California Gold Read Online Free PDF Page A

five or six months—I haven’t starved yet.”
    Presently the man finished the cheese and wiped his mouth. “Thanks for pulling me out. Suppose I should introduce myself. Wyatt J. Paul. J for Junius. I’m from Osage, Kansas. Nobody ever heard of it.”
    “Chance is my name. James Macklin Chance, but that’s too long. I go by Mack.”
    They shook hands. The young man from Kansas had a powerful grip.
    “Where you from, Chance?”
    “Pennsylvania. Schuylkill County coal fields”
    “Are you bound for California like I am?”
    “Yes, San Francisco.”
    “I’m going down south.” Wyatt Paul wiped his nose, showing his white glistening teeth again. “But it’s all the same sunshine. Pure gold. I’d say we should get moving and find it—what do you think?”
    “In the morning, when there’s light. Get some sleep.”
    “You in the habit of telling other people what to do?” Wyatt Paul’s face froze momentarily into ugliness again, then he recovered. “Sorry—I didn’t mean that. I’ve ridden the cars all the way here, and those three are the first who managed to roust me. If l had them here I’d crack their heads.”
    “Sure, I feel the same way,” Mack said, though he didn’t. He reached for the lantern and blew it out. The innocent blue eyes simply vanished. It gave him an eerie feeling.
    Somewhere the wild animal screamed again.
    Snow fell in bleak gray twilight. It had been coming down a long time. Mack’s teeth hadn’t stopped chattering for hours. Bad as Pennsylvania, he thought.
    They had been traveling together for two days, climbing, descending, following great horseshoe curves in the main track. Now Wyatt spied a wooden trackside marker, stumbled to it through the drifts, and brushed off the snow.
    CALIFORNIA STATE LINE
    Little bits of melting snow fell off his face as he tried to smile. “We ought to whoop it up,” he said listlessly.
    “Not yet. Keep going.”
    Wyatt was too spent and starved to show any resentment of the order. Mack trudged by him, back to the center of the track, and together they continued west through the storm.
    Two figures broke through the rolling white mist, crunching the shallow mounds of snow, and disturbing half a dozen mountain bluebirds, which shot upward in alarm. The men resembled walking rag heaps, with only the gleam of eyes and the pale flash of bare hands to indicate otherwise.
    Mack went faster than Wyatt down the slope. He’d never inhaled such a sweet aroma as that which breathed out from the forest of smooth- and rough-barked trees, giant knobcone pines and tamaracks, white firs and mountain hemlocks.
    “My God, Wyatt, just look at that,” he shouted, pointing below, where the forest gave way to a field of breaking mist glowing more golden in the sun as he watched. “It’s California. The real thing.” He flung off the buffalo-hair overcoat, feeling his fatigue, hunger, and pain drop away with it. The tangle of rags and leather scraps on his feet, brown from dried blood, raked a trail in the snow as he raced downward.
    “Jesus, Jesus. Feel that sunshine.” A dozen yards behind, Wyatt laughed like a boy and turned in a circle, doing a crazy little dance.
    They came down from the forested slopes to the low emerald-green foothills while lances of sunshine pierced the mist. Laughing and capering, they flung off more of their stinking rags, here a grimy pile of them, there another. Mack squinted at the sun and turned his face up to it. He felt the warmth, the blessed warmth.
    On the breasts of the sweet green hills, yellow blossoms tossed and swayed in a balmy wind. To complement the wild mustard there was fire-colored redbud, purple and pink lupine, deep blue brodiaea, and the white of cow parsnips, a rainbow sea rolling on and on to the west. In the distance, dark specks clustered here and there on a flat tawny-gold plain. Cattle?
    Mack stopped among the wildflowers and turned about. Looking back at where they’d come from—the deep green