Comstock Lode

Chapter One

Chapter 1


It began with a dream, a dream that ended in horror.

It began in a thatched cottage with wind around it and rain beating on the shutters, with a flagstone floor and the smell of fish frying, and his mother putting blue plates on the table and his father sitting by the fire. It began in Cornwall, in England, in 1849.

It began with listening to the storm blowing in from the sea and the fire hissing from occasional drops that fell down the chimney.

It began with Val Trevallion's father saying, "Mary, we are going to America."

His mother stopped, holding a blue plate in her two hands, staring at his father.

"We are going to California, to the goldfields. There will be no more mines for our son, and this day I have decided."

Tom Trevallion leaned over and knocked his pipe empty of ash on the edge of the hearth. "Tomorrow we will go to Gunwalloe."

"But aren't there mines in the goldfields?"

"It is placer-mining like we tinners used to do before the deep mines began. A man need not go underground there, nor a lad, either.

"Look at him! He has been a year ... read full excerpt from: Comstock Lode ebook