of dealings, I see the entries, all through the year the street grew up and you can see how right here on the lines. I wrote each person’s name and what he owned. I put down how Molly had all rights to me as wife and Jimmy as son. I wrote out the claims. Jonce Early came back to build a public house where he’d staked out. A smith named Roebuck figured there would be plenty of horses by and by and digging tools to fix, and so he set up his forge. Another man — I can’t read his name, I never did hear him called — rode in with a wagon of coal he would sell in sacks when the winter came. More names with each passing months, I remember I marveled at it; hearing of our prospects, these people were coming to settle, it was common enough sense, but I always had the feeling somebody had certified Hard Times as a place in the world and that’s why it was happening.
Here it shows how my commissions rose on the Express business. Here is the marriage notice of Bert and the little girl — he could write, but all she did was put a mark down. Now that tells a lot, the minute I began to keep the records I was the natural party to every complaint, legal or otherwise. I used to feel I was a horsebreaker and each day one of a remuda I had to cut down to size. For several Saturdays running Miss Adah, Mae and Jessie kept Bert happy by shunting only the drunkest and least able customers to the Chinese girl — so that all she had to do was lead them to a room, take their money and leave them sleeping there. Bert had a good length of wood near his hand while he tended the bar and he was ready to jump out and use it if he thought his sweetheart was having trouble. The ladies didn’t want that; and they suffered too whenever any of Bert’s digging friends made a joke of him for quitting his job at the lodes. “Like to be around the stuff, Bert?” someone would call out — and the strain just got to be too much for the ladies. They came to me as a delegation and elected me to break the news to Zar. “You can gentle him to it, Blue,” Miss Adah said, “it won’t be as bad as if he finds out for himself.”