I know why. DON'T!

Pain shot upward through his neck into his head. A heavy haze obscured his sight of Amanda. He realized she was still on her knees, asking another question. Through the roaring in his ears, he finally deciphered part of it: "-attorneys."

"What?" The sound emerged as a guttural. His lips moved again, slowly. "What?"

"The name of the family attorneys-Boston-can't remember-"

Merciful God, how terribly he hurt! If only he'd drawn the long lot-never come to San Francisco-he might have seen his grandsons- But not Amanda. Why were things never clear-cut? Why was there darkness and this unbearable pain? Why hadn't he been given time to persuade her to abandon her scheme for- "Jared, please-tell me the name!"

Don't, Amanda. That's not the way your father wanted you to live- "Jared, you're my blood kin. You've got to tell me!"

His lips jerked a whisper: "Ben-"

"What? Jared, try. Try!"

"Ben-" He spoke it as separate words. "Bow."

"Benbow. Benbow-yes, oh God, that's it!"

Was he wrong to tell her? The question savaged him as he arched his back and cried aloud, afraid because the lamplight had grown so dim.

Was he wrong? Was she only planning to do what needed to be done-?

No. It would harm her. He didn't want her harmed. He loved her. He tried to tell her as she leaned her cheek against his again, their tears mingling.

"Jared, oh Jared, don't die. We're all that's left to bring the Kents into the world again-"

Againagainagain wailed the echoes in his mind. The pain was lessening, the dark deepening. One last, clear thought eradicated his fear, now that he realized even fear wouldn't help him: I have to go, Amanda. All of us have to go to see the elephant.

Chapter V.

The Man Who Got

in the Way

i

THE TWO MOUNTED FIGURES WERE dwarfed by the immensity of the dripping spruces and pines. A gray haze, not so thick as fog and not quite rain, hid the slopes of the Sierras they'd last seen at sunset the preceding evening. The mules struggled over the rocky terrain. Israel, leading the way, frequently had to resort to quirting the animals.

Most of their gear was packed in bags that bulged from the flanks of his mule. His trousers bulged as well. His legs were still wrapped in bandages.

Although the mulatto's burns could have been far worse, they'd nevertheless caused him considerable suffering. He'd never complained once-but the pain had shown on his face from the first day he'd hobbled out of his shanty and taken half a dozen steps before halting in the center of the backyard, sweating and drawing deep breaths.

Amanda had been watching from inside. Israel resumed walking in a moment or so, wincing each time he put weight on his feet but clearly determined to reach his goal. He'd finally come up the steps into the back room. Even though he'd made rapid progress since that first passage across the yard, walking was still difficult for him. Riding muleback was much less of a strain.

"Israel? How much farther, do you think?"

"I calculate a mile or so. Unless we took the wrong fork a while back."

"I surely hope not. I'm worn-out."

"So'm I. And the Sabbath's supposed to be a day of rest!"

The shod hoofs of the mules rang against rocks on the barely discernible trail. From their right drifted the purling of water, a stream hidden by the murk. Only by copying down the most explicit directions at Sutter's had they been able to wind their way up to this branch of the Feather.

Amanda's statement to Israel was no exaggeration. They'd been on the way from San Francisco six days now, making slow progress because of their unfamiliarity with the country. It was a trip she'd decided they must take, hardship or not.

But she'd be thankful when they reached their destination. Winter dampness seeped up the sleeves of her fleece-lined coat and penetrated the fabric of the jeans trousers tucked into her stout boots. Her thighs hurt from the bouncing and scraping of the saddle. With her hair pinned up beneath a flop-brimmed wool hat, and the holster of her revolver showing beneath the bottom of her coat, Amanda hardly resembled a woman. Nor did she feel much like one.

Since the dark of Christmas night, a kind of daze had enveloped her. Even now, more than three weeks into January of the new year, 1850, she hadn't entirely freed herself of despondency. To find Jared with such abruptness, then lose him just as abruptly, and all within a space of twenty-four hours, had been the profoundest sort of shock.

She had wept over his body for nearly an hour after the breath went out of it. It was Billy Beadle, she learned later, who finally pulled her away. She'd been hysterical. She didn't remember.

She was ashamed she'd behaved that way. She'd always prided herself on her strength. But flesh could only bear so much, and that one Christmas Day had strained her physical and mental resources almost to the breaking point.

In the days that followed, she'd alternated between periods of depression whose only antidote was a stiff drink and the security of her bed, and other periods of almost frantic activity. During the latter, she tramped San Francisco with Billy, asking in the saloons and gambling halls for information about the identity of the men who had shot her cousin.

That the murderers were cronies of Felker's she didn't doubt. But the disbanded Hounds proved to be more than closemouthed. They were elusive. Every known member of the group had vanished suddenly, perhaps fearing civic wrath of the kind that had caused the destruction of the Hounds' headquarters.

Amanda offered five hundred dollars for information, but got nothing more than a few useless scraps: this man had been seen playing cards with Felker; that one had accompanied him on a tour of the brothels. One man mentioned was at last identified as one of the pair who'd spoken to Billy on Christmas morning. He too was gone. The guilty had fled along with the innocent. Amanda soon realized she'd probably never locate the two who fired the fatal shots.

That wasn't the only cause of her troubled state. Jared's burial in San Francisco's crude hillside cemetery had been an ordeal.

The mourners were few. Amanda, Israel, solemn-faced Billy, Felix, and Louis. Only their nearness, and her own vow not to surrender totally to despair had made it possible for her to endure the brief service. She'd hugged Louis to her side, her other hand clutching Jared's fob medallion. As the earth rattled on the plank coffin, she closed her hand tighter and tighter on the medal's edge, using the physical pain to deaden the pain of her heart and her mind- Afterward, she found herself constantly wishing Jared had been given a few more days at her side. She remembered his eyes during their argument just before the pistol balls shattered the window. He had looked at her with surprise-sorrow-and finally with loathing- Or did she only imagine that?

Accompanying her depressed feeling was an almost abnormal awareness of the hampering effects of age. She'd been conscious of gradual changes for several years. Her energy seemed to drain away before a day was half done. She was frequently wakeful at night. Routine tasks sometimes looked too formidable until she rested a bit. For a week or two, she dwelled on this deterioration in a morbid way, unable to stop thinking of the ultimate end of the process.

The heightened sense of her own mortality brought on intense self-questioning. However briefly, perhaps Jared had seen her more clearly than she saw herself. Perhaps her determination-the determination that had burst inside her like a long-smoldering fire when she first saw the Headley book-had become a ruinous influence.

She'd long believed it was right to plan and work and save in order to go back to Boston. She thought the Rents' past and her son's future demanded it.

Yet recalling Jared's eyes and his dying plea for her to leave the gold alone, she doubted.

Was she letting the fury of wounded family pride warp her?

Or was she on the right course?

She didn't know.

But when it struck her that she should at least look after Jared's interests up in the diggings, she didn't put the idea aside. Instead, she immediately informed Israel that they were going.

Louis had received word of the forthcoming trip in somber silence. To add to the gloom of the departure, she was worried about Bart McGill. The morning she and Israel set out, his ship was seven days overdue. He'd often spoken of hundred-knot winds that created an extreme hazard on the Cape Horn passage- Now here she was, winding up a muddy track beneath sodden trees. She felt more than a little out of her element. How ridiculous for a woman almost forty-seven years old to go traipsing into the gold country like the very fools she'd once condemned.

Someone had to settle Jared's affairs, though- To whose benefit? was the immediate response of her questioning conscience.

Confused again, she took comfort in remembering what she'd once told Luis Cordoba about the Mandan's vine to paradise. A human being did what seemed necessary and right, and left it to someone else to judge whether the sum of thousands of such decisions equaled a life lived with honor, or the lack of it. If her plan to recapture Kent's, tainted as it was by her hatred of Stovall, was impure-why, so was life itself. Despite Jared's warnings-and Bart's-she would go ahead. She had in effect made that choice the moment she informed Israel about the journey.

A sudden change in the irregular clopping of the mules' hoofs drew her from introspection. Ahead, between two great shoulders of granite, Israel had brought his mount to a halt.

"Guess we've arrived safe and sound," he called. He pointed. "There's civilization."

Amanda grimaced. Just beyond the mulatto, a hanged man dangled from the branch of a tree.

The corpse twisted as the rope unwound slowly. The tree limb creaked. A young man, Amanda saw as she rode up beside Israel. A young man with a black beard and distended eyeballs and flesh discolored by death. She wondered what his crime had been-and what heaven's verdict on his life would be. The earthly decision was unmistakable.

The two mules clopped by the hanging tree to a place where the trail again descended. Listening, she heard a fiddle scraping "Old Dan Tucker." The camp itself was still invisible in the mist.

They rode on till they came to a crudely lettered sign on a post driven into the ground: welcom to Hopeful Another sign-rather, the sheared-off top section-lay discarded nearby. Amanda leaned forward to read what had been painted on the board: War! War! ! War! ! !

The celebrated Bull-killing Bear KIT CARSON will fight a Bull to the Death on Sunday the 15th inst. at 3 p.m.

The rest was gone. Somewhere ahead, a gun went off. Men shouted. Her shoulders felt heavy. Foolish old woman, she thought.

Then she recalled the fob medallion in her pocket, and sat up straight. Two more shots exploded. She said, "We may be sound, but who knows how safe?"

She unbuttoned her heavy coat; laid her right hand on the holstered revolver. Israel fell back to let her take the lead as the mules negotiated the muddy track that led toward lanterns now visible as smears of yellow in the murk.

ii

Even in San Francisco, Amanda had seldom seen such a confusion of humanity as she did that Sunday morning.

Hopeful straggled for more than half a mile along the bank of the Feather's branch, hemmed in on the landward side by nearly perpendicular hills covered with dark firs. The camp consisted exclusively of improvised housing-tents, scrap-lumber hovels and even a number of large packing cases from which the sides had been removed. Inside one of these, a man lay reading. In another, a couple of bearded miners played cards.

Amanda kept her hat brim pulled down as she and Israel rode along the main street. She saw no women anywhere. Men milled aimlessly on either side. Most were white, but here and there she spied a darker face: a Mexican, a Chilean. Two stocky youngsters appeared to be Kanakas from Hawaii. Most of the miners were dressed as Jared had been-heavy coats and trousers. There was an almost universal display of mustaches and chin whiskers.

Being hatless, Israel immediately attracted attention.

A group lounging outside a tent identified as Sacramento Tom's started pointing. One man lobbed a stone. Another shouted, "Ain't no claims for niggers here!"

Israel went rigid. Amanda laid a hand on his arm. He swallowed and gazed straight ahead.

Inside Sacramento Tom's, the fiddle scraper swung into "The Old Oaken Bucket." A man approached Amanda's mule, weaving. He doffed a filthy felt hat.

"Welcome, pilgrim! You don right, comin' to Hopeful. We're takin' it out of the ground with jackknives-"

Head down, she didn't respond. The man shrugged, executed a half-turn, unbuttoned his pants and began to urinate in the mud.

On Amanda's left, three bearded fellows were carrying a wounded man out of another gambling tent, to the amusement of a small crowd. Had this been the source of the shots? She heard one of the watchers yell to someone in the tent, "Frenchie, you be in miner's court at five sharp. The court'll decide whether Dick provoked you. That is"-a glance at the wounded man being borne away-"if Dick's still alive to state his case."

A somewhat larger tent on the right announced itself as the bear flag palace. From all the lanterns burning inside, some positioned above others, Amanda realized an enterprising soul had somehow rigged an upstairs section for the hotel. Immediately beyond the Palace, a general store-another tent-was doing a brisk business.

Out in front, a shirtsleeved clerk waved a pair of boots to half a dozen customers. "Cowhide, double-soled, triple-pegged and guaranteed waterproof. Fit your road-smashers exactly! Who's going to start with a bid of two and a half ounces? Do I hear two and a half ounces of dust-?"

"You hear three!"

"Three and a half!"

"Four!"

Before Amanda passed by, the boots sold for nine ounces of dust. She admired the auctioneer's audacity.

She was so intent on watching the auction's conclusion, she failed to see another man, more tipsy than the first, who came lurching toward her mule from the left. He stumbled against the animal. The mule brayed, bucked-and Amanda went toppling off.

She struck on her right side, sinking three or four inches into the ooze and gasping for air. Her cheeks and forehead were splattered with mud. Israel tried to control his nervous mule as Amanda gained her knees. She grabbed for the top of her head. Her hat had fallen off! The tipsy gentleman, pink-faced, middle-aged and bearded, gaped. "God bless us all, a woman! Madam"-he extended a pudgy hand-"Otto Plankveld, late of Albany, New York. Allow me to assist you-"

"No, thanks, I'm all right," Amanda said, jumping up and jamming her hat on her head-too late.

"A woman! The Dutchman's got a woman!"

"Ah, he's just blind drunk again-"

"No, you are. She's standin' right out there!"

Instantly, men rushed toward Amanda from both sides. The commotion spread, attracting others from up and down the street. The damp air grew so full of alcohol fumes, she might have been inside a distillery. Poor Otto Plankveld was promptly elbowed to the rear of the crowd. Hands reached out. Teeth shone in sudden grins.

"Hey, dearie, you a workin' girl?"

"How much for a toss in bed?"

"How about in the mud? Is that cheaper?"