“I was even worried about the goat.”
“You’ve got to think of something.”
“If we could only buy it.”
“You mean now?”
“So it would be waiting for us, after the war.”
“How much would it cost?”
“Ten, fifteen thousand, maybe. Maybe less. This outfit that owns it is always in trouble, and especially lately. But a lot more than we’ve got.”
She lay there a long time, and when it began to get light her eyes were still open, staring at the sky outside. Then: “Roger.”
“Yes?”
“You know Red Caskie?”
“I guess so.”
“You know what he does?”
“He’s the Brewer dog-robber, isn’t he?”
“He does all kinds of things, but mainly he makes one trip a month down to San Francisco. You know what that trip’s for?”
“...I can guess.”
“Yes, it’s for gold. The silver goes down on the stages, by Wells, Fargo, every day, and nobody bothers it because it’s heavy and not a great deal goes by any single coach. But once a month the mint pays for the bullion in gold, and Will Brewer stays down there to take care of that and whatever other business the company has. And then Caskie brings it back.”
“When does he go?”
“Never the same day of the month, never the same boat down to San Francisco, never the same coach line, always a little bit different, so nobody can be waiting for him along the line.”
“How much does he bring?”
“How much do they send down?”
“In silver, they’re running a thousand a day.”
“Thirty thousand a month?”
“Around that.”
“Then that’s what he brings back.” She stretched, yawned, and snuggled into my arms. “So then, after we get it, I’ll slip up here with it, and buy this mine, and when the war’s over we can have anything we want.”
“Wait a minute, not so fast.”
Because sitting here, reading what I’ve just written, all I can see is two people fixing to commit a crime. But then, especially after that week I spent in the Union army, it seemed like I had to do something that was some good to my country, and that this could be it. I mean, if $30,000 in gold was coming from California, to pay men to dig $30,000 in silver, to pay men to shoot my people, and I could get it, it looked like the right thing to do. I wanted her to get that part straight, and I was solemn as hell while I was explaining it to her. But all she did was pull me closer, and kiss all around my mouth, and into my mouth.
The old shack, across the river from Sacramento, was exactly as I had left it, even to the rowboat back of the pump, where I had dragged it so it would be out of sight, and after we had aired the rooms out it hardly seemed we had been away. I had rented it from a fellow named Mouton that had the farm along that part of the river, but instead of walking over there and telling him I was back I decided to lay low for the few days we’d be around, and tell him nothing. If he hadn’t even bothered to unlock it and get it ready for the next fellow, it didn’t look like he got over there very often, and it might be that he kept track of those dodgers over at the post office that told about the men wanted by the army, and had spotted my name. Every morning I’d stroll over the bridge and buy a glass of beer across the street from the Sacramento Valley Railroad, which anybody would have to use coming from Virginia City, unless he was going to put himself to an awful lot of trouble, no matter how he mixed up his steamboats and stagecoach lines. It ran as far as Folsom, and it was there that the coaches started. And sure enough, one day in October, here came Caskie. He had a bag, and he stayed on the train to Front and K Streets, and went aboard the Yosemite. It left at six, so when he came off a little later without any luggage, that just meant he was passing the time in town, so I went on across the river.
“When’s he due back, and how?”
“Well, that ought to be easy, Roger.”
“Will you tell me what’s easy about it?”
“Well, can’t we watch some more?”
“Which line do we watch? There are six boats he can come by, all leaving San Francisco the same time, and all getting here within a few minutes of each other. Which hotel does he stop at? We can’t go around asking for him, or looking at the registers, because he knows us both, and that’s all he needs to know, that we’ve been snooping after him. How do we know he goes to a hotel? Maybe he goes direct from the boat to the train, like he went from the train to the boat, and he’s here and gone before we’ve even got started on what we’re going to do about him.”
“There has to be some way.”
“There doesn’t have to be anything.” We talked about it all afternoon and half the night, and the more we talked, the clearer it became to me that the only part of his trip we could be certain about was the train ride from San Francisco to Folsom, and if there was some way I could go on ahead and find out in advance when he had started, then we might be able to do what we figured to do with some chance of getting away with it. In the middle of the night I woke her up. “Come on, let’s pack.”
“What, now?”
“In the morning we leave.”
“Where are we going?”
“Folsom.”
We got to Folsom around seven thirty, let a hotel hack take our stuff over the river to the town, and then stood around to watch how they did, transferring passengers and express to twenty or thirty stages that were pulled up there. It was like I remembered it, from my first trip up there. The runners were all over the platform beating up business for whatever line they worked for. As fast as the passengers would make up their mind, the runner would take his luggage over and stow it in the luggage carrier on back of the coach. But the messengers, they weren’t paying attention to luggage or stuff like that. They were up front, at the baggage car, with the Wells, Fargo man, checking it over what they were responsible for, and some of it was regular packages coming up the line, or maybe around from the East by boat and up, but after they had been transferred they got down to the real thing, which was the metal boxes to be transferred, some to one coach, some to another. They held money, and the messengers split it up which one was to stand by while the Wells, Fargo man helped the others carry them to whichever coach they were consigned to. But on those boxes there was no way to tell if they held $5 or $500 or $5,000, or were coming back empty. The messengers, they rode guard on all boxes.
I held my watch, to see how long it took, and the first coach didn’t pull out till a half hour after the train got in. We walked over to the town to find a spot she could stand on and watch what Caskie did, once he got off the train. That wasn’t easy, because for stuff like that you think of a saloon, but at that hour of day a girl pretending to take a drink and watching a railroad station would attract attention, and in that country just to start somebody wondering what you’re up to is to get in trouble, because they don’t generally figure out that you’re up to something good. And besides, the saloons didn’t give a good view. At Folsom there’s the American River, with the town on one side, the railroad on the other, and a bridge in between, but half the saloons got their back to the river, and they block the view from the ones that face it, so that idea looked pretty sick from the start. We had walked clear down to the stables on the west end, where the old town was, when I hit on what we needed, or thought I had. We came back to the hotel, and I said: “I have business up the line, but my wife is staying, and I want her to be comfortable, in a nice room. Can we have one up high, in front?”
“I can give you third floor, a beautiful bright room overlooking the river, with unobstructed view of the valley—”