“I’ve always loved you, Roger.”
“I was scared too.”
“But you’d have done it.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“I am.”
“Then I’d have made a mess of it.”
“I wish I’d worn the hat. I could have cried when I saw that coach drive on, with him in it and all that gold, that lovely money.”
“I laughed, I was so happy.”
That night we lay close, but we didn’t have much to say. On her end of it, she had lost the money and the chance to get hold of the mine, and I guess I cared about that part, too. But mostly I hated it that I wasn’t doing anything for my country at all. If I was grabbing gold that the North needed, all right I was a hero. But if I wasn’t, I was nothing but a gunman laying up with a girl, and not much of a gunman at that, because I hadn’t even done what I figured to do. She began running over it again, how it had all happened: “It was all so wonderful. There he was, stepping out of the baggage car with the Wells, Fargo man, and in a minute there went the money over, and I knew which coach it was, and—”
“Out of the — which car, did you say?”
“The baggage car. Where they had the money.”
“Not a passenger car?”
“No, the front car.”
I thought and I thought, and then I really told her how crazy we had been to think we could do it the way I had laid it out. In the first place, we were right on top of it and we still had no way to carry the stuff, even if we got it. In the second place, we were foolish enough to think we could face armed men that were always expecting trouble, and get away with it. In the third place and the worst place, we had made no provision for a real getaway, beyond riding up a river we had never seen, headed for what we called the “cattle country,” with no idea how we were going to get out of it once we were in it, or with anything worked out better than faith, hope, and guesswork. “Go on, Roger, I’m listening.”
“We’re getting that money. Next trip.”
“But how?”
“We’re stealing that train.”
“But the people—”
“Won’t stop us for one second.”
“Oh if we only could!”
“And the key to the whole thing, the getaway, we make a real one. That’s the trouble with these punks out here, these fools that think they’re bad men. They don’t know how to shoot, and they don’t know any geography, so they can start some place and have some kind of a chance of getting there. But me, I do. I studied it all the time I was sending those dispatches, I know how the land lays and I know every little thing that goes on. You know how we’re getting out of here?”
“Tell me.”
“Mexico.”
“But we can’t get there!”
“Why not?”
“Either we have to head south and travel over all the southern part of the state, where there’ll certainly be word about us, or we’ve got to go back to San Francisco, and that’s terribly dangerous, or — but how?”
“The Colorado River.”
“...Where’s that?”
“Not too far away. We grab that gold just a little the other side of Folsom, and we light out toward Sonora. Then we hit the Stanislaus River and go up over the pass to the Owens River country and go down to the lake. No trouble so far. Game, water, grass for the horses, everything we need. Then we got it bad a few days because we’ve got to cross the Mojave Desert. But probably that’s really good, because there’s hardly any communication across that part of the country, and nobody’ll be looking for us, or know who we are. Then we hit Callville and a steamer.”
“For where?”
“Port Isabel.”
“I never even heard of it.”
“It’s there. Then the C. S. A. Later, our silver mine.”
“Oh, it’s wonderful!”
13
Three days later we were back in the shack on the Yolo side of the Sacramento River, but I think we learned more in that time than either of us had ever learned in any other three days of our life. We sent her trunks down by express, and then I made her ride back to Sacramento with me just the way she’d have to ride for the Colorado, in a man’s dungarees, with man’s boots, hat, and shirt, and we got them all in Placerville for her, in boy’s sizes, fairly cheap. She could ride a man’s saddle all right, because she’d ridden that way in Venezuela, except she had a riding mule there, and held the reins out wide in each hand, besides cocking her feet up front in a short stirrup, so she looked funny but rode fairly easy. But what we ran into, that first night out of Placerville, almost made your blood run cold when you stopped to think it would have been our second night in the open if we’d gone ahead with what we had started to do, and no way to have done anything about it. To begin with, it rained. And then we woke up that we had nothing against rain except blankets, and no food or things to cook food in, or anything to drink. The horses ate, and I watered them in the river. But we went hungry, and lay on the wet ground, and shivered. She wanted to go to one of those teamster places for the night, but I was bullheaded. If this was what we’d elected ourself to, we might as well get started on it, and if there was plenty we had to learn, we’d better learn it now than later. We were a sick-looking pair when we trotted into Folsom, but we knew what we had to buy. The first thing we got was two oilcloth pack covers, that we could lay on if that was all we needed, but could put up for a tent if we ran into nights like last night. Then we got a skillet. It’s the California tool, and they got jokes all over the place about it, and yet we’d forgotten it. Then we got canteens. Then we got bacon, flour, sugar, salt, and beans. Then we had something to eat, and felt better.
The second night, coming from Folsom into Sacramento, we found out we didn’t really know anything about horses. My family had had a horse in Annapolis, and I had taken care of him a good bit of the time, but watering and feeding and bedding a horse in your own backyard is one thing, and watering and tethering and feeding him on a long ride is completely different. You got to figure how much feed he needs, that you’ve got to carry, how much he can do for himself on the pasture you find for him, how much line he’s got to have, how far you can ride him in a day, a whole lot of things that don’t come up with a horse and carriage around a nice little town like Annapolis, with brick houses and nice green lawns. We worked and cussed and watched and got acquainted with our animals and finally began to get it down better, so it was easier. I learned one thing too I was to use several times later.
The night we left Folsom we pitched by the river, I staked out the horses, found wood for a fire, then went looking for a rabbit. So of course, when what you need is a rabbit, all you see is a crow. But then, from a boulder over the river, I happened to notice a pool, and down in it were fish. I could see them, where they’d flash silver in the sun. And once more I began to cuss, because of course that was one more thing we forgot, a hook and line. But I climbed down there with my gun and stuck it in the water. I was pretty nervous, because I couldn’t remember if that made it explode, or what it did. It pretty near jerked my arm out of the socket, but that was all. In a minute, floating all around, were my fish, and I hooked them out with a stick and went running back to where she was frying bacon over the fire. So instead of bacon and beans we had fried trout and greens that she found, with strips of fried bacon. We weren’t really good yet, but we were getting a whole lot better.