Free Gold by Jane Toombs Page A

two pieces and examined them attentively. I then tried a piece between two rocks and found that it could be beaten into a different shape but not broken.”
    Sutter tried to keep the find secret until the mill was completed but he failed. As word of the dis covery spread down the coast to San Francisco, to the capital at Monterey and to Los Angeles, it was greeted at first with skepticism, then mild interest, then with wild excitement.
    Slips carried the first of the gold to ports on the Pacific. Mexicans by the thousands, many of them experienced miners, trekked north. Hawaiians and South Americans boarded ships bound for San Francisco. They became the Argonauts, named for the shipmates of the mythical Jason who sailed on the Argo in search of the Golden Fleece.
    Word was slower reaching the United States. Not until President Folk’s message to Congress in December did gold fever erupt with full force. But when it did, there was no surcease. Workmen quit their jobs, doctors closed their practices, and farmers put aside their plows in the rush to the West.
     
    The Empire Hotel, two stories of pine logs roofed with cedar shingles, was Hangtown’s new est and largest building. It boasted a porch with a balcony on its top. It had six windows in the front alone, two of them paned with glass. The down stairs, other than a hallway designated the lobby, was one huge room housing the saloon and gambling hall; the hotel rooms were all on the second floor. Next to the saloon in an attached building was the store.
    “ The miners come in,” Pamela said, her voice sharp with irritation, “they look at our merchandise, they handle it, but they don’t buy it.”
    “ They will,” Rhynne told her. “They’re testing the water before jumping in.”
    Pamela dabbed at her nose with her handker chief. “You told me we’d clear two thousand dol lars a month,” she said. “We’ll be lucky to clear two cents.”
    Rhynne gave her a calculating glance. “Have you been taking your medicine?”
    Pamela looked toward the other end of the store, where Selena toyed with her hair in front of a mirror nailed to the wall. Lowering her voice, she said, “As a matter of fact, no. I’ve been out of it since two days ago.”
    Their eyes met. She tried to keep her gaze level under Rhynne’s sardonic stare, but could not. How was she to go on? Her entire body ached. She had to force herself to eat food that nauseated her.
    “ Laudanum, isn’t it?” Rhynne asked.
    Pamela nodded, then sneezed.
    “I’ll see what I can do,” he told her. Again she glanced toward Selena. Had she overheard?
    “ Pamela, be of good cheer,” Rhynne said in a louder voice. “The winter’s over, spring’s upon us. ‘Whither is fled your visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?’’
    “ I think I’d appreciate more customers and less Wordsworth.” Pamela tried to smile. “I don’t know why I’m so melancholy of late. The rains, I suppose, and this never-ending muck.”
    “ The rains are over, the mud... He broke off. "What’s this, Pamela?” Rhynne, who had been testing the scales, held up one of the weights.
    “ The man who sold me the scales called it an Indian weight.”
    Rhynne opened the back door and hurled the weight up the rain-gullied hill behind the store. “I’ll not abide it,” he stormed. “Paying a man half what his gold’s worth simply because he’s an In dian.”
    Selena watched Rhynne return, slamming the door. She pulled her golden curls out over her shoulders, finally fastening a large blue bow in the back. All day she’d had a strange feeling that something was about to happen, yet nothing had and she was restless.
    “ Harry Varner uses Indian weights,” she pointed out to Rhynne. “I’ve seen him.” Varner ran Varner’s Grocery, Hangtown’s first and only other general store.
    “ Honest Harry Varner.” Rhynne sniffed. “He’s well-named.”
    “ He frightens me, that Varner, as short as he is.