Chapter 17 #2
“She passed away when I was fifteen.”
“I’m sorry.” I had to tread lightly. Any time I spoke to Sam about Bess’s time-crossing he became upset. But I wasn’t any closer to understanding what had happened to her. “What about Bess’s family?”
“Her mother had passed away by the time she married Alfred. Her father was still alive when Alfred died, and he was the one who paid for her to go to New York. But when I joined her two and a half years later, she told me he had died and she no longer had a source of income. She had taken in washing at that point, but it wasn’t nearly enough. ”
“I wonder if either of her parents were time-crossers in this path,” I mused.
His mood, which was already dark from retelling his past, seemed to slip even more.
“How does it work?” he asked.
“What?”
“Time-crossing. How did it start?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think any of us do.”
“How does choosing a path work?”
“On my twenty-fifth birthday, I stay awake past midnight in whichever path I want to keep. It’s that simple—and that complicated.”
“What if you don’t want to stay in 1849, but you can’t fall asleep here?”
I smiled. “Part of the time-crossing gift is that we can fall asleep the moment we choose. We don’t get insomnia.”
“One benefit to your existence, I suppose.”
I shrugged. “There are other benefits, but sometimes I think the burdens of time-crossing far outweigh the benefits.”
“You have a better attitude about it than Bess did.”
“Oh?” I wanted him to tell me more about her. I’d only known her for a couple days, but her shadow extended over my life.
“From what I could tell, she hated being a time-crosser. Here, her father was a member of Parliament, and in her other life, she said she was poor and destitute.”
“You don’t know where she lived in her other path?”
“I think she was in New York. She didn’t talk about her other life often, but the night Alfred died, she made one comment that has stuck with me since then.”
I wanted to lean forward, to draw the statement out of him, but I waited. Quietly.
“I told her it would be best if she went to New York, to get away from the scandal. And she said, ‘I’ve been trying to escape New York my whole life, but it seems to be pulling me there in both my paths.’ And since she’d never been to New York in this path, it made me assume she lived there in the other. ”
The only three clues I had about Bess’s other life were that she lived in New York, she was destitute, and it was in the future. She could be one of millions of people.
“Tell me about your other life,” Sam said. “From what you’ve mentioned already, it sounds like a good one.”
Warmth filled me at the request.
As the stars began to shine, Sam not only listened with curiosity, but he also wanted to know everything about my family, my work, my home—me.
September 25, 1849
North Yuba River, California
The morning was overcast as we rode our mules just north of the fork in the Yuba River where we had camped. Everything was serene. Untouched. Promising.
“This is as good a place as any to start panning for gold,” Sam said, surveying the area. “Are you ready?”
I nodded, and though my body was physically tired from the arduous journey into the mountains, sleeping on the hard earth, and riding the uncomfortable mule, my determination and excitement gave me energy.
Sam dismounted and began to pull his supplies off his mule.
We’d brought picks, shovels, and pans. Some of the bigger companies of men we’d seen on the way up the mountain had rockers, which resembled cradles.
They would shovel dirt and water into buckets and dump it in the rocker.
As the rocker was swished back and forth, it would sift the rocks from the sand, allowing gold nuggets to sit on top of the screen.
Larger operations would dam the rivers and get to the gold in the riverbeds, where it was most plentiful.
But that took too much time and money, and we didn’t have the necessary manpower. We would try our luck with pans.
“The placer gold breaks away from the quartz veins in the mountains,” Sam told me, “and is carried downriver with the water. We’ll need to wade into the water and dig for it.” He nodded at my dress. “I don’t know what you can manage.”
“In 1929, the hems of women’s dresses are at the knees.”
The look of shock on Sam’s face made me laugh.
“You spent two years in a penal colony with the toughest criminals from England,” I said, “and then several months in Sydney Town, but the thought of a short hem makes you blush? Some women even wear trousers.”
This time his shock turned to disgust. “Women? In trousers? Do you wear them?”
“No.” I continued to laugh. “My father feels the same as you.”
“Good man.” He smiled.
“I’ll pull the hem up from the back and tuck it into the front of my belt.” I watched his reaction. “It doesn’t bother me if it doesn’t bother you.”
“I suppose there’s no other option.”
Smiling, I turned my back to him and made quick work of my skirt.
We had purchased rubber waders before we left San Francisco, and I was already wearing them to protect my feet.
I stood straight and put my hands on my hips, looking down at my strange outfit.
Even though I was wearing my skirt pulled up like trousers and it would have been considered indecent back East, every inch of my skin was covered.
When I faced Sam again, he grinned. “You look like the furthest thing from a miner I’ve ever seen.”
I laughed as I readjusted the straw hat I wore to protect my face from the sun and picked up my shovel and pan. I was ready to find gold.
We started near the river’s edge. I stuck my shovel into the riverbed and hit hard rock. The shovel reverberated through my hands like a shock wave, sending pain up my arms.
Trying again, I moved the shovel and hit more rocks. “Where is the sand?”
Sam didn’t respond as he had more luck—or perhaps, strength—and lifted a shovel full of gravel and sand from the riverbed. He walked it to the shore where his pan sat and dumped it in.
I followed him, eager to see what he had found.
Bending over, he submerged the pan of sediment under the water and began to shake the pan back and forth.
Loose dirt washed downstream as he broke apart clumps and then added more water, continually shaking the pan.
“The idea is that the gold is heavier than the dirt, so it should settle to the bottom of the pan as the rest washes away.”
I watched, fascinated and hopeful.
He repeated the washing several times, removing pieces of rock, and then he paused.
“Ally, look.” He lifted a gold nugget about the size of a grape from the pan. I’d seen several of them at Bess’s Place and on our way to the Yuba River. I knew exactly what it was.
“Gold!” I said, my breath catching. “We did it!”
“We started to do it.” He chuckled and handed it over to me.
“It’s yours.” I pushed his hand back. “You found it.”
His brown eyes were gentle as he regarded me. “I’m not here to find gold.”
Frowning, I asked, “Then why did you come?”
The look in his eyes told me why he’d come. For me.
Warmth and affection filled my heart as he set the pan down and took my hand in his, turned it over, and softly laid the gold nugget onto my palm. “It’s all for you.”
Without thought, I stood on my tiptoes and wrapped my arms around him, grasping the gold in my fist. “Thank you,” I whispered, in wonder at this man.
He held me tight. His voice was gruff as he said, “Come on. We’re wasting precious time. We’ve got gold to find.”
I pulled back, my heart beating hard, laughing and hopeful. I slipped the gold nugget into a pocket of my skirt, wanting to keep it as a reminder of the real gift Sam had given me.
The hours slipped by, and the work was backbreaking.
For every pan with a nugget of gold, there were five or six with nothing.
Thankfully, each pan contained flakes, hundreds of them, but it was the nuggets that we wanted and needed.
I took the time to collect every fleck we found because eventually they would add up, but it was time-consuming work.
We panned one section and then another, and it soon became obvious where more gold was deposited: the inside of the bends of the river. My hands were raw with blisters from the shovel, and they became dry and cracked from hours of being in the water.
At lunchtime, we stopped for cold beans and a short break, and then we were back in the riverbed.
The sound of the water, which had been soothing and peaceful the night before, began to wear on me. My back ached from bending over, my arms hurt from shoveling and panning, and the hem of my gown was heavy from the weight of the water.
I’d rarely been so miserable in my life.
“Why in the world do the men come into San Francisco after panning for weeks at a digging just to gamble and drink away all their hard work?” I asked as I stood to push my hair out of my eyes. “It’s insanity.”
“We’ve already collected at least fifty dollars’ worth of gold,” he said. “A blacksmith in Massachusetts, working hard all day, might make a dollar. This is easy money for them, and what comes easily is spent easily.”
My lips parted. “You think we already have fifty dollars?”
“And then some.”
“Sam!”
He laughed. “That’s not going to get us far when a meal at my San Francisco Hotel will cost a man five and a bed will cost ten.”
My face fell as I realized he was right.
“That’s why it comes and goes so easily from these men,” Sam said, bending over with another pan of sediment. “Fifty dollars isn’t worth much in California.”
As I worked, I noticed a crevice up ahead. The sun hit the rocks at such an angle that it gave me a clear view, and my breath hitched. “Sam, look.”
I pointed toward the crevice and then began wading upriver, my pan in one hand and my shovel in the other. It wasn’t easy walking in the rubber waders, but they kept my feet dry and warm.
Sam finished washing his pan and then followed me.
There in the crevice of the rocks were several large gold nuggets. Twice as many as we had panned out of the river that whole day.
Excitement filled my heart, and it felt like it might burst as I reached down and picked up the biggest one I saw.
It was the size of a plum.
With a squeal of delight, I turned and showed it to Sam. His smile was so bright and so happy, but he wasn’t looking at the gold.
He was looking at me.