Old Spudge is telling him a story, something he’d read in the newspapers back when they were still in San Francisco, long before he ever thought to find himself in Downieville. “There was a woman lynched here, the first woman ever to be lynched in California. It stuck with me,” Old Spudge says. “Terrible story.
“Juanita Something or Other. Twenty-six years old. And little. Slip of a girl. Stabbed a miner, popular fellow. Lots of friends. So they dragged her from the courthouse by her hair all the way to the river here. Rigged a scaffold. That’s when Juanita really showed her sand. Put the noose around her own neck, shouted, ‘Adios, se?ors,’ and jumped into eternity. That’s the reason I remember it so well. Because of the sand.” Old Spudge’s eyes, barely visible beneath his hat and above his scarf, are red and watery. He loves a woman with sand.
By all reports, Joe Cannon had tried to break Juanita’s door down the night before she killed him. He went back the next day, either to apologize or to finish what he’d started; here reports vary.
The press had mostly taken the woman’s side. She had every right to defend herself, they said. Mob action （and against a woman!） was a stain on the whole state. She would still be alive today if she’d been white, they said. It was the newspapers that gave her that operatic ending. They also changed her name. She was never Juanita. She was Josefa.
What Old Spudge is trying to tell Edwin is that they’ll soon be performing Othello for a lynch mob. Edwin might want to calibrate his Iago accordingly.
But the play never happens. Instead, only a few hours later, a tremendous blizzard arrives. The town is buried in ten feet of snow. It would be nice to think Josefa sent this. Adios, se?ors.
The situation becomes dire. Food is running out and the miners dig through the snow to the store only to find that the shelves are empty. Dan Waller holds a meeting in his hotel room. It’s larger than the room Edwin and Old Spudge share, and redolent of pipe smoke and a recently emptied chamber pot.
The women gather together on the rumpled bed. Edwin stands by the window, looking out at the white undulation of the yard, the air filled with whirling snowflakes. The curtain is red and velvet and cold to the touch.
Dan tells them to pack up and quickly. He’s a big man with a thick mustache. He plays the heroes, but without his make-up, he looks more like a no-nonsense barkeep. “No one here has food to spare for us,” he says. “So we should get as far as we can before nightfall.” The wind and snow are so thick, Edwin thinks they’ll be traveling blind. Cold, hungry, and blind.
Grass Valley, their destination, is forty miles away. It’s good they left the wagons and sets there. Otherwise, they would have had to abandon them here.
The three women ride their horses, wrapped in coats and blankets. The four men lead, forcing the path. The road out of Downieville begins with a steep climb. The men must stamp the soft snow down with their boots, through drifts as high as their waists. Edwin’s breath is shallow and painful, the air so cold it rattles like nails in his lungs. He keeps his eyes down, blocking the wind and snow as much as he can with his hat brim.
Their progress is agonizingly slow. Edwin imagines days passing, the sun moving unseen overhead, the moon waxing and waning, the seasons turning on their wheel while on the ground below, Edwin takes one step and waits and then takes another. He wonders if he might freeze mid-step. He wonders if his hands might actually be warmer if he took off his gloves, curled his icy fingers together. He tries it and they aren’t. He warms them under the saddle blanket of his horse while he walks beside. Surely he would be warmer if they could only walk faster. The wind dies down, which is a great mercy.
But now the daunting horizon of mountains is visible ahead.
Edwin wonders how the women are doing. He wonders if they’re frightened as well as cold. He thinks about Dan’s wife, Emma. No one would say she was pretty, but she has an expressive, compelling face. She commands the stage—Edwin can see this without understanding how she does it. He thinks about this a lot. He makes himself think about it now. He trips over an exposed branch. Maybe Dan has lost the road. Maybe they won’t be found until the snow melts in the spring. His scarf is wet and icy from his own breath and sometimes freezes to his cheek. He can’t be sure he still has toes.
The horses exhale loudly, unhappily. When they started, Old Spudge tried to urge them onwards with songs—“Old Dan Tucker,” “The Pope He Leads a Happy Life,” and “Whar Did You Cum From?” Now, except for their footsteps, the troupe is silent. No birds call. No water runs. Edwin tries to conjure the heat of Panama, how hard it was to breathe that thick cloying air. He tries to remember it so vividly he feels it, but he’s not that kind of actor.
They trudge forward. On the way in, they’d passed an abandoned miner’s cabin and Dan had hoped to reach it before nightfall. But they’ve been walking now for some time in the moonlight, and they don’t know if it’s still ahead or if they missed it. On a downward slope, they come instead on a different cabin, a ruin really, only a corner still standing. But there’s a bit of roof overhead and under the collapse of the walls, some wood dry enough to burn. They make a fire and gather around it, drinking boiled snow for supper. Edwin hangs his scarf near the flames and the ice in it steams away.
The fire suffers from the limitations of fires—one’s back can be warm or one’s front, but not both. With the help of blankets, Edwin thaws and as he does so, his body begins to shake. He shivers more uncontrollably now that he’s warmer than he did while walking. His teeth rattle and he’s never quite warm enough to sleep.
In the morning, they begin again. They’ve been walking now, on and off, for twenty-eight hours.
Then, a miracle. They come down from the mountains. The snow thins on the ground and the sun shines. They’re all able to ride the rest of the way. Edwin’s a good, bold rider and the minute he swings into the saddle, the whole affair becomes a grand adventure, something to write home about.
Later, he’s settled on a chair in Grass Valley, in the Golden Gate Saloon, with his legs stretched in front of him, dry and warm, a meal in his belly, a drink in his hand, and a fire at his feet. He’s in a comfortable, dozy, immortal mood. In his nineteen years, he’s survived fire, water, plague, and ice. He was born with a caul. What can possibly hurt him? He might just sleep in the chair. Or he might rouse himself, go and see if he can find the girl he visited last time they passed through.
He does neither. Instead, Edwin picks up an old edition of The Sacramento Weekly Union.
He reads that his father died on November 30th.
Today’s date is January 12th.
* * *
—
Night falls. Edwin is wandering, sobbing, drunk and alone, along the main street in the bright moonlit snow when he sees his father coming towards him. His father wears no costume, but is dressed as himself in his stained coat and shabby hat. Edwin stops to wait for him. “？‘Cut off, even in the blossoms of my sin,’？” his father says. A bobbing lantern shines through his body. “Honestly, I’m sick of it. You do it.”
As the light grows brighter, his father dims, finally vanishing completely. The man holding the lantern is Old Spudge. “I’m here to fetch you back, boy,” he says.