How Much Of These Hills Is Gold

Lucy recalls when she first came to Sweetwater. She spends many hours swimming in the river for which the town is named. This is where she first meets Anna. The rich girl gives Lucy gifts of clothing and food. She wants Lucy to move into the mansion that Anna occupies with her father. He rejects the idea, and Lucy goes back to her boardinghouse.

After returning from the river one night, Lucy’s landlady announces that a male visitor is waiting for her. It turns out to be Sam. Lucy observes that if she “learned to go unseen, then Sam spent five years polishing a natural shine brighter” (211). He takes her to a restaurant for a meal. Afterward, he confesses that he has been making the tiger noises and leaving tracks that frighten the town’s inhabitants so he can steal their chickens and beef. The two bump into Anna and Charles on their way home. Lucy lies about her sibling and tells Anna that she and Sam grew up in the same orphanage.

The four young people go to Anna’s house to drink cocoa. Later in the evening, Charles flirts with Lucy. He has been pestering her for months behind Anna’s back. After she sends Charles away, Lucy walks in on Anna kissing Sam.

Anna is ashamed of her behavior. Lucy then confesses that she has been encouraging Charles’s attentions. Anna offers forgiveness, and Lucy realizes that her friend views her as a pet. Lucy thinks, “Anna wants a domestic thing, a harmless thing—Anna’s tigers as different from Lucy’s tigers as Anna’s Charles is different from Lucy’s Charles” (227).

While walking back to the boardinghouse, Lucy spots a gunman waiting on the porch. Sam says he has come for him because Sam owes him money. Lucy impulsively says she will run away with Sam that night. They plan to board a ship for China.

Lucy and Sam walk all night until Sam steals a pair of horses. The farther they travel, the more Lucy realizes how mired she became in her old life: “For five years Lucy let more and more of herself be buried. Sank into Sweetwater’s slow life like a mule in quicksand, too stupid to notice till it was half-drowned” (233-34).

As they travel, Sam confides that Ba told him that Ma ran away. Lucy is shocked. On impulse, she asks Sam to cut her hair short. He does, and she buries her long braid in the ground. The two now travel disguised as men. Sam also confesses that he took some gold, which is why he’s being pursued.

The siblings continue to flee westward while being pursued by Sam’s enemies. Lucy remembers the law that says she and Sam can’t claim any gold. She considers it “a treacherous thing, twisting to sink fangs into them however it can. Better to make their own rules, as Sam always has” (242). They pass through the familiar landscape of their childhood for the last time on their way to the coast.

When Lucy and Sam arrive in San Francisco, Lucy finds the city just as treacherous as the wild landscape she left behind: “Later she’ll learn how hard it is to live at the end of the West. Sometimes the ocean takes a life, sometimes the fog that hides lighthouse beams” (247-48). They go to a brothel that Sam knows, where he can get food and a bath. The madame is named Elske, and her girls are dressed as fantasy figures posed in frames. She tries to entice Lucy to work for her by offering a storybook, but Lucy refuses.

The next day Lucy and Sam haggle with a ship’s captain for the price of their passage. Knowing that they are desperate, the captain increases the fee. They don’t have enough gold left, but Lucy plays cards with local gamblers that night and wins every hand; “for one night, at least, they made the hills hold gold” (260).

Sam tells Lucy how he came by the gold he possesses. He says he and some fellow prospectors stole back gold that was stolen from them after they mined it. They split up their shares and threw the remainder that was too heavy to carry into the ocean. It was a way of giving back what was taken from the land. Now Sam is being pursued by the men who stole the gold in the first place. During their last night onshore, Sam’s foes catch up with them. A fat man and his hired gun threaten to kill Sam if he doesn’t return the gold. Lucy decides to bargain with the fat man alone.

Lucy and the gold man haggle. The only price he will accept is Lucy’s servitude as a prostitute until she works off Sam’s debt. After she agrees, he allows her to say goodbye to her brother. Sam doesn’t want to leave for China until Lucy hits him hard across the face. As he departs, Lucy wonders “if Sam will ever remember her without the shadow of that blow” (267).

Lucy goes to work as one of Elske’s fantasy girls. She quickly reduces her debt once she learns how to read the desires of each of her customers. One of them breaks her nose, accidentally correcting the injury her father inflicted years earlier. Before long, Lucy repays the gold man all that Sam owed him. The man says he will give Lucy a parting gift and asks what she wants. She tries three times to articulate what she would like. In the end, she still can’t say: “She opens her mouth. She wants” (272).