Soul of a Gunslinger

by Jim Cox

  Hide took-on a wide grin as he scooted his chair away from the table and patted his thigh. “Why don’t you sit right here, sweetheart, ‘til we finish our drinks?” Not only did she follow Hide’s instructions and sat on his lap, but she flung her left arm around his neck and started stroking his cheek and lips with her fingers. The girl sure is forward, Lefty thought, but it’s her way to sell more drinks. It looks to me Hide likes her attention and is getting forward with her. If he keeps it up, we’re likely to be in a heap of trouble. The sexual teasing between Hide and the girl went on for several minutes while Lefty sat gawking around the room. Hide, and the girl were laughing and carrying on in a romantic sort of way when Lefty saw the two loud men who appeared to be drunk stand up. They wore pistols on their right sides, and their hammer safety straps were hanging loose. Lefty looked away, not wanting to draw attention, and when he looked back at them, their holsters were empty, and their right hands were behind their backs. Lefty knew trouble was coming, so he slowly reached down and removed the safety rawhide from his gun’s hammer.

  “What going on here? You gringos are not welcomed in here,” one of the men said in a slurry, Spanish dialect as he approached with his gun leveled on Hide. The second man rounded their table with a drawn gun, getting Hide and Lefty in a crossfire if gunplay should occur. When the Mexican man spoke, Hide’s mind left the girl and turned to the voice. Lefty hoped Hide would sit still and let the matter get settled with words, but he didn’t. Instead, he quickly pushed the girl aside and was starting to stand when two gunshots sounded. One bullet hit Lefty’s upper right shoulder and the other, aimed at Hide, hit the girl’s midsection as she was being pushed away. Both Mexican men were taking aim for a second shot when Lefty’s two shots sounded like one. One bullet went through the first man’s heart, and the other bullet hit the second man just above his right eye.

  Seconds later while the gun smoke was settling, Lefty saw Hide standing in shock with his eyes on the groaning girl who had been gut shot. The two dead men were not far away. Lefty could tell the other saloon patrons were standing back waiting until the two gringos left the scene, so he grabbed Hide’s arm and slowly walked back toward the batwings watching for any revenge. As the batwings were swinging closed, Lefty saw the saloon crowd surround the three bodies lying on the floor, and then he heard a man call out the girl was dead.

  They rode north out of Las Angeles on the San Francisco Trail in a gallop. After they’d ridden at a fair speed for nearly an hour, they came to a grove of Mojave Desert trees where they stopped to get organized and make themselves coffee. There was no grass for the horses, but all four of them were relieved of their gear and given a long drink of water. While the coffee water was heating, Lefty tended to his shoulder injury. It wasn’t serious, only a half inch crease along the top of his arm muscle. The pain bothered him more than the wound appeared. Lefty washed the blood off and then wrapped his bandanna under his armpit and over his shoulder which covered the entire injury. After he had finished wrapping and tying his bandanna, Hide handed him a cup of coffee. “I sure am grateful to you for saving my bacon back there at the saloon. I’d be a goner if you weren't looking out for me.” Lefty nodded. There was a long silence before Hide continued with his thoughts on the gunplay. “I don’t even know the saloon’s girl’s name, and she got herself killed because of me. I shouldn’t have been carrying on with her like I was.” Nothing more was said about the saloon killings, and after another cup of coffee, the horses were readied to travel for another couple of hours before stopping for the night. Hide’s mind was on the young saloon girl, and Lefty’s was on the whereabouts of Joe and Frank Ellis.

  Chapter Eight

  Their three-day travel from Las Angeles to Santa Barbara was peaceful. The weather was nice, and even though the landscape was mountainous, the road circled through valleys and lowlands as much as possible, making it easy on the horses. Gold travelers along the way were mostly friendly and a pleasure to talk with.

  Lefty and Hide rode down the streets of Santa Barbara around noon with a sky full of white fluffy clouds, and even though the July heat was only a few days away, the west wind from the ocean made the temperature comfortable. The men had now been away from home for six weeks and were getting antsy to get to the gold fields, so with a half-day of daylight remaining, they didn’t stay long in the town. They did stop at the mercantile for some food items and went to the blacksmith to get Star’s loose shoe repaired.

  “You wouldn’t happen to be Lefty Newman, would ‘ya?” the smithy asked after he had Star’s shoe nailed tight. The question caught Lefty by surprise.

  “Yes, sir; that ain’t my Christian name, but it’s what people call me. How come you know my name?”

  “There were two men by the names of Joe and Frank Ellis who were asking about you a couple days back when they came to town. They said you was most likely ahead of ‘em because they got waylaid in Yuma.”

  “Did they say anything else?” Lefty asked.

  “They said they was going to Monterey and try to catch up with you there.” The smithy stalled for a few seconds and then continued with a lowered head, “They said you shot their brother in the back and killed him, and they’re aiming to do the same to you.”

  “They’re lying’! We were standing face to face when he went for his gun, but he was a mite slow.”

  “They said that ain’t possible. They said their brother was known for his fast draw and there ain’t no way possible you could have beat him; you being a backwoods farm boy.”

  “That’s another lie! I beat him fair and square,” Lefty said with piercing eyes.

  “It don’t make no-never-mind to me, young man, but if I was you, I’d be careful and go around Monterey altogether. Those men mean business and they’ll kill you the minute they lay eyes on ‘ya.”

  “They’ll have to be a lot faster than their brother,” Lefty said with a bit of sarcasm.

  Lefty and Hide left Santa Barbara and rode for a couple of hours before stopping for the night. From there, they rode a bit faster, took shorter rest stops, and stayed in their saddles longer than most times.

  Five days later, Lefty and Hide were sitting on a log a few feet from their campfire holding coffee. The sun was long gone, and they’d just finished supper, even though it was long past time for the meal. Hide had been noticeably quiet all evening, so Lefty called him on it. “I can tell you have something on your mind, Hide. What is it? Go ahead and spit it out.”

  “We’ll be in Monterey in two days if we keep to our travel plans, but I think we ought to take the smithy’s advice and bypass Monterey altogether. There ain’t no need to take a chance on meeting up with those brothers and you getting shot.”

  “We ain’t doing that, Hide. We ain’t running or going out of our way because of those brothers…I ain’t afraid of ‘em.”

  “I know you ain’t afraid of ‘em, Lefty, but if we ride into Monterey it’s nothing more than child’s play; like you want to prove something by killing those two brothers; like you wanna be branded as a gunslinger.”

  “I ain’t no gunslinger,” Lefty said firmly.

  “Maybe not, but you’re sure acting like one. If you kill those two brothers, you can cut six notches on your gun handle, and you’re only nineteen years old.” Lefty looked at Hide with drawn lips, threw his coffee against a tree, and huffed off to bed.

  At first light the next morning, the men were leading their horses to water when Lefty saw Abe limping, so he called out, “Abe has a limp, Hide. He’s favoring his left front leg.” Hide, who was at the head of the pack, looked back and saw the limp, frowned, and then acknowledged Lefty’s comment with a nod. Since the creek was only a short distance away, they continued to the water. When the horses got their fill, Hide examined Abe’s left front leg for swelling or an injury of some kind but found none. Then he raised the horse’s leg and put it between his legs with the hoof pointing upward. “He has a sharp stone lodged in the soft area of his hoof,”
Hide said, “I’ll dig it out and see if it's caused any damage.” Minutes later, Hide had removed the stone and carefully reexamined Abe’s hoof injury. “He has a bad bruise and shouldn’t be walking on it for a day or two,” Hide said, looking at Lefty.

  The day passed rather slowly with nothing much to do. Hide took Abe to the creek a few times to let his injured hoof soak in the cool water, and the men bathed and washed their dirty clothing. At noon, they cooked a hearty meal of beans, bacon, and fried cornbread. “If I keep eating like this I’ll gain some of my weight back,” Lefty jokingly said.

  “You didn’t have much to lose in the first place,” Hide said. “How much do you think you’ve lost?”

  “I’d guess around twenty pounds, maybe more,” he answered. “I’ve had to tighten my belt three notches in order to keep my pants up.” They both smiled.

  It had been some time since they’d had meat to eat, except for bacon, and they also needed to stretch their food bags, so Lefty decided to go hunting while they waited on Abe’s hoof to heal. He left camp in the late afternoon, walking slowly along the creek for several minutes without seeing a thing. Later he came to another creek that emptied into the one he was walking along and headed east along its banks. Within a quarter of a mile, the trees were becoming larger which helped him creep along, hiding as he went. Lefty got the break he was looking for when he came across a worn-down path with fresh deer tracks stamped in the dirt, obviously a path leading to the water. He followed the path to the creek, waded across, and stood behind a large tree down-wind of the path.

  A considerable amount of time had passed when he heard something crack. It was different than any of nature’s sounds. Lefty’s head was slumped, thinking of what Hide had said about him being a gunslinger with six notches on his pistol handle, but the cracking sound got his attention. He slowly raised his eyes to the heavily used path. It wasn’t long until a large buck deer came from behind the trees, walked to the water, and stood broadside to Lefty. It didn’t have a chance.

  That evening, the fried venison and potatoes were gobbled down along with left-over beans. They ate much later than normal, and by the time the dishes were washed, and the horses were hobbled in the grass, the cold night air was moving in. Not long afterward their stuffed bodies filled their bedrolls.

  Hide’s eyes opened wide the next morning. Something had woken him. He lay listening for another sound but heard none. Minutes later, he passed the sound off to some wild animal and rolled out of bed into the beginnings of a new day. After shaking out his boots and stomping them on, he strapped on his gun belt, put on his hat, and built up the fire before heading to the creek with the coffee pot in hand.

  Hide was in a good frame of mind and was humming a tune when he got back to camp, but it suddenly changed when he saw Lefty standing, fully dressed, with a strange expression. Then out of nowhere, two men stepped out with guns pointed at him. “Get your hands up, and we ain’t telling you again before bullets start flying.” Hide followed orders.

  “What’s this all about?” Hide asked. “How come you’re holding us at gunpoint? We ain’t thieves or wanted by the law.”

  “We’re after your money. We need a grubstake to get to the gold field, so hand-over every cent you’ve got and don’t hold nothing back,” one of the robbers said with a gnarled face.

  Hide’s left eye winked as he turned toward Lefty. “We might as well give ‘em our money, Sling. They’ll shoot us if we don’t, but don’t give ‘em the bags.” Lefty quickly caught on to Hide’s deception with his mention of bags and calling him Sling.

  “Bags! Do you have some gold?” one of the robbers excitedly said as both bandits turned their eyes toward Hide just long enough for Lefty to draw and fire.

  Standing over the dead bodies with his smoking gun at his side, Lefty’s hands started to shake, and his stomach began to churn as he stared at the men lying beside the campfire with bullet holes in their foreheads. He was regretful looking down at the men he had killed, but then a sobering thought came, that makes six men I’ve killed and I ain’t even encountered the Ellis brothers, yet. After standing over the bodies several minutes longer, trying to make sense of his killings, Lefty walked away and replaced the two dead shells in his gun.

  Hide, and Lefty drank a cup of coffee before fetching two fair sized stones from the creek to dig graves with. The digging process was hard and took over an hour because of the dry ground and tree roots. They drug the bodies to the shallow graves, removed their clothes and boots, putting them aside, and then laid the bodies in the graves and covered them with dirt. Afterward, the men gathered stones from the creek and piled them on top of the graves to keep the wolves and other animals from digging them up.

  Hide and Lefty hadn’t eaten breakfast, and the grave digging had worked up a hearty appetite, so Hide started cooking fried venison, potatoes, and fried cornbread while Lefty took their horses to water. To his surprise, Abe was no longer limping, causing him to assume the horse was well enough to travel, especially since he wouldn’t be carrying anything. The pack-racks would be on the robbers’ horses.

  After returning the horses to the grass, Lefty went looking for the robber’s horses and found them tied to a bush down creek. He led them to the grazing site alongside Star and the other horses and then went back to camp for breakfast.

  The men were stuffed as they sat against trees drinking their second cup, but day-light was burning, and they were anxious to head out, so they broke camp. After retrieving all six horses and packing their supplies on the thief’s horses, they searched through the dead men’s clothing to see if there was anything of importance; there wasn’t. However, Hide suggested the clothing and boots might bring a few coins when they got to San Francisco, so they rolled them up, tied them with a belt, and hung them on a pack horse. They put the thieves’ guns and gun-belts in Lefty’s food bag, and hung their hats’ chin straps on a saddle horn.

  Hide’s argument of bypassing Monterey didn’t happen. They’d be there in two days.

  Chapter Nine

  Monterey’s streets were extremely crowded when Hide and Lefty entered the city with two horses tethered behind each man just before high noon. Unlike most western towns, many of the people were well dressed and appeared to be important, some riding in fancy buggies. Hide had to fall behind Lefty and form a single line to get through the busy traffic several times. “Wonder what’s going on?” Hide asked.

  “I imagine folks are stirred up about going to the gold fields,” Lefty answered.

  “They don’t look like gold field folks to me…they’re too fancy looking. Let’s stop and get a bite to eat at one of the cafes and find out what’s happening.” Lefty nodded his agreement.

  The hitching rails were all taken until they came to the last café at the north edge of town. They stopped as the doors swung closed behind them and looked around. The room was okay but not as nice as the last café they’d been in, and the waitresses weren’t nearly as pretty. The men took a back table along the wall and waited for their coffee, but both waitresses seemed to ignore them and waited on other tables, refilling coffee cups. Finally, a woman approached with two plates. As she sat their plates down, Lefty made a mental note of the food—mashed-potatoes, beef-hash, fried okra, and homemade bread. Butter and jelly already centered the table. She had turned to leave when Hide called out, “We’d like some coffee, ma’am, if it ain’t too much trouble.”

  “It’s brewing,” was all she said.

  After they’d eaten and was on their second cup of coffee, they struck-up a conversation with an old-timer sitting at a table beside them. “How come there are so many people in town and what’s got ‘em all riled-up?” Hide asked.

  “We’ve got a lot going on these days,” he said. “Argonauts are coming through by the hundreds, heading for the mountains, and men are arriving for the state’s constitutional convention.”

  “What-do-you-mean by the constitutional convention?” Lefty asked.

 
“It ain’t actually starting ‘til September, but governor Riley has called in forty-eight delegates from ten districts throughout the territory. The governor picked Monterey as the meeting place because he said Cotton Hall here in town was the only building in the state big enough to hold all of the people who’d be coming. The hall is on the street west of here a-ways,” the man said, pointing west.

  “What’s the meeting all about?” Hide asked.

  “They're getting the California territory ready to become a state. The big-shots are figuring on sending their proposal to the US Congress for approval next year, and if the proposal gets accepted, we’ll become the thirty-first state in the union. But first, the delegates have to adopt a few things.”

  “What kind of things?” Lefty asked.

  “They have to settle on the state’s east boundary. Some want it to be the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and others want it to be the Rocky Mountains. They’ve also got to adapt women’s property rights and the state’s position on slavery. It ain’t gonna be easy to settle all of the items on the docket, but they’ve set aside two months to get things done.”

  Lefty and Hide thanked the man for his words, left twenty-five cents on the table for each meal, and left. Since the Ellis brothers hadn’t been seen and the city didn’t have anything to offer them, they gathered up their pack horses tie-lines, stepped into the stirrup, and left Monterey without many words. San Francisco was only three days away.

  »»•««

  The July afternoon was a mite cool as the Pacific Ocean’s western breeze crossed the San Francisco Bay area, bring with it overhead clouds lazily rolling eastward over the hilly terrain. Lefty and Hide couldn’t believe what they saw as they rode north, up the city’s Main Street. It exceeded their wildest expectations. They thought Monterey was congested with all sort of different people, but it was nothing compared to San Francisco. The boardwalk benches and walkways in front of the businesses were filled with men up and down the street. Many smoked pipes, or had cigarettes they’d made hanging from their mouths. Because the boardwalks were so congested, the crowd’s overflow packed the street, with men standing around, restricting any passersby to a snail’s pace, sometimes stopping them altogether. There were hoops and hollering all along the street with no regard for other folks. Sometimes a gun was fired into the air for no good reason at all.