A band of music was playing in the bandstand a quarter mile away so that the beat reached us raggedly. Belinda smiled up at me from the little shade of her parasol and wanted to know how many ladies I had danced with at the Firemen’s Ball.
I held up my fingers with the thumb tucked into the palm.
“Were they pretty?”
“Some were pretty.”
“What were their names?”
“One was Martha. I don’t remember her surname. And there was Patricia Henderson, Mary Beddoes Mathews, and Amelia Brittain.”
“Which one did you like the most?”
“I did like Amelia Brittain the most. She is engaged to marry a very wealthy fellow, however.”
Maybe a murderer, however.
“What’s his name?” Belinda asked.
“Beaumont McNair. Isn’t that a high-tone name?”
“I like Tom Redmond for a name.”
“Thank you,” I said.
She reminded me that we were engaged to be married on her eighteenth birthday, and we stopped at a stand in the shade of an oak tree. I bought her a bottle of sarsaparilla. Belinda sipped liquid through her straw as we walked on. A trio of horsemen clopped past us, high-stepping horses with gleaming haunches. Belinda told me about the nun who was mean to her and the nun who thought she might have a vocation. I heard my name called.
In a fancy buggy gleaming with varnish were Amelia and Beau McNair, Amelia waving a handkerchief, Beau wearing a fuzzy plug hat. Halted, the chestnut horse, with blue ribbons knotted in his mane and a high curve of tail, pitched his head and pawed a hoof. I had a comprehensive sensation of low station.
Amelia beckoned. Belinda moved reluctantly at my side, and I had the further revelation of her awareness not only of station but of youth, not to speak of the sarsaparilla bottle with its straw, which she held down in the folds of her skirt.
Amelia looked splendid in a complicated white dress, a bonnet busy with ribbons and her long white gloves, which semaphored enthusiasm. “Mr. Redmond, how nice to see you! Here’s my Mr. McNair certified innocent!”
Beau raised a finger from the reins in greeting.
I introduced Belinda Barnacle, whose curtsy, with her dipping parasol and concealed sarsaparilla bottle, was prettily managed.
Beau McNair’s striped jacket fit him like paint.
“I’ve told Mr. McNair how helpful you’ve been, Mr. Redmond,” Amelia said. “I suppose I can’t thank you for the disposition of these misapprehensions, but your support was important to an anxious young woman.”
I bowed and said I was always at her disposal.
Though his expression was sullen, her fiancé had such a gilded aura, with his clipped fair beard and mustache, that it was a mental effort to conceive of him as the kind of rakehell who believed his station in life gave him license for insult and injury to lesser beings, not to speak of slaughtering whores for sport.
Drawing on a whore’s belly with an acid pen was so stupid and juvenile that I could hardly believe it of this sartorial paragon seated at his ease beside Amelia Brittain. He simply did not look the part.
“Mr. McNair’s mother will be arriving within a fortnight,” Amelia said, with a brilliant smile, leaving me to wonder whether this was for the wedding, or because her fiancé had got himself into another pickle.
I managed to summon up an amiable expression at the information.
Beau’s whip tickled the back of the beautiful horse. He tipped his hat in farewell, not having spoken a word, and the varnish-shiny rig rolled away, with Amelia’s gloved hand waving back at us.
“That was Miss Brittain that you liked the most,” Belinda said, as we started on
“That one, yes.”
Belinda looked thoughtful. “Mr. McNair doesn’t like you much.”
“Perhaps not.”
“What did she mean, you’d been so helpful?”
“He was in jail, and she asked me to see if I could do anything to help.”
“He’s not in jail any more.”
“No,” I said.
It appears a shade too neat, Bierce had said.
As we walked on I found a receptacle in which Belinda could rid herself of the sarsaparilla bottle. She managed to juggle her parasol while dusting her hands together.
“She’s very pretty,” she said.
When I brought Belinda home, Mr. Barnacle was leaning on the fence. In the little yard behind him young Johnny Barnacle kicked a kerosene can with resounding metal thumps. Belinda slipped inside the gate and trotted into the house.
“Henry George!” Mr. Barnacle said, jutting his unshaven chin at me.
“Henry George?”
“That writing fellow was correct. The Railroad has been the ruin of us out here.”
“How is that, Mr. Barnacle?”
“Just what he said would be. For awhile everybody’s put to work, then the job is finished and everybody’s out of work. Depression, Tom. They said San Francisco would be another Venice if we didn’t connect to the east with a railroad, but we have did it and now we are up the spout.”
Mr. Barnacle had not worked for some years, which his wife attributed to his weakness for whiskey. He attributed his difficulties to the Railroad, and probably Bierce would agree with him, as Henry George did.
“One rich man makes a hundred poor men,” he went on, nodding sagely at the Georgian wisdom. “The fine carriages roll past the starving children!”
“Well, your children are not starving, Mr. Barnacle,” I said.
“Tell me, Tom, are you still a member of the Democracy Club?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Down with the SP and the Monopoly, I say! Shooting those poor farmers down at Mussel Slough!”
“Bad business!”
“Buying up legislatures like them fellows is no better than Chinese slave girls,” he ranted on. “The Girtcrest Corridor Bill! Bad cess to them, I say, Tom!”
The Girtcrest Corridor Bill, which Bierce called “the Giftcrest,” was being ushered through the State legislature by Senator Aaron Jennings, “the Senator from Southern Pacific,” and was a giveaway of thousands of acres of San Joaquin Valley land to the Railroad. Anti-Railroad sentiment was noisiest in the Democratic Clubs in San Francisco.
“Down with the Monopoly, Mr. Barnacle!” I said, and passed through the gate and up my creaking stairs.
I had showed a piece I wrote to Bierce, and “The Monopoly” must have impressed him enough to consider me as having some promise as a journalist, also that I possessed the proper Antimonopoly fire and facts:
For the 737 miles of line from Sacramento to Promontory, Utah, Charles Crocker, Collis B. Huntington, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins, the Big Four, received $38,500,000 in land grants and government bonds. They employed themselves as the Contract and Finance Corporation to build the Central Pacific line, and when the stock they turned over to this corporation was distributed, each of the partners was richer by $13,000,000.
As the Central Pacific Railroad inched its way over the Sierra to join the Union Pacific and connect the two coasts of the Nation, the Big Four was already planning the Monopoly of transportation in the State of California. The first step was the acquisition of the existing local railroads, and then the construction of new interior lines. These roads were to become the Big Four’s most valuable property, the Southern Pacific Railroad. Terminal facilities in Oakland and San Francisco were acquired for the same purpose.
By the early ‘70s the SP had succeeded in controlling the movement of freight to and from California and within the borders of the state. The roads it did not own in California numbered five, with a total of fifty-nine miles of track.