Port O' Gold Part 13

"Bah!" cried Kemble, and stalked out muttering. Brannan laughed. "He's riding his hobby consistently. But he'll come down. So you've had no news from Benito?"

"No," said Inez gloomily. "Perhaps it is too soon. Perhaps he has had no luck to tell us of as yet. But I wish he would write just a line."

"Well, well, cheer up, my dear," said Brannan, rea.s.suringly. "Benito can take care of himself. Next week I return to my store in the gold lands, and I'll have an eye out for the lad. How does your work go, Adrian?"

"Poorly," answered Stanley. "Labor's too high to make money. Why, the common laborers who were satisfied with a dollar a day, now ask ten, and mechanics twenty. Even the Indians and the immigrants learn at once the crazy price of service."

"San Francisco. Port o' Gold!" apostrophized the Mormon gaily. He went on his way with a friendly wave of the hand. His steps were bent toward Alcalde Hyde's headquarters. Hyde had made many enemies by his set, opinionated ways. There was talk of putting Rev. Thaddeus Leavenworth in his place. But Brannan was by no means certain this would solve the problem. He missed Leidesdorff sadly. The latter's sudden death had left a serious hiatus. He was used to talking problems over with the genial, hospitable Dane, whose counsel was always placid, well considered.

Congress had failed to provide a government for California. San Francisco grumbled; more than all other towns she needed law.

Stevenson's regiment had been disbanded; its many irresponsibles, held previously in check by military discipline, now indulged their bent for lawlessness, unstinted. Everything was confusion. Gold-dust was the legal tender, but its value was unfixed. The government accepted it at $10 per ounce, with the privilege of redemption in coin.

The problem of land grants was becoming serious. There were more than hints of the alcalde's speculation; of illegal favors shown to friends, undue restrictions placed on others. Brannan shook his head as he climbed Washington street hill toward the alcalde's office. In the plaza stood a few mangy horses, too decrepit for sale to gold seekers.

Gambling houses and saloons ringed the square and from these proceeded drunken shouts, an incessant click of poker chips; now and then a burst of song.

The sound of a shot swung him swiftly about. It came from the door of a noisy and crowded mart of chance recently erected, but already the scene of many quarrels. The blare of music which had issued from it swiftly ceased. There was a momentary silence; then a sound of shuffling feet, of whispering voices.

A man ran out into the street as if the devil were after him; another followed, staggering, a pistol in his hand. He fired one shot and then collapsed with horrid suddenness at Brannan's feet. The other man ran into Portsmouth Square, vaulted to the saddle of a horse and spurred furiously away.

Brannan stooped over the fallen figure. It was that of a brawny, bearded man, red-shirted, booted, evidently a miner. That he was mortally wounded his gazing eyes gave evidence. Yet such was his immense vitality that he muttered, clutching at his throat--staving off dissolution with the mighty pa.s.sionate vehemence of some dominating purpose. Brannan bent to listen.

"Write," he gasped, and Brannan, with an understanding nod, obeyed. "I bequeath my claim ... south fork ... American River ... fifty feet from end of Lone Pine's shadow ... sunset ... to my pard ... Benito Wind--"

His voice broke, but his eyes watched Brannan's movements as the latter wrote. Dying hands grasped paper, pencil ... signed a scrawling signature, "Joe Burthen." Then the head dropped back, rolled for a moment and lay still.

CHAPTER XVIII

NEWS OF BENITO

Brannan turned from contemplation of the dead to find himself surrounded by a curious, questioning group. A bartender, coatless, red-faced, grasping in one hand a heavy bung-starter as if it were a weapon of defense; a gambler, sleeves rolled up, five cards clutched in nervous fingers; half a dozen sailors, vaqueros, a ragged miner or two and several shortskirted young women of the cla.s.s that had recently drifted into the hectic night-life of San Francisco. All were whispering excitedly. Some of the men, with a show of reverence, removed their hats.

"Do you know who did this?" Brannan asked.

"I saw it," cried one of the women. She was dressed as a Spanish dancer and in one hand held a tambourine and castanets. "They fight," she gave a little smirk of vanity, "about me."

Brannan recognized her as Rosa Terranza, better known as Ensenada Rose.

She had been the cause of many rivalries and quarrels.

"Dandy" Carter, the gambler, let down his sleeves and thrust the cards into his pocket.

"Rose was dealin' faro," he explained, "and this galoot here bucks the game.... He lose. You un'erstan'. He lose a lot o' dust ... as much as forty ounces. Then--just like that--he stops." The gambler snapped his fingers. "He says, 'My little gal; my partner! G.o.d Almighty! I'm a-wrongin' them!' He starts to go, but Rose acts mighty sympathetic and he tells her all about the kid."

"Hees little girl," the dancer finished. "I say we dreenk her health together, and he tell me of the senorita. He draw a picture of his claim with trees and river and a mountain--ver' fine, like an artist. And he say, 'You come and marry me and be a mother to my child'." She laughed grimly. "He was ver' much drunk ... and then--"

"That Sydney Duck comes in," said Dandy Carter. "He sits down at the table with 'em. They begins to quarrel over Rose. And the fust I knows there was a gun went off; the girl yells and the other man vamooses, with this feller staggerin' after."

"He shot from under the table," a sailor volunteered. "'Twas murder.

Where I come from they'd a-hanged him for't."

"But who was he?" Brannan asked the question in another form. The girl and Dandy Carter looked at one another, furtively. "I--don't know his name," the girl said, finally.

"Don't any of you?" Brannan's tone was searching. But it brought no answer. Several shook their heads. Ensenada Rose shivered. "It's cold. I go back in," she said, and turned from them. Brannan stopped her with a sudden gesture. "Wait," he ordered. "Where's the map ... the paper this man showed you ... of his mine?"

Ensenada Rose's eyes looked into Brannan's, with a note of challenge her chin went up. "Quien sabe?" she retorted. Brannan watched the slender, graceful figure vanish through the lighted door. In her trail the gambler and bartender followed. Presently a burst of music issued from the groggery; a tap-tap-tap of feet in rhythm to the click of castanets.

Already the tragedy was forgotten. Brannan found himself face to face with the sailor. "I'll help you carry him--somewhere," he said. He raised the dead man's shoulders from the ground, and Brannan, following his suggestion, took the other end of the grim burden, which they bore to the City Hotel. Brannan, in the presence of Alcalde Hyde, searched Burthen's clothing for the plan which Rosa had described. But they did not find it; only a buckskin bag with a few grains of gold-dust at the bottom, a jackknife, a plug of tobacco, a scratched daguerreotype of a young girl with corkscrew curls and friendly eyes.

Next evening Nathan Spear chanced in to see the Stanleys. "Sam Brannan's gone," he told them. "Said he'd let you know about Benito. And here's a letter from Alcalde Colton of Monterey--who's at the gold-fields now."

"Has he seen my brother?" Inez questioned, eagerly.

Spear began to read: "Young Benito Windham has been near here for a fortnight. I am told, without much luck, He had to sell his horse and saddle, for the price of living is enormous; finally he paired off with a man named Burthen--strapping, bearded Kansan with a little daughter, about 17. They struck a claim, and Burthen's on the way to San Francisco for supplies. I'll tell you more when I have seen the lad and had a talk with him. The girl, I understand, was keeping house for them. A pretty, wistful little thing, they tell me, so I'd better keep an eye on Friend Benito."

"Have you seen this Burthen? Is he here?" asked Stanley.

"He was robbed--and killed last night at the Eldorado."

"Sanctissima!" cried the girl, and crossed herself. "Then the little one's an orphan. And Benito--"

"Her guardian, no doubt."

Spear laughed. "He writes that a miner gave $24 in gold-dust for a box of seidlitz powders; another paid a dollar a drop for laudanum to cure his toothache. Flour is $400 per barrel, whisky $20 for a quart bottle, and sugar $4 a pound. 'It's a mad world, my masters,' as Shakespeare puts it, but a golden one. By and by this wealth will flow into your coffers down in San Francisco. Just now there is little disturbance, but it is bound to come. Several robberies and shootings have already taken place. There is one man whom I'd call an evil genius--a gambler, a handsome ruffian and a dead shot, so they tell me. It's rumored that he has a fancy for the little Burthen girl. Lord save her! Perhaps you know the rascal, for he hails, I understand, from San Francisco, one Alexander McTurpin."

The three surveyed each other in a startled silence.

"Benito and he are sure to quarrel," Inez whispered. "Madre Dolores!

What can we do?"

"Perhaps I'd better run up to the mines," said Adrian. "I've my own affair, you know, to settle with this fellow."

"No, no, you must not," cried his wife in quick alarm.

Spear smiled. "I wouldn't fret," he spoke a.s.suringly. "Sam's gone up to see this fellow ... on a little business of his own."

CHAPTER XIX

THE VEILED WOMAN

Several months went by with no news from Benito. James Burthen had been buried in the little graveyard on a hill overlooking the bay. And that ended the matter in so far as San Francisco was concerned.

In the Alta California, a consolidation of two rival papers, appeared a brief notice chronicling the death of an unidentified miner, whose a.s.sa.s.sin, also nameless, had escaped. Ensenada Rose, described as an exotic female of dubious antecedents and still more suspicious motives, had left the Eldorado on the morning after the shooting "for parts unknown." She was believed to hold some "key to the tragic mystery which it was not her purpose to reveal."

But killings were becoming too familiar in the growing town to excite much comment. San Francisco's population had quadrupled in the past half year and men were streaming in by the hundreds from all quarters of the globe. Flimsy bunk-houses were hastily erected, springing up as if by magic overnight. Men stood in long lines for a chance at these sorry accommodations and the often sorrier meals which a score of enterprising culinary novices served at prices from one dollar up. Lodging was $30 per month and at this price men slept on naked boards like sailors in a forecastle, one above the other. Often half a dozen pairs of blankets served a hundred sleepers. For as soon as a guest of these palatial hostelries began to snore the enterprising landlord stripped his body of its covering and served it to a later arrival.

"If the town grows much faster it will be a tragedy," remarked Adrian to James Lick that afternoon. Lick had bought a city lot at Montgomery and Jackson streets and had already sold a portion of it for $30,000. He was a believer in San Francisco's future, and at San Jose his flour mill, once contemptuously called "Lick's folly," was grinding grain which at present prices brought almost its weight in gold.