And they cheered up, for they were a jolly, carefree lot that went to California that year, with their wagons piled any old how with all sorts of rubbish that they thought might prove useful at the diggings, like patent tents and mackintosh boats (‘Gold-seekers, take heed! Our rubber boats and shelters are unsurpassed!! You cannot face the chill of the gold rivers without a rubber suit!!!’) and water-purifiers and amazingly fangled machinery for washing gold dust. And they didn’t sing any hymns about milk and honey and Canaan, either; no, sir, it was a very different anthem, plunked out on a banjo by a young chap in a striped vest, with his girl dancing impromptu on a packing-case, and everyone thumping the tailboards – I daresay you know the tune well enough, although it was new then, but I’ll be bound you don’t know the words the Forty-Niners sang:
I’ll scrape the mountains clean, my boys,
I’ll drain the rivers dry,
A pocketful of rocks bring home,
Susannah, don’t you cry!
Oh, Californey!
That’s the land for me,
I’m off to Sacramento
With my wash-bowl on my knee!
(omnes, fortissimo)
Oh, Susannah, don’t you cry for me,
I’m off to Sacramento
With my wash-bowl on my knee!
It was a raucous, ranting thing, but when I hear it now in imagination it’s just a ghostly drift down the wind, fading into a whisper. But it was hearty enough then, and we sang it all the way down to Council Grove.
I promised not to do a Gregg or Parkman, but I ought to tell you something of how we travelled.11 When we camped at night, we set guards; Wootton insisted, but I was all for it anyway, for you must do things right from the start. Susie and I slept in the carriage, which was as comfortable as Owens had promised, and the tarts slept in two of the wagons close at hand. The drivers and guards had a couple of tents, although some preferred to doss down in the open. At breakfast and supper, and at the noon halt, Susie and I were waited on by her nigger servant, the tarts ate in their own wagons, and the guards messed at a discreet distance – oh, we were a proper little democracy, I can tell you. I suggested that we might have Grattan over for supper one night, since he was a bit of a gentleman, or had been, but Susie wouldn’t hear of it.
‘They’re our work-folk,’ says she, holding a chicken leg with her pinkie cocked, and guzzling down the burgundy (now I saw why we’d brought such an unconscionable lot of it). ‘If we encourage familiarity, they’ll just presume, an’ you know where that leads – you finish up ’avin’ to call in the militia to put ’em in their place, like New York.12 Anyway, that Nugent-Thingummy looks a right sly smart alec to me; whatever ’e may say about lookin’ after my wenches, an’ keepin’ them randy guards at arm’s length, I’m glad I’ve got Marie an’ Stephanie on the cue vee.’
‘What’s this?’ says I, for I took a fatherly interest in the welfare of our fair charges.
‘Marie an’ Stephanie,’ says Susie, ‘would rat on their own mothers, an’ the other little trollops know it. So there’ll be no ’anky-panky – or if there is, I’ll soon ’ear of it. An’ Gawd ’elp the backslider; she won’t be able to sit down between ’ere an’ Sacramento, I promise you that.’
So two of the tarts were Susie’s pet spies, were they? That was useful to know – and lucky I’d found out before I’d done anything indiscreet. I could foresee circumstances where that knowledge might be useful.
One acquaintance that I did cultivate, though, on the quiet trek to Council Grove, was Uncle Dick Wootton. He was a strange case; after our first meeting he’d hardly said a word to me for days, and I wondered was he sulking, but I soon discovered it was just a pensive shyness; he kept very much to himself with new acquaintances, although he could be genial and even garrulous when he got to know you. He was younger than I’d thought, and quite presentable when he’d shaved. However, down to Council Grove he had no proper duties anyway; Grattan and I set the guards, and halts and starts seemed to determine themselves; when anything out of the way happened, like a river-crossing, the teamsters and guards saw to it, and since there were good fords and the weather was dry, all went smoothly enough.
So Wootton had no guiding to do, and he spent the time riding far out to flank, or some way ahead; he had a habit of vanishing for hours at a time, and once or twice I know he slipped out of camp at dusk only to reappear at dawn. He ate all on his own, looking out across the prairie with his back to camp; sometimes he would sit on a hill for hours at a time, looking about him, or wander silent round the wagons, checking a wheel or examining the mule-loads. I would catch his eye on me, occasionally, but he would turn aside and go off again, humming quietly to himself, for another prowl over the prairie.
Then one day just after a noon halt he trotted up to me and said: ‘Buffler, cap’n’, and I rode out with him a couple of miles to where a small herd of the beasts were grazing – the first I’d ever seen. I was for taking a shot at once, but he bade me hold on.
‘Got to pick a tender cow. Bull meat tough enough to build a shack, this time o’ summer. Now, see thar; you take a sight a half finger width down from the hump, an’ a finger from the nose, or she’ll cairry your lead away for ye. Gotta hit hyart or lungs. Now, cap’n; you blaze away.’
So I did, and the cow took off like a rocket, and ran quarter of a mile before she suddenly tumbled over, stone dead. ‘Gone under,’ says Wootton. ‘You shoot sweet’, and as he skinned the hump very expertly, and removed the choicest meat, he explained to me that a buffalo was damnably hard to kill, unless you hit it in a vital spot; I gathered I had gone up in his estimation.
I thought we would drag the carcase back to the caravan, but he shook his head, and set to roasting hump steaks over a fire. I’ve never tasted meat like that first buffalo-hump; there’s no beef to compare to it, and you can eat it without bread or vegetable, so delicious it is. Wootton also removed the intestines, and to my disgust grilled them gently by pulling them through the embers, whereafter he swallowed them in a great long string, like some huge piece of spaghetti. I watched him in horror – or rather, I didn’t watch him, for I couldn’t bear the grisly spectacle. Instead, I turned my head aside, and saw something infinitely worse.
Not twenty yards away, on the lip of a little grassy ridge looking down on the hollow where we’d built our fire, three Indians were sitting their ponies, watching us. I hadn’t heard them or had the least intimation of their approach; suddenly, there they were – and I realised that the wretched dirty creatures I’d seen at Westport, and scavenging round our train on the way down, were mere cartoon. These were the real thing, and my heart froze. The foremost was naked to the waist, with braided hair hanging to his belt, and what looked like a tail of coonskin round his brows; the face beneath it was a nightmare of hooked nose and rat-trap mouth crossed by stripes of yellow paint. There were painted signs on his naked chest, and his only clothing was a white breech-clout and fringed leggings that came to his knees. He had a rifle across his saddle and carried a long lance tufted with buffalo hair – at least, I hoped it was buffalo hair. The other two were no better; they had feathers in their hair, and their faces were painted half red and white; they carried bows and hatchets, and like their leader they were big, active, vicious-looking sons-of-bitches. But what truly scared me stiff was their sudden apparition, and the silent