“I see.”
He looked to the front of the car. “Pardon,” he said, with little discernible joy. “My wife requires me.”
After that, whenever our eyes met, Kramer winked.
Elko, Nevada, was supposed to be only a supper stop, but with our locomotive developing a “hot box”—an axle bearing overheating dangerously from friction—we limped in for a longer stay.
Like Promontory, Elko was booming. A large Chinese settlement lent it a different tone, but esthetically it still had a long way to go. The ever-present alkali dust swirled in head-high clouds, stirred by mule trains and eight-horse stages clattering off to the White Pines silver mines.
Johnny stayed in our car to rest, his appetite blunted by the laudanum. Most of the others headed for a hotel restaurant. I held back, having no stomach for more fried meat. I was about to buy some fruit from a vendor when a Chinese boy walked by. He wore the customary blue overshirt and pants, wooden clogs, and round hat from which a braided cue stretched nearly to his ankles. Looking at him, I had an inspiration.
“You wan’ my food?” he said incredulously when I overtook him. “Chinee food?”
I held out two silver dollars and nodded. He looked at them in astonishment. Meals along the CP ran a buck and a quarter. To a Chinese boy whose family lived on a fraction of what whites earned, my offering must have seemed a small fortune.
“Not ’nuff,” he said, eyeing me shrewdly. “Fo’ dollah!”
The little bandit! The trouble was that suddenly I was ravenous for Chinese food. I handed him two more dollars.
He led me through narrow packed-dirt alleys. I asked questions about the settlement and gathered that it consisted mainly of discharged CP workers. Groups moving along the alleys or standing and smoking cigarettes stared at us, the babble of their conversation slowing momentarily. I sensed no hostility, merely curiosity. There were no women anywhere in view. He led me inside a frame shack where I sat on the floor before a low bench.
The food was worth every penny: heaping bowls of steamed vegetables and rice, dumplings filled with spiced pork, succulent chicken and duck, and apple-shaped pastries coated with melted candy. I plied my chopsticks as fast as I could.
Onlookers surrounded the repair crew. The harried engineer said it would take several more hours to fix the axle. I had a mug of coffee in the station and picked up a day-old paper with the caption ACTIVITY IN WALL STREET'S GOLD ROOM. Volume was heavy and the price had risen from 139 to 141 dollars an ounce. Hadn’t Kramer said it was 137 dollars? I thought of Twain’s thousand dollars. Wouldn’t gold be more sensible than a flying machine?
I stopped by the telegraph desk. A boy about nineteen sat self-importantly behind the key.
“Anything about gold over the wire today?”
“You’re ’bout the hunderth to ask.”
“What’d you tell the other ninety-nine?”
“That’s a dandy!” He slapped his knee. “What’d you tell the other ninety-nine!”
I decided he was simple, not putting me on. “Do you know today’s closing price?”
“Up over one forty-two,” he said. “Everybody says it’s just the beginning.”
“I suppose you’re in too,” I said.
“Would if I had the cash.” He grinned. “I know who has jumped in on the sly.”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Grant, that’s who.”
Was the first family really so flagrant, I wondered, that every yokel in the Nevada desert knew their business?
I drank two more coffees and watched the uninspired panhandling of several ragged Sochoche Indians. Then I walked back to the train. The moon was just beginning to climb over the horizon. I took a gold eagle from my pocket and stared at it. It gleamed with the reflected radiance of ten thousand stars overhead.
Reno was the CP point nearest the fabulous Comstock mines, which for the past decade had channeled limitless millions through San Francisco into the world. The place was well-equipped for financial dealing. After breakfast I found a Wells Fargo office on North Virginia, where I learned that already the price of gold had risen fifty cents that morning. That decided me. With fourteen hundred dollars of my letter of credit, I purchased a certificate for ten ounces of gold.
I hurried back to the station thinking that the few times in my life I’d tried slot machines, I’d never hit for more than a handful of quarters. This time the jackpot would be bigger. Much bigger.
With a second locomotive attached to our train—doubling the noise and smoke—we moved out of the Nevada basin upward into the pine-sloped Sierras. I saw yellow wildflowers that reminded me of backpacking trips I'd made near Tahoe. As we crossed the California border I felt my heart beat faster. This was home.
Evergreens covered the mountains like shaggy blankets, broken only by the log chutes used by timber crews to stockpile quick-hewn railroad ties. We climbed the twisting canyon of the Truckee and came upon a magnificent view of Donner Lake. Predictably, guidebook accounts of the ill-fated Donner Party, embellished with grotesque details, echoed through the car.
Near Cisco we lunged into darkness. The train butch laughed at our startled reactions. Lighting the car’s lamps, he informed us we were in snowsheds extending the next fifty miles.
“Just when we get country worth seeing,” Johnny said.
Snow here didn’t drift like eastern snows, but lay in mammoth caps. The CP, at a cost of twenty thousand dollars per mile, was enclosing everything. Stations, tracks, water tanks, woodsheds, turntables, stalls for locomotives—all were to be roofed over before next winter’s paralyzing storms. Fortunately for us, sections remained where we could see through unfinished walls.
At almost every station Indians, mostly Shoshones and Paiutes, climbed in and out of the baggage cars. One Paiute chief stalked through our
