Past All Dishonor Read Online Free PDF Page B

a whopping big fish they couldn’t handle it, and on account me being so big they thought I could do it. They took the top off a box and I stuck my hand in and maybe it was a fish but it felt more like a bear trap. I tried again, and again after that, and I was blood up to my elbow before I pulled it out, and it had hold of my thumb, and I saw it was an ocean crab as big around as a dinner plate. They quit laughing when I slung it at them, and a couple of them went overboard to get out of its way, but they hollered they knew I was no fisherman, and that evened it up for the guy about the singing, and from then on we were friends. Soon as Paddy got them quieted down so no wharf guards would get in it they used a bull’s-eye lantern on another float and a big salmon practically jumped in the boat. I had eaten two pieces, and was all full of their tortillas and hot stuff, before I remembered this was stealing too, and if it was wrong for her, why was it just funny for me?
    “Rodrigo.”
    “Yes, Paddy?”
    We were lying in front of my shack, where he had rowed back with me to have a look at my rocker in the morning and maybe give me some tips, and I’d told him a little about Morina. Nothing about the money, or how I’d got her off the boat, but plenty about how she’d left me, and how I’d been looking for her. “Rodrigo, she no estay in Sacramento.”
    “How do you figure that out?”
    “At estimbo, nobody meet, you say?”
    “Not that I saw. She said her family’s dead.”
    “And you no come, she meant estop in hotel?”
    “That was the idea.”
    “She go to Nevada. I show you why.”
    We went in by the fire, and I got him pen, ink, and paper, and he drew a map of California, a better map than I could have drawn, a map that looked like something in a book. He put all the rivers in, and showed how they lead up from the Golden Gate, first the Sacramento, leading up to the mouth of the San Joaquin, then bending around and leading up to the northern part of the state, then the San Joaquin with twenty little feeder rivers, leading down to southern California, and showed how the state would never need any railroads, with steamboats to haul you any place you want to go, and even the few railroads it has are starving to death on account of no business. “Now, Rodrigo, you listen. Here is a girl. If she want Stockton, she take boat to Stockton. If she want Aliso, she take boat to Aliso. Any place in California, she take estimbo straight there. But she want Nevada, first she estimbo San Francisco to Sacramento, then she change to estimcar.”
    “What’s she holding out on me?”
    “Maybe her business roulette. Maybe she deal faro, big Virginia City place, no want to tell you, you think she is no nice girl. You go there, you find.”
    “She’s not here, that I’m certain.”
    “You go, write me, I come. Thees gold here, all wash out.”
    That stuff he had figured out about the rivers and all wasn’t new to me in any way, because I’d ridden the boats myself. Why I’d been shying off it was that I wasn’t supposed to go to Nevada. I was supposed to stay in Sacramento and do my duty exactly the same as a soldier. I tried to tell myself it was not like being a soldier, that I ought to go to Nevada anyway, to see what was going on there. But all that got me was I woke up one night with the word deserter whispering in my ear.
    You go by the cars to Folsom, and from there on over by stage, and I never saw such a road in my life. The way it’s built, with grades and cuts and width and sprinkling carts wetting it down where-ever it’s a little dusty, you’d think it was built for Bragg’s army. And from what was moving on it you’d think it was being used by Bragg’s army, too. There was every kind of wagon you ever heard of, from prairie schooners to oxcarts to hayricks to Conestogas, besides an article I never saw until now, and even after you see it you’re not sure you believe it. It’s a Washoe wagon, that