then that her father appeared in the doorway and the Anglo drew and fired four times in rapid succession. Her father fell back through the doorway with a bullet in his forehead and his blood arced high across the old wooden lintel.
She didn't tell us what she felt just then and we didn't ask. There hardly seemed any need. It was the night before we crossed the Colorado and her face glowing in the light from the campfire had the look of something ancient wrought from carved and polished stone. We ate beans and salt beef and bread and rattlesnake and it was the first she'd really talked to us and even Mother was mostly silent for a change.
She said she asked the Anglo his name and he told her. She said, "Take your chickens and go, Paddy Ryan." And he said, "Thanks, we will."
They got down off their horses and that was when they had them first, right there among the chickens in the yard.
TWO
John Charles Hart and I met in 1848, the year the Mexican war ended, in what later would be called Arizona, in a grown-overnight booming little town called Gable's Ferry just across the Colorado River from the California gold fields north and Mexico to the south. I was drunk and barely twenty-one and Hart was playing cards with two other men in the Little Fanny Saloon. I'd seen him in there nearly every night but we'd never spoken a word to one another.
Were it not for the gold at Sutter's Mill that January neither the Little Fanny nor the town for that matter would have had reason to exist. It certainly wasn't Mexico that drew the bulk of those pilgrims. But there was a narrows in the river there that made it a natural place for a ferry so an old roughneck named Gable had built one and manned it with his shotgun and a pair of well-trained dogs. Just a primitive barge-and-cable affair that you knew the river would swallow whole come flood time but for now it did what it was supposed to do and word had got around.
I'd been there pretty nearly from its inception. I'd seen barrels of whiskey and billiard tables come in and fancy wear and ready-made clothing, card sharks and whores and trappers and tradesmen and miners pouring through each day. Within a month or so we had a makeshift saloon and whorehouse, a dry goods store and another saloon, a stable and a grocery. Everything in fact except a church, a schoolhouse and a jail.
Though most would maintain that only the last was needed.
Prices had gone mad. Across the river inexperienced miners were pulling a hundred twenty-five dollars a day and everyone knew it. At Gable's Ferry you could pitch a tent, set some cots inside and charge a dollar a night lodging and plenty of men were willing to pay it. Old rusty mess-pork left over from the war and dried-out worm-eaten apples could fetch as much as seventy-five cents a pound. Over at Reardon's Dry Goods Store a good canteen would cost you ten dollars silver. By contrast a whore at the Little Fanny went for a dollar.
I didn't know what in hell I was doing there.
I was making decent money with my dispatches on the reconstruction and the occasional gold-dust yarn to the New York Sun but it wasn't the steady income I'd had during the War — when the byline Marion Bell appeared in the paper on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The money from my father's estate in Massachusetts was not going to last forever. At Gable's Ferry prices I was drinking that up at an alarming rate. Trying to forget what I'd seen in Mexico City more than anything else I imagine.
My paper awhile back had run a cartoon of General Winfield Old Fuss 'n Feathers Scott in full ceremonial uniform holding a sword above his head and perched atop a pile of human skulls. That about said it all.
Playing five-card draw that night were Hart, an old German miner named Heilberger and George Donaldson. I barely knew Heilberger but rumor had it that Donaldson was a horse-thief and a card-cheat and the night would bear out at least the last of these rumors.
I was sitting behind Hart
She didn't tell us what she felt just then and we didn't ask. There hardly seemed any need. It was the night before we crossed the Colorado and her face glowing in the light from the campfire had the look of something ancient wrought from carved and polished stone. We ate beans and salt beef and bread and rattlesnake and it was the first she'd really talked to us and even Mother was mostly silent for a change.
She said she asked the Anglo his name and he told her. She said, "Take your chickens and go, Paddy Ryan." And he said, "Thanks, we will."
They got down off their horses and that was when they had them first, right there among the chickens in the yard.
TWO
John Charles Hart and I met in 1848, the year the Mexican war ended, in what later would be called Arizona, in a grown-overnight booming little town called Gable's Ferry just across the Colorado River from the California gold fields north and Mexico to the south. I was drunk and barely twenty-one and Hart was playing cards with two other men in the Little Fanny Saloon. I'd seen him in there nearly every night but we'd never spoken a word to one another.
Were it not for the gold at Sutter's Mill that January neither the Little Fanny nor the town for that matter would have had reason to exist. It certainly wasn't Mexico that drew the bulk of those pilgrims. But there was a narrows in the river there that made it a natural place for a ferry so an old roughneck named Gable had built one and manned it with his shotgun and a pair of well-trained dogs. Just a primitive barge-and-cable affair that you knew the river would swallow whole come flood time but for now it did what it was supposed to do and word had got around.
I'd been there pretty nearly from its inception. I'd seen barrels of whiskey and billiard tables come in and fancy wear and ready-made clothing, card sharks and whores and trappers and tradesmen and miners pouring through each day. Within a month or so we had a makeshift saloon and whorehouse, a dry goods store and another saloon, a stable and a grocery. Everything in fact except a church, a schoolhouse and a jail.
Though most would maintain that only the last was needed.
Prices had gone mad. Across the river inexperienced miners were pulling a hundred twenty-five dollars a day and everyone knew it. At Gable's Ferry you could pitch a tent, set some cots inside and charge a dollar a night lodging and plenty of men were willing to pay it. Old rusty mess-pork left over from the war and dried-out worm-eaten apples could fetch as much as seventy-five cents a pound. Over at Reardon's Dry Goods Store a good canteen would cost you ten dollars silver. By contrast a whore at the Little Fanny went for a dollar.
I didn't know what in hell I was doing there.
I was making decent money with my dispatches on the reconstruction and the occasional gold-dust yarn to the New York Sun but it wasn't the steady income I'd had during the War — when the byline Marion Bell appeared in the paper on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. The money from my father's estate in Massachusetts was not going to last forever. At Gable's Ferry prices I was drinking that up at an alarming rate. Trying to forget what I'd seen in Mexico City more than anything else I imagine.
My paper awhile back had run a cartoon of General Winfield Old Fuss 'n Feathers Scott in full ceremonial uniform holding a sword above his head and perched atop a pile of human skulls. That about said it all.
Playing five-card draw that night were Hart, an old German miner named Heilberger and George Donaldson. I barely knew Heilberger but rumor had it that Donaldson was a horse-thief and a card-cheat and the night would bear out at least the last of these rumors.
I was sitting behind Hart
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