Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
Denver. Why the blazes they were going there was beyond Caleb, but it wasn’t for him to meddle.
There was a voice inside squawking at him to help. He owed them. But they were going in the opposite direction of where he was headed.
“I can’t.”
“Why?” Sing Lee protested. “Say how much. I pay.”
If he were able to do it, he definitely wouldn’t take their money. That’s for damn sure.
Caleb shook his head. “You’re going east. I have a job I have to do, and that takes me west.”
The older man was clearly disappointed, and he barked a few things at his daughter. She replied, gesturing toward Caleb. He sensed she was explaining his situation. Finally, Liang turned to him again.
“He’d like you to reconsider. He will pay you more than your current job.”
“I can’t do it, Sing Lee,” Caleb replied. “This job ain’t something I can put off.”
The older man’s lips thinned and his chin dropped.
Caleb truly wished he could do something.
He knew the journey from San Francisco must have been long and hard.
They’d been truly fortunate to get this far.
And even if they were able to find their way through these mountains, Sing Lee and his people could run into trouble anywhere between here and Denver.
The dangers facing them could come in both two- and four-legged varieties.
With a curt nod of his head, the older man gently pushed Ho toward his mother, rose to his feet, and walked away.
Liang gathered the child in her lap. “My father no longer trusts white men. Nor do I. To be honest, I am surprised he asked you.”
That didn’t make Caleb feel any better about turning them down. In fact, it made him feel worse. Sing Lee didn’t trust white men, but he still had saved him.
He thought of how similar this man was to Doc. They would save someone’s life, regardless of who it was that needed their help. A person’s worthiness, or lack of it, didn’t matter a damn to either of them.
“How long have you been on the road?”
“Nearly three months.”
To set out from San Francisco on foot with pair of mules was slow going. Even so, that was a long time to be traveling on foot with a toddler in tow.
Caleb’s gaze fell on Ho. The child had fallen sleep in his mother’s arms.
“A far more difficult journey than we thought,” Liang said.
He could well imagine. From San Francisco, they would have needed to travel through the mountains and deserts of California and Nevada, across the dry salt plains of Utah before climbing into these Colorado mountains.
Mormon country was not particularly hospitable to outsiders, and staying clear of the railroads meant they must have passed through rugged, untamed land.
Caleb guessed that nowhere would they have been likely to receive a warm welcome.
“How’d you find your way without a guide?” he asked.
“My father has a map he purchased in San Francisco. It has many blank spaces on it, but it shows some landmarks that have been useful.”
It was in those blank spaces that a man, a woman, or a wagon train could wander around in until the buzzards finally picked their bones clean.
His eyes gestured to the toddler’s deerskin jersey and the moccasins they were wearing. “Are those Shoshone?”
“Yes.” She ran her hand affectionately over her son’s chest. “We had been traveling for over a month. One of the landmarks on our map was the Great Salt Lake. My father had heard that we’d be safer going south of it.
We were crossing a wide valley when we came upon a tribe of Shoshone in a small village. They were farmers. And Mormons.”
In his experience, people didn’t talk much about the tribes in Utah, but Caleb had picked up a few things in his travels.
He’d heard grim stories of native children purchased from other white men who’d managed to steal them from their people.
The Mormons justified their actions in their own minds by saying the ‘heathens’ needed to be converted and civilized.
The truth was that the young ones provided the settlers with a source of slave labor.
Caleb thought back to his childhood and the training school his father ran in Indiana. Elijah Starr was doing the exact same thing. Work them to death and save their souls. Kill the Indian and save the man. And in the meantime, profit from their labor.
Caleb was certain the farms Sing Lee and his people had come upon were church-owned.
They allowed the Shoshone to settle on land they once lived on and hunted.
And in return, the harvests belonged to the Mormons.
Caleb had traveled through that area a few times over the years.
He’d seen the guarded bitterness on the Indians’ faces far more than he liked.
“I’m surprised they didn’t drive you off.”
“When we came upon the farms, we found some women and children working in the fields. One told us her people had been struggling with a very bad sickness. They’d already lost a child in their settlement.
When she described it, Sing Lee knew it was what you call measles.
There was no stopping him from going to give them aid. In return, they took us in and fed us.”
If there was one thing Caleb knew about the Shoshone, no matter how badly they’d been treated, they saw it as a matter of honor to reciprocate kindness.
“We stayed with them for two weeks.”
“That’s where the shoes and your son’s clothes came from.”
She nodded. “We bartered and paid them cash. When we left, they sent a guide with us. He led us through their country into the foothills of the great mountains. At the Blue River, he left us. Sing Lee offered money to him, but he wouldn’t go all the way to Denver.”
“Why Denver?”
“My father has a friend who went there two years ago. When the troubles became very bad in San Francisco, he sent word for our family to come.” She cast a glance at the others on the far side of the fire.
“None of those men are farmers or ranchers, like you, Mr. Marlowe. They have professions that they can use in a city where there are people.”
“What kind of professions?”
“You know my father is a doctor.” She motioned to a man sitting and smoking at the edge of the fire.
“Hing is a cigar maker. That one, seated beside him, is Ah. He is a very good cook and had his own restaurant. It was destroyed in the riots. Tong, with the gun over there, had a general store that was burned to the ground. Wing Chee, sitting by my father, is a fine tailor.”
“The man you know in Denver, will he help you get settled?”
“He is a trustworthy man. And he told my father there are a few others there who came from Guangdong and Fujian, places all of these men came from.” Little Ho fussed in his sleep, and the young mother stroked his back until he drifted off again. “It’s safer if we find people like us.”
Caleb agreed. And he hoped Denver was a safer city than San Francisco. They’d come a long way already, but there was still some hard travel ahead of them. He hoped it was not for nothing.
“You said your father don’t trust white men. And you neither.”
“We don’t. And we have good reason.”
The look in her eye was one of challenge, but Caleb felt no inclination to tangle with her. “I read some things in the papers about the riots in San Francisco.”
“It was very different from what they printed. They only told the white man’s side of things.”
He believed her, but even the newspapers Caleb had seen could not hide the ugliness of what had occurred. Lives were lost. So many had been injured and killed. They estimated thousands of dollars’ worth of damage had been done to property of the Chinese immigrants.
“Tell me about it?”
“Do you know of the Burlingame-Seward Treaty?”
“I don’t.”
“It was a friendly agreement between your government and mine ten years ago. It expanded on another treaty signed ten years before that.” Her chin was high, her cheeks flushed as she spoke.
“My father brought our family over after the first treaty. I was born in China. My brother was born in San Francisco.”
“What does the treaty do?”
“It encourages trade between the countries. And it also says that the Chinese people are free to immigrate and work and travel in America. Many came because the treaty promised protection. We thought we were welcomed.”
Caleb already knew that was a lie on the part of the government. There was no protection. As bad as the trouble had been in San Francisco this past summer, the massacre of the Chinese in Los Angeles seven years ago was even worse.
“For my people, there has been no welcome. Only mistrust. And anger. And violence.” Her hand rested protectively on her sleeping child. “The same politicians who signed those treaties now create hate. They stir a fire in the white people against us. They blame us for all bad things.”
Caleb knew how politicians worked. They were always looking for scapegoats to take the blame for a lack of jobs or for businesses going belly up.
And all the while, they were constantly cooking up money-grabbing schemes.
Hell, it seemed like there was a scandal uncovered every week while old U.S.
Grant was running the show. And to turn attention away from themselves, governors and congressmen pointed their crooked fingers at blacks, Chinese, and anyone else they could think of.
Caleb believed they’d sell their wives and children to the devil to keep their own snouts deep in the public trough.
He kept his eyes on the young mother. A blind man could read the sadness in her expression. “You lost someone?”
Liang Lee paused and then nodded. “My husband. It was on the very first day of the riots, before they really started. He was an apothecarist. He worked with my father. He was delivering medicine to an elderly woman on the edge of Chinatown. Two white men approached him and stabbed him to death. They didn’t take his money.
They left the medicine behind. They killed him for no reason. None.”
She drew a deep breath, trying to keep her composure, but Caleb saw a tear escape and fall.
He thought again of Sheila.
The woman could argue with a sheriff, stand up to outlaws, and order him around like a trail boss. Yet he suspected she would be sitting beside Liang Lee right now, holding her hand and sharing the burden of her grief.
It was one of the things he admired most about her. Sheila cared about things. Fiercely.
“We could not stay in San Francisco and wait until the next time. We could not see my brother die. My child die.”
She leaned down and placed a kiss on her son’s head. It was clear to him that she was trying to hide her face.
Whatever it was that drove men to do these things was beyond Caleb’s comprehension.
To kill an innocent man was evil, regardless of the rage a person was feeling.
He was not a religious man, but he’d read the Bible with his mother plenty when he was a sprout.
It was pretty damn clear. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless, or the widow. Do not shed innocent blood.
Caleb looked at the group by the fire. It wasn’t right. So many lives torn out by the roots.
When he left his childhood home in Indiana, he was an outlaw.
He got running so he wouldn’t hang. He ran because he was scared and lost. In some ways, he imagined that these folks felt the same fear.
They were running for their lives. The difference was that as a white man, he could find a place in the world far more easily than they could.
“My father is tired.” She swept a hand toward the others in the camp. “We all are tired.”
She lifted her sleeping son into her arms. Ho buried his face into the crook of his mother’s neck.
“Sing Lee asked you to help us because we have come far and have farther to go. But I don’t think we can make it.”
Caleb expelled a deep breath and looked around him. These people needed him. He’d received kindness at their hands. And he needed to return that kindness.
“I can’t take you to Denver right now, Liang, but I have an idea.”