California Gold Read Online Free Page A

resembled the ruined shoes he’d thrown away. He’d also ripped up one of the shirts from the roll on his back, and wrapped his foot. The shirting had been clean yesterday. Today it glistened and oozed blood.
    He scorned himself for the outcry. Although there wasn’t anyone to hear, he thought it unmanly, an admission of weakness.
    The wind raked and numbed his face, and fear swirled up as the snow stung his cheeks. He set his mouth and dove his hand into his pocket to clasp the leather cover of T. Fowler Haines, his thumb finding the bold embossed C in California. Leaving bloody footprints in the snow, he climbed up the steep road toward the peaks.

2
    WHITE LIGHT WOKE HIM. He sat up, grumbling, bone cold.
    Hearing voices, he remembered where he was: miles east of Donner Summit and Truckee, in the Sierras, but still on the Nevada side of the border. A late-spring storm had driven him to shelter at sunset inside one of the high-mountain snow sheds built all along the Central Pacific’s right-of-way. He’d fallen asleep. Lucky he hadn’t slept all night; he might have frozen to death.
    Creeping toward the light at the end of the shed, he resembled an upright bear more than a man, a shaggy thing bundled inside several shirts, a filthy buffalo-hide coat, and a fur hat he’d tied tightly under his beard. He wore three pairs of soiled socks, and work shoes he’d bought after cooking for a week for a CP section crew plowing the line in Nevada. He thrust his gauntleted hands under his arms and peered out. Light snow fell through the brilliant headlight of the locomotive hissing and squirting steam fifty yards down the track. Mack saw a coal tender, a single freight car, and a caboose. The night was vast, cold, forbidding, with a sense of implacable rock all around, and lifeless space.
    A lantern swung to and fro between the train and the utility shed of a small coaling station. It belonged to the brakeman, who’d run up from the caboose. The engineer and firemen crunched the snow as they hurried back to join him, their voices carrying clearly in the still night.
    “Saw him when he peeked out, Seamus. Hold my lamp while I get my truncheon.”
    Mack clung in the shadow just inside the shed, squinting against the headlight. The freight car door rolled back noisily.
    “All right, you. Get out of there. Out, I say. There’re three of us, one of you.”
    That convinced the stowaway; a shadow shape in the steam jumped down. Landing off balance at the edge of the long snowy incline that sloped away from the track, he groped for the freight car to steady himself. The brakeman said, “No free rides on C. P. Huntington’s line, mister.” Mack blinked at the sound of the truncheon striking the stowaway’s bare head.
    The man groaned and swayed toward the slope. Laughing, the engineer kicked the man’s rear and the brakeman clubbed him again. That pitched him over with a muffled cry. Down the slope he went, rolling, stirring up clouds of snow. Mack heard another strident yell from below, then silence.
    The train crew exchanged comments he couldn’t hear as they returned to their posts. The brakeman stopped to urinate in the snow, then climbed aboard and waved his lantern. As the locomotive drivers shunted back and forth, the engineer sounded the whistle, and its throaty wail reverberated through the mountain fastness. Now the train came chugging toward Mack, its headlight reflecting on the two steel concaves of the jutting snowplow. For a moment they flashed like mirrors.
    As Mack grabbed the beam at the end of the shed and swung around to the outside, his shoe slipped and he nearly fell. Clinging to the outside of the shed, he twisted to look over his shoulder. A chasm. Just a black chasm. God…
    Chugging, rumbling, the work train entered the shed. Mack couldn’t help coughing loudly in the thick steam and coal smoke, but the train’s noise was so great, no one heard. His nose ran and his teeth chattered. The train