Scryer's Gulch

Episode 2: Red Eye Gravy and Fellow Travelers

Before we go on, I thought I'd best give you an idea what Scryer's Gulch looked like in those days.

The first sight you saw about four miles out of town were the charcoal kilns, rising like giant beehives just off the road. Thirty-seven cords of wood per kiln every time they fired them up, and those things ran day and night--you need a lot of charcoal to smelt hermetauxite, and then there are the blacksmiths to think of. Jed Bonham owned those kilns, but I suppose that's no surprise.

The miners' camp was next, rank upon rank of bunkhouses, tents, tiny shacks and cabins, enough to hold the hundreds of men who worked at the mines. It wasn't just the "BB"--the Big Blavatsky; there were the Honest Alastair, the Li'l Levy, the By-and-By, and those were just the major ones. Up in the hills, men worked small claims hoping for the next big strike, watching as they dug for their pendulums to tremble in the presence of hermetauxite ore--usually in vain.

Now, the greenhorn prospectors--there was box office business for the confidence men. They'd set up as seers, claim they could feel where the hermetauxite was. All seers can feel that, depending on how big the strike and how strong the seer. Problem is, all the real seers were either out prospecting for themselves, or working for Bonham. The tricksters worked in two-man teams. One would buy a worthless claim and pretend to be a prospector. Then some sap from back east would hire the other of them as a seer, and wouldn't you know, he'd find a big strike right there on that empty piece of nothing. The first trickster would act all reluctant to sell, say (honestly) that the claim wouldn't pay out, but that he liked the area and might build a little cabin there some day, right by the stream where "his ol' dog were laid teh rest," or some other piece of sentimental claptrap. The greenhorn always thought he was the smart one and the claim-holding con man was the hayseed. The sap would bid the price up to where the "reluctant" claim holder could not refuse. Then the con men would usually skip town for a while, until the greenhorn abandoned the claim and went back home. They'd come back, pick the claim up again for nothing, or buy another for a dollar, and be at it again.

But I digress.

At the low end of the main street stood the stables, the undertaker, the butcher, the office of the Voice of the Gulch newspaper--the one Bonham didn't own yet--one of two general stores. Then Prake's Hardware, a few saloons, a dressmaker, a haberdasher, and the ethergraph office among other businesses. Right about between the high end and the low end stood the Hopewell Hotel, which is why it was the stagecoach stop: convenient to everything, as Julian Hopewell liked to say. Above Hopewell's was the office of the Independent Mountaineer--Bonham's own paper--Mamzelle's Palace, a few more saloons, the barber shop, the other general store, the assayer's office, the bank, the Methodic Church (the Church of Our Lady of the Great Hullabaloo was just outside of town on account of the noise), and toward the end, the Hotel LeFay. The side streets branching out from the main street held the new schoolhouse, freshly painted red and white with its little bell tower atop it and the yard fenced in white pickets, and private homes. The Prakes and the Runnels lived next door to one another in graceful but relatively modest houses on Jackson Street.

Bonham's house was another matter.

It sat up a ways on the hillside, looming over the town as if to put the whole in its shadow. At least one of its real glass windows always caught the sun, paradoxically glittering and blinding the folks down below. We'll get a better look inside that pile of timber another time. Let's go back to the Hopewell. If you were looking closely at the second floor of the new addition, you might've seen Miss Annabelle's black cat slink out the window.

Misi curved his tail around the balustrade, then dropped lightly onto the kitchen porch roof. He could hear Ralph inside, half muttering, half humming as he fried ham; Misi could smell biscuits just about ready to come out of the oven, and heard the scraping of the pan that meant Ralph was making redeye gravy. Annabelle would be happy at breakfast.