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“For how long will you be there?”
    “For as long as it takes me to find someone and this thing Pa needs.”
    “My sister-in-law lives there,” she said. “I can ask if she would take you in.”
    I rubbed my eyes hard before I lifted my head. “Take me in?”
    “You’re a capable young woman, and if I made the right entreaties . . . she might work you harder than I have, but she’s not cruel. You’d have a place to live.”
    I wrapped my arms around my waist. I saw no choice. I’d be serving but this was nothing new. I’d be dependent upon a stranger, a rich matron who’d take one look at me and make assumptions. “How can I leave my pa?” I murmured, speaking my thoughts out loud. “How can I leave him now? He needs me here.” My eyes smarted and my throat stung.
    “I can help with that, if you’ll let me. I’ll see what I can discover. And I can keep you informed as to what’s happened to him.”
    I met her eyes. “You’d do that?” I shook my head. “Why? Why would you care about me and my pa?”
    Her eyes darted away. “In my years I’ve learned a thing or two.” I frowned. She went on. “I have no children.”
    I gazed at her soft cheek in profile, thinking on this, thinking on her livelihood, her independence, her loneliness. I had to trust her. I had no choice.
    And I had to have that box. I had to go to San Francisco, even if I had no idea where to begin once I got there. San Francisco, a city beyond my wildest dreams of a city, and me alone there. Where to find that Ty Wong, and how to balance my search with a servant’s necessary work. Would I find what I needed? This stranger, a missing box . . . and maybe even, with luck, someone to treat me right?
    I doubted it. I squared my shoulders even as I pulled that shawl double tight around me, like a swaddling.
    I had to trust that all things would be made plain in time. I had no other choice.
    I might as well have been leaping off the cliff into the gorge of the Yellowstone, the great raging river and jagged rocks waiting for me at the bottom.
    Mrs. Gale wrote a letter for me to carry to her sister-in-law. I packed in haste. Thus without further warning or mental preparation or shoring up of any kind, the very next evening I was on a train steaming west to San Francisco.

Chapter SIX
    March 25–28, 1906
    “California . . . His description of the beautiful
flowers blooming in winter, of the great herds of Spanish
cattle in lovely fields, of glorious scenery, and of the ideal
climate and blue skies, made me just crazy to move out there,
for I thought such a country must be a paradise.”
    —Mrs. F. A. Van Winkle, interview,
The San Francisco Chronicle, September 9, 1900
     
     
     
     
    RACING.
    My train: racing across the west, a great lumbering mechanical beast charging bullheaded toward the ocean and the edge of the continent and away from the snow-covered mountains, with me on board wishing I could turn myself right around and run straight back to the high rocky fortress of my youth.
    My heart: racing with fear and an anxious dread at what lay ahead for me when this beast finally arrived in San Francisco. City of saints and demons—or so Mrs. Gale had said in one of her few choice descriptions.
    My brain swirled with awful imaginings. The worst and most terrible was of my pa, hanging. Then there was Wilkie, his snake eyes devouring me. The box, which was hidden who knew where and which held secrets and choices of who knew what kind. That huge city waiting to swallow me alive.
    While I packed my things—a quick task, in the face of my small collection of belongings—Mrs. Gale had painted me a portrait of San Francisco. She told me of Chinatown: “a precarious world unto itself. You’d be best to stay away. The Chinese call themselves ‘Celestials’ and we non-Chinese are ‘Demons.’” She also warned me against venturing into a vile place called “the Barbary Coast,” “where that name, Demons, is most fitting.”
    Kula