Oakley Hall - Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

That item was published six years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

The girls are sold at about the age of five by their parents. Syndicates farm as many as eight hundred girls, bringing them along to an acceptable age, at which time their prices might be seventy-five or eighty dollars in China. In California they are worth from two hundred to a thousand, depending upon their degree of attractiveness. Pay for their services ranges from fifteen cents to a dollar.

The crib girls on Jackson and Washington Streets, and in the alleys, are exposed like chickens in cages. The cribs are ten or twelve feet wide, containing a front room and back, divided by a curtain. Reformers claim that up to 90 percent of the girls are sick. Their indentured prostitute contracts, which are usually for eight years, add on two weeks for every sick day. If they try to escape their indenture is changed to life. If they are too sick to work they are transported to a “hospital,” which they do not depart alive.

I played baseball with Elmer Nix once more, at the new baseball diamond at the Central Park at 8th and Market, both of us playing for teams to which we no longer rightfully belonged, for Nix had quit the police to become a dispatcher for the San Francisco Stock Brewery. I had the pleasure of throwing him out at second base in a double play.

The Girtcrest Corridor Bill passed in early 1886.

Captain Isaiah Pusey became San Francisco chief of police in 1891.

I continued to write occasional pieces for the Chronicle , on events, scandals; profiles and expositions for tourists and newcomers to the City; on Emperor Norton, on Sarah Althea Hill, Judge Terry and Senator Sharon, on King Kalakaua and Queen Liliuokalani, Lucky Baldwin, William Ralston, the Big Four, Boss Buckley and Boss Ruef. My extended piece on the Chinese slave girls was published by Bret Harte in the Atlantic Monthly . It caused a stir, and my journalistic fortunes were much enhanced.

I published some work that gave pain to the Democratic bosses of the City, the Republican bosses of the state, and the Southern Pacific Railroad. If I was by no means as brilliant as Bierce, I was not as cynical either. Later I published several books and collections on San Francisco history.

I think my father eventually became as proud of me as if I had been a fire chief. He continued to distribute boodle in the legislature on behalf of Railroad issues. We met for supper about once a month at one of the better San Francisco restaurants, the Gent paying for the repast even after I became well able to do so. The Former-Spade messages to Bierce were never mentioned, my father’s single act of disloyalty to his employers.

Some years after her marriage, I met Mrs. Sloat on Geary Street. Amelia was with another handsome young lady, both of them dressed to the nines with elegant hats and tight bodices with low necklines that revealed flesh as smooth as chamois, both of them laden with packages of purchases. They were up from Woodside for the day.

The friend went to the City of Paris while Amelia and I had tea. Her gloved hands fluttered. Once she touched my hand. She smiled and laughed like the Amelia I remembered. She seemed happy. Her husband was a dear man, she said. She loved him very much. She called him “Marshy.”

“I think I have made my husband happy,” she said.

“How could you not?” I said.

She gazed at me with her eyebrows rising up her forehead and her brown eyes filling with tears.

Looking down, she said, “Marshy is ill. It is doubtful that he can live for two more years, Doctor Byng tells me. He is very brave. I will be a very wealthy woman, Tom.”

I didn’t say anything to that.

“Have you read any good books lately?” she asked, changing the subject.

I said I had not had much time to read, lately.

“I have been rereading Jane Austen. She is very fine.”

“I guess so,” I said. I thought about the social elite at Amelia’s wedding. I said I didn’t much like Jane Austen.

“All the characters think about is money,” I said.

Amelia looked as though I had slapped her. She rose, daubing at her eyes. “You have not yet learned irony,” she said. She gathered up her packages, awkward in her haste.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “Please forgive me!” But I didn’t know if she had heard me, for she was gone with a swish of her brown velvet skirt past the table.

I sat alone with my eyes stinging as though they had been dipped in acid.

I remembered Bierce saying that perseverance in one’s principles might be praiseworthy, but obduracy in perseverance was stupidity.

I called on Senator Jennings in his room at the Grand Hotel during a court recess. An Irish maid with a face like a side of bacon let me in and went to see if the senator was sleeping. She ushered me into sickroom stink, Jennings braced sitting in a big bed with a half dozen medicine bottles on the table beside the bed. His face was gray as blotting paper.

“I remember you, you’re Bierce’s boy Friday,” he said. He did not sound hostile. “I know your daddy. Is Clete still working for the SP?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Working for the Railroad,” he almost sang, as though he could make a song of it. “The Railroad dollar did exasperate those that wasn’t getting it. What’s that nasty son-of-a-bitch Bierce doing now?”

“He’s living in Sunol, writing ghost stories about the War.”

“Tell him I don’t hold no grudges,” he said. “We’re going to beat it this time. Bos’s just that much smarter than they are.

“I’ll live to see it,” he went on. His lips fluttered when he spoke, as though there were no muscles in them. “Sworn I’d live to see it. We’ll beat that one, but there’s another I’m not going to beat.”

I said I was sorry to see him laid up.

“See that glass of water there? Would you measure exactly twelve drops from the brown bottle into it? Otherwise I’m going to be yowling like a catamount with a cactus up his ass in about two minutes.”

I measured in the laudanum, and he swigged the water down with an explosive “Ahhhh!”

“Tell Bierce it was McNair that had Gorton cold-cocked,” he went on. “Al was one cadging, complaining, nasty piece of work. It was Nat McNair.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said and asked if he minded talking about George Payne.

“Don’t mind talking about it if you ain’t going to print it.”

“I won’t print anything you don’t want me to.”

“Promises made,” he explained. “Guess who’s paying Bos Curtis.”

I said I expected it was Lady Caroline Stearns.

He nodded once, grinning, and wiped his damp lips with the sleeve of his nightshirt.

“The woman you hate.”

“Son,” he said, “when the crabs are chewing on your innards, and old man Death is standing by with his scythe pointed at you, you don’t have time for hating. I am pleased to say I am over it. It is like shedding off your shoulder a hundred-pound sack of shit. Anyway I’d be hanged by the neck by now if it wasn’t for Bos Curtis and that lady paying him. Elza’s still sticking by his guns; that was her agreement with Bierce. But Bos is a kind of favor a man don’t have any right to expect.”