Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

So, having completed the YA novel about the emigrant trail, I was thinking over how to make it into a series, along the lines of Little House on the Prairie. The trouble is that with my original protagonist, Sally, in West Towards the Sunset, being twelve years old in that book … she would grow up. I wanted to keep the main character of a series as a tween or teen, but still incorporate their participation in all kinds of interesting events over the following twenty years after 1846. And then I had a thought – each YA novel could feature a subsequent tween or teen in the Kettering family, starting with Sally’s brother Jon as a main character … and then with two more siblings!
And that was inspiring – especially since the milieu of the various precious metal rushes would allow more liberty to a male character … so on with the follow-up, featuring Jon Kettering! Then I am plotting taking the younger sister, presently a baby, to Virginia City in the Silver Rush, and the very youngest Kettering boy, as yet unborn, working in a newspaper office with a very young Samuel L. Clemens. Each book, as in the Texas frontier series will be free-standing, but linked. So behold — the first half chapter of Hills of Gold!

(I promise – I am also working on the final wrap-up of the Luna City Chronicles. Yes, I can multi-task…)

It was a small thing, that bright pebble in the millrace – but what an avalanche that it started! I was there at the very start of it all, because Pa was a carpenter, working at the job he had been hired to work on, and he took along me and our sort of foster brother, Henry Steitler to help, early in the winter of 1847. Henry was sixteen then, and well-grown; he loved to build things, and work out better ways to make things work. He counted as a man, as things went, then. His father had died in an accident on the trail, and well… he had been part of our family ever since. He was tall and fair-haired, like me, so people just naturally took us to be blood-kin.
My name is Jonathan Mathew Kettering, and I had turned seven years old, on the early winter day that our wagon company came down the Yuba River track into that wide valley in the center of California. When I was eight years old, Pa and Henry and I went to work on Mr. Sutter’s new sawmill, in the hills. I wasn’t interested in any kind of school that involved reading books, to Ma’s despair. I escaped Ma’s notion of lessons any ways that I could, preferring to run wild in the woods and hills with my best pals, Will and Jimmy Greenwood. The Greenwood boys were part Indian and came by those ways naturally. Their older brothers were in the trail-guiding trade, their pa was Old Man Greenwood, the famous mountain man.
“Those wild boys are the worst kind of influence on Jon!” Ma exclaimed, the evening that Pa came home from Sutter’s place and told us that he was considering taking me to work on the sawmill in the hills. “Indeed – take Jonny-cakes with you, Elkanah.” (Johnny-cakes was my nickname among the family.)
“Might as well start him off, learning a good trade,” Pa agreed, and so that was what happened. I didn’t mind much. I really didn’t care anything for book learning, as it made my head ache something fierce.
We Ketterings and Henry Steitler had arrived in California as part of a company of ox-train immigrants in the trail season two years previous to the time of the story that I am telling. My Pa, Elkanah Kettering was captain of that company. Pa was a sensible man, and there was an old mountain man with us, Choctaw Joe Bayless, who knew the trail and the conditions in the west. Choctaw Joe had all that, as well as acquaintanceship with many of the tribes that we encountered. He knew their languages and their ways, right well enough, to ease our passage, and our company arrived safely in California, with the addition of a baby girl born on the very day that Pa’s company tackled the last high pass through the mountains.
A wagon company which followed the same trail as us, some weeks later had not such good fortune. They were stranded in deep snow for months. Half of them starved to death before rescue parties could be organized and come to their aid. Their awful suffering has been warning and a cautionary tale, ever since. My sister Sally’s best friend was one of the survivors – Ginny Reed. Sally threatened to scalp me good, if I ever asked Ginny anything about it. Ginny didn’t like to dwell on it, none.
So that was how Pa planned our winter in the hills – helping to build Captain Sutter’s sawmill. Ma and my older sister Sally were taken up with caring for our new baby sister, Emily-Anne. Our womenfolk were all planning to spend the months that we were away in our small cabin, on a patch of land near Sutter’s place, a settlement which was growing right crowded, even then. I had no interest in babies, anyway, no more than I had in Ma’s school lessons. Pa was saving up to purchase a nice tract of land closer to the coast, where he could plant wheat and run cattle, Ma could have her splendid garden, and we all live together in a big new house that he would build for us, rather than the cramped little cabin of unpeeled logs. Well, that was Pa’s intent, anyway. Before things changed.
Captain Sutter was the big impresario of those parts in the earlies. He had ambitious plans, when he hired Pa along with Mr. Marshall and a crew of Mormon boys to build a sawmill, on the south branch of the American River. Those hills that were like knees to that tall mountain range, mountains that were a barrier between California and the desert that we had crossed barely two years before. The river poured down from the foothills, and Captain Sutter hoped that the spring flood would power his mill. Pa needed the money to buy that tract of land that he had his eye on, so he took Captain Sutter’s coin. Captain Sutter needed lumber, lumber to build all those houses for those new settlers coming to California, now that it looked likely for it to become an American territory. The war with Mexico over it all seemed likely to be settled in our favor.
Anyway, we took off, up the rough track to the hills above the American River, just as winter set a white veil over the high mountain peaks beyond. Pa drove a wagon filled with supplies, canvas for tents, and trunks full of carpentering tools. I rode in the wagon with him, and Henry rode his tamed Indian paint pony that his father had bought from some Kanzas Indians, back when we started out on the trail. That pony was getting real-well mannered, finally, although it wasn’t anything for looks.
There were a number of picks and shovels among the gear in the wagon, and some wheel-barrows, as well.
“You see, Johnny-cakes,” Pa explained, “We’ll have to dig a mill-race, to channel the water from the river to turn a wheel that runs the saw. Dig the race, build the mill – all from the bare ground.”
“A lot of work,” Henry added. His pony was picking a careful way along side our jolting wagon. “But it saves a lot of work, in the long run.”
“A proper mill, so I am told, saves the work of thirty men working a pit-saw, day and night, sawing lumber from logs,” Pa explained. I thought about how I’d much rather be with Pa and Henry, working at building that saw-mill no matter how hard it might be, rather than doing home chores for Ma and enduring her efforts to teach me book-learning.

(A snippet from Luna City 12, in progress; a story from when Letty McAllister and Stephen Wyler were children in the 1930s … investigating a case of mysterious visitors to a neighbor in need of help…)

“Who – or what do you think is doing Mrs. Allison’s housekeeping, while she’s away in Karnesville?” Stephen ventured. He wasn’t one for believing in fairy stories either. Douglas considered the matter gravely, before he replied.

“I think that someone, or more than one someone – since the note said “we” it must be more than one – who are doing Mrs. Allison a good deed is human, but for some reason, they can’t show themselves.” Douglas looked earnestly at the young faces, gathered in the dim shade inside the tipi-hut, and ventured. “I wonder if they aren’t kids. Kids like us – and for some reason, they are afraid to show themselves. They’re on the road, like all those hobos, looking for work and a meal – and they don’t want anyone to see them. But they have a baby with them. And I find that real worrisome. Kids with a baby – they ought to be able to ask for help. From Chief McGill. Mr. Drury, or our father. The Reverend Rowbottom.”

“Strangers,” Retta commented softly. “If they were from anywhere around here, they’d know to be able to trust Reverend Rowbottom, or Chief McGill … certainly the mayor of Luna City.”

The mayor of Luna City was Letty and Douglas’ father, and there was no man in Karnes County who was a softer touch for the troubled, ailing or indigent, as long as they were truly in the condition and not freeloaders looking for a handout.

“We ought to do something about that,” Stephen said then – very decisively. He was the only son of the richest rancher in the county; a family well-accustomed to doing something positive regarding any matter which attracted concern.

“What ought we do?” Artie looked around the circle of faces. He was not entirely gormless, but one of those children made to be a follower, which is how he had come to latch on to the McAllister siblings and Stephen Wyler.

“I think we out to set a watch.” Douglas sounded as if he had thought a plan out very carefully. Just as Stephen loved movies and books about bold pirates and scurvy dogs on the Spanish Main, Douglas was devoted to the exploits and the logical deductions of Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective.  “Letty and Retta ought to watch Mrs. Allison’s house and see who comes there during the day while she is away in Karnesville. It’s summer; school is out until fall, so no one would think anything of kids just hanging around. Meanwhile, Stephen and Artie and I will go around every business in town and see if there are kids that we don’t know hanging around, looking to cadge work.”

“Everyone around here notes strangers,” Artie Vaughn nodded an assent to the plan. “You should make us up a list, so we can split up and save time.”

“Let’s do it,” Douglas, being an intelligent boy, did not disdain sensible suggestions from other members of the club. He nodded, in slightly surprised agreement, pleased that Artie had been absorbing Sherlock Holmes’ logical methods.  “And meet tomorrow afternoon at four, to compare notes.”

Letty told her mother that she was going over to spend the day at Retta’s, once she had finished her daily chores. Retta told her mother that they were going to spend the day outside, and Retta’s mother kindly supplied them with a thermos of lemonade and some sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. The mothers of members of the Club were well-accustomed to their offspring spending the summertime daylight hours on kid-business of their own.  All the various mothers asked – and not with any real conviction that such requests would be scrupulously observed – was that their various activities not be physically risky, unlawful or likely to involve blood being shed.

Retta and Letty both were working towards Scouting badges in First Aid and had – so far – been able to staunch any flows of blood resulting from various misadventures, without drawing parental attention to them. Douglas and Stephen were quite grateful for this ability.

The girls took some books with them, and a pair of bird-watching binoculars which had belonged to Letty’s grandfather; the architect who had laid out the plans for Luna City and designs for all the public buildings, back in the waning decades of the previous century. Letty had to borrow the binoculars from her father’s study – but he was not a bird-watcher, and in any case, would be in town all the day long at his office, so the binoculars would not be missed. Retta borrowed her family’s wind-up alarm clock, likewise hoping that it would not be missed during the day. Douglas had suggested that the girls keep a log, noting the times, and for that, a clock was essential.

Retta’s father had built a treehouse in the far-distant quadrant of their yard, for the benefit of Retta’s three much-older brothers. Those brothers were now all well-grown and distaining such childish amusements, so Retta had the treehouse to herself and her friends. It was a simple platform of weathered planks with a crude waist-high rail around it, nestled in the center of a many-branched oak tree – a perch which offered a good view of the back of the Allison house across a meadow of unmown grass and the long dirt driveway between it and the mailbox on the main paved road. Since it was veiled by leaves all around, the platform could not be seen by a casual viewer. Anyone coming to or from the Allison house would be seen. It was the ideal position, as Douglas had pointed out, to surveil the Allison’s place. Retta and Letty climbed up the rough ladder formed by planks nailed into the oak tree trunk, emerging through a small trapdoor in the middle of the platform.

They had also taken the precaution of bringing some books and a pair of cushions to soften what they expected to be a day-long vigil. Letty loved spending time in the treehouse, for when the wind strengthened, the platform swayed gently, like a ship in a rolling sea.

“There goes Mrs. Allison,” Retta made a tidy note. “Eight-forty. Just in time to catch the 9 o’clock bus to Karnesville. The milkman already has been – she took in the milk and let the chickens out. And so has Sgt. Drury’s car. He must be going to Karnesville, too.”

John Drury was an older man, once a Texas Ranger, who served as a detective for the Luna City Police Department, at such times as required extra-special detecting skills. Crime did not often wave, in Luna City; such offenses as occurred were most usually quite transparent.

“Eight-forty,” Letty double-checked the time. “I hope this isn’t a day when the brownies don’t show up. I want to be the ones who solve the mystery.”

“Stephen was going to go to all the shops on Town Square,” Retta ticked them off on her fingers. “All the ones who might have hired boys to run errands, or something. Artie was going to Bodie’s, and to the Cattleman Hotel.”

“Douglas was going to the Tip-Top first thing,” Letty continued, “And then to speak to the folks at Gonzalez’ garage. He thinks that because the Gonzalez place is so close to the main road – that was where someone looking for work might go, after asking at the Tip-Top. They’re going to meet up at noon and go around to everyone that they might have missed in the morning.”

“Makes sense,” Retta agreed, as she opened her book. “I think we got the easy part, though.”

“The boring part,” Letty propped the binoculars on the railing, and focused them on the Allison’s back porch. They had agreed to alternate every half an hour.

It hardly had been forty minutes before Letty looked up from her book and spotted the girl, out on the county road that ran past the Allison and Livingston home places.

“Look now – over there, just by the mailboxes,” Letty said, softly. “See that girl? She’s pulling a little wagon … an old Liberty Coaster, looks like …”

“I see her,” Retta swung the binoculars around, and trained the lenses on the girl, walking along the roadside verge, pulling the little wagon after her. She was very obviously a girl, as her light brown hair hung down in two braids, although she was wearing faded denim overalls like a boy’s and a baggy shirt several sizes too large for a skinny frame – all this plain to Letty, even without binoculars.  “There’s another in the wagon … could that be the baby they meant – that they needed milk for?”

The girl, the wagon, and the smaller child in it were lost to their sight, momentarily screened by a thicket of hackberry bushes. Retta continued, almost whispering, “She’s … yes, coming down the drive to the Allison place.”

“If they go inside, they’re for certain Mrs. Allison’s brownies,” Letty whispered in reply. The girl with the wagon and smaller sibling was so far away that they might have conversed in normal tones … but the necessity for discretion compelled whispers.

Almost holding their breaths, Retta and Letty watched the girl go to the back door of the Allison place. The strange girl moved confidently, as if she knew what she was about, and had no apprehension about being there. She bent down and picked up the smaller child. Letty thought the smaller child was another girl, for the mop of yellow ringlets, and a baby smock which once might have been pink. Then the two girls vanished into the house – casually, as if they had every right to be there, leaving the wagon by the back porch steps.

“Nine-thirty-five,” Letty looked at the alarm clock, and made a lot in their watch-log. “The brownies are in the house. I wonder how long they will stay?”

“Depends on what Mrs. Allison has asked them to do,” Retta replied. “Say – what do we do when they go?”

Letty thought it over, very carefully. “I think that we should follow them. At least a little way. That way, we can tell the boys where they are staying.”

“They must be staying somewhere,” Retta agreed.

For some time, silence fell in the tree house, broken only by the faint rustle of turning pages, the metallic ticking of the alarm clock, and the slight scuffle as Retta and Letty handed off custody of the binoculars. The girl they were watching appeared in the Allison’s yard three times – once to open the henhouse and scatter feed for them, then again an hour later to sweep the back porch with a broom, and finally at around 1:30 to chase the hens back into the henhouse. Then, she emerged one last time from the house with the smaller girl in her arms. Retta and Letty noted the time and duration, in between bites of their own sandwiches. When the older girl set the blond child in the wagon, and set off down the long drive towards the county road, Retta and Letty were ready.

They crouched behind a stand of overgrown sunflowers by the Livingston’s mailbox until the girls and their wagon had gone past. Letty wondered if they were sisters, although they did not look much alike, or as nearly as she could judge from a close inspection through the binoculars.

“Not too close,” she warned Retta in a breathless whisper. “We don’t want them to see us following them – but we ought to see where they go, from here.”

It helped that neither of the girls looked behind; the older seemed to have all her attention focused on pulling the wagon, and the blonde toddler with the curls was too little to be taking notice of much. But Letty and Retta still lingered behind cover as they found it – overgrown roadside bushes, bends in the road, as it straggled southwards from Luna City itself, in the direction of the derelict abandoned tourist cabins, the burnt-out ruins of the old Sheffield mansion, and the derelict Mills home place.

“I wonder if they’re staying on Old Man Mills’ land,” Retta whispered, “I’d be scared to death of his pet alligators!”

Letty shook her head. “I don’t think they would dare … even if Ol’ Man Mills is practically a hermit, these days. Mrs. Mills is plenty sharp, an’ I don’t see that she would abide strangers, much. Even if they are kids. Those Millses are the biggest bootleggers in Karnes County – everyone says so.”

The girl and her wagon, with the smaller child in it had drawn somewhat farther ahead, lost to the sight of Letty and Retta around a bend in the road. They were nearest to where there remained a lightly-beaten track toward where the mansion had been – now a pile of weathered stones and timbers burnt to ashes and blackened slate shingles thirty years previously. Locals insisted that the low hill above a bend in the river was haunted. When the two girls ventured stealthily around that bed, the road which stretched out before them was entirely empty.

“We’ve lost them!” Retta despaired, but Letty shook her head.

“Maybe not … they weren’t all that far ahead of us. Look, Retta – there’s gaps in the fence, and all those paths leading away from the road. I’ll bet they went through one of them. We ought to look for the tracks that wagon would make in the dust. There’s plenty of spaces between the weeds where wheels and shoes could leave marks.” Letty smiled at her friend and nudged her shoulder. “We’re Scouts! Remember – we should be able to spot tracks!”