Story Excerpt: Son of Sal

A restless energy rippled through Roaring Camp that day. The year was 1850, a time when brawls were as common as the dust underfoot, yet this disturbance was different, something beyond the ordinary that drew the entire camp away from their usual haunts. Ditches and claims lay abandoned. Even “Tuttle’s Grocery,” notorious for its stoic gamblers who continued their poker hands even as French Pete and Ka-naka Joe’s deadly duel unfolded over the bar, had emptied. Its regulars now joined the grow-ing crowd that swarmed around a rough-hewn cabin at the fringe of the clearing. Hushed conversations hummed through the air, punc-tuated by a name that echoed, laden with a mix of curiosity and foreboding: “Cherokee Sal.” I had traveled three hundred years to see her to-night.

I had disguised myself as a man heading to a claim further west but resting in Roaring Camp for the week awaiting my claim partner, a feat easy to do before the days of ubiquitous identi-fication. When the camp’s folk wandered to-ward her home, I attached myself the thong.

She was a coarse and rough woman. At that time, she was the only woman in Roaring Camp, and was just then lying in sore extremity when she most needed the ministration of her own sex. Everything I knew about her suggest-ed she was dissolute, abandoned, and irre-claimable. She suffered a martyrdom hard enough to bear even when veiled by sympa-thizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness. It was, perhaps, part of the expia-tion of whatever sin she committed that, at a moment when she most lacked her sex’s intui-tive tenderness and care, she met only the half-contemptuous faces of her masculine associ-ates.

Yet a few of the spectators were, I think, touched by her sufferings. A man I learned lat-er was Sandy Tipton thought it was “rough on Sal,” and, in the contemplation of her condi-tion, for a moment rose superior to the fact that he was a man with an ace and two jacks in his sleeve.

Deaths were by no means uncommon in Roaring Camp, but a birth was a new thing en-tirely. People had been dismissed to the camp effectively, finally, and with no possibility of return; but this was the first time that anybody had been introduced ab initio. Hence the ex-citement.

“You go in there, Stumpy,” said a prominent citizen known as “Kentuck,” addressing one of the loungers. “Go in there, and see what you can do. You’ve had experience in these things.”

Perhaps there was a fitness in the selection. Stumpy, in other climes, had been the putative head of two families. In fact, it was owing to some legal informality in these proceedings that Roaring Camp—a city of refuge—was in-debted to his company. The crowd approved the choice, and Stumpy was wise enough to bow to the majority. The door closed on the extempore surgeon and midwife, and the peo-ple of Roaring Camp collectively sat down outside and waited.

Before I came to 1850, I had thoroughly re-searched what I was getting myself into. The camp numbered over a hundred men. One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, but all were reckless. Physically they exhibited no indication of their past lives and character. The greatest danger had a cherub’s face, with a profusion of blonde hair; Oakhurst, a gambler, wore Hamlet’s mel-ancholy air and intellectual abstraction; the most courageous man was scarcely over five feet in height, with a soft voice and an embar-rassed, timid manner. The term “roughs” ap-plied to them was a distinction rather than a definition. Perhaps in the minor details of fin-gers, toes, ears, etc., the camp may have been deficient, but these slight omissions did not detract from their aggregate force. The strong-est man had only three fingers on his right hand; the best shot had but one eye.

In every way imaginable, these men were or-thogonal to the comfortable and well-fed popu-lation of 2138, and while I did my best to blend in, I was not yet prepared to remove a pristine white tooth or cut a scar into my skin.

Such was the physical aspect of the men that were dispersed around the cabin. The camp lay in a triangular valley between two hills and a river. The only outlet was a steep trail over the summit of a hill that faced the cabin, now il-luminated by the rising moon. Sal might have seen it from the rude bunk whereon she lay, winding like a silver thread until it was lost in the stars above.

A fire of withered pine boughs added socia-bility to the gathering. By degrees the natural levity of Roaring Camp returned. Bets were freely offered and taken regarding the result. Three to five that “Sal would get through with it;” even that the child would survive; side bets as to the sex and complexion of the coming stranger. In the midst of an excited discussion, an exclamation came from those nearest the door, and the camp stopped to listen. Above the swaying and moaning of the pines, the swift rush of the river, and the crackling of the fire rose a sharp, querulous cry—one unlike anything heard before in the camp. The pines stopped moaning, the river to rush, and the fire to crackle. Nature had stopped to listen, too.