Free California Gold by John Jakes Page B

losing their emerald color as summer drew near.
    A yellow-and-red sign on the booth said fare 15¢. Mack saw the agent in the booth eyeing him, and he turned around and walked the other way, fighting to curb his rising impatience. For an hour he drifted through a commercial section along Railroad Avenue, the western extension of Seventh Street. Then he returned to the mole. Another ferry was departing with hoots of its whistle and chugging of engines. A different man was on duty in the booth, a weak-sighted man with thick silver spectacles.
    Mack waited, making an effort to be inconspicuous. The next incoming ferry, Contra Costa , docked ten minutes later. She unloaded passengers and prepared to depart again. He waited until the last boarding call, and then darted past the booth while the man inside was squinting to count his receipts.
    Brawny sunburned young men secured ropes across the open end of the ferry while others on the wharf uncleated the lines and tossed them aboard. With a fanfare of whistles, Contra Costa chugged out of the slip. Mack brushed by a stout woman who looked at him as if she feared rape, and climbed to the upper deck, where he sank down on a bench at the bow. The wind was fierce up here, but still sweet with the sea scent. The light falling on San Francisco’s hills and buildings had a mellow, burnished quality unlike anything he had ever seen. Soon he noticed the ticket collector working his way through the crowd of passengers on the upper deck. Mack held fast to his bundled possessions, screwing up his nerve.
    “Ticket,” said the little rabbit of a man, his brushy mustache fairly trembling with authority.
    “Look here, I don’t have one. No money. But I have to get across, because—”
    The ticket man turned away with a bored air. “Mix! Portugee!” he called down a companionway. “Another free rider up here.”
    Mack clutched the rail. Below, the Bay folded back on both sides of the bow, foamy white, eminently dangerous. In Pennsylvania, he’d tried to learn to swim in an old quarry, but never really mastered it.
    Mix and Portugee were two of the sailors who manned the ferry. One, dark-haired and cheerily sinister, wore a gold ring in his right ear.
    “Damn you, let go,” Mack said, trying to shake them off as they hustled him downstairs. He didn’t resist too violently, because he didn’t want to reach the City beaten and bloody. The ferry was in midchannel. Prolong this a bit and he’d be across. “I tell you I can explain why—”
    “The Southern Pacific can’t put your stories in the bank, kid,” said the seaman with the earring. “No money for a ticket, you swim. It’s the rule.”
    The other one shot a bolt back and opened a gate in the port rail. Passengers watched the little scene with a mixture of curiosity and amusement.
    Mack yanked backward, alarmed. “You can’t do this. I’ll drown, I don’t know how to swi—”
    A boot against his backside turned the rest of it to a yell. He flew forward into space, the water rushing up at him. He struck, remembering at the last moment to dive his hand into his pocket and seize the guidebook and hold it over his head.
    Choking, kicking, he went down, his entire head underwater. He flailed his legs, and that took him back to the surface. Wake from the ferry crashed over him, spuming in his eyes, washing him with brackish water. He held the book high in the sunshine while something slimy brushed against his cheek. The silver eye of a dead fish regarded him. “Shit,” he groaned.
    On the ferry’s stern, behind the rope where the passengers boarded, a father traveling with two children gestured and argued with the ticket taker, protesting their treatment of Mack. It made no difference, though; the ferry Contra Costa plowed on toward the wedding-cake city, its whistle blast a mocking good-bye.
    He began to kick, treading water simply by instinct. Already he felt tired, heavy. He started to sink again and kicked harder. He’d