by W R. Garwood
Chapter Eight
When I rode down Los Angeles’ Main Street and out San Fernando the next morning, following a comfortable night’s rest at the first-class Bella Union, Salazar rode at my side, astride his pudgy buckskin.
In talking to the local sheriff, he’d learned that some of the very rascals he was trailing were thought to be in my brother’s calabozo at San Diego, or were a week back.
“¿Quién sabe?” Salazar shrugged when we mounted up and headed out of the old town. “Those infernal jails are all made to be broken out of. A blind peon with a spoon could cut his way out of our accursed adobe. But they don’t get away with that sort of thing at our Alameda jailhouse. That place is all stone and iron, let me tell you!”
About five miles out of Los Angeles, we met a small crowd of folks coming toward us, mainly Mexicans along with some Yanks, and all heading north to the Sacramento mines. Some rode bony mules and some forked worn-out nags that didn’t seem able to make it to town let alone any farther. They certainly were one rag-tag bunch, and I wondered if any of those hard-faced rapscallions, who stared at my fine horse and fancy duds with mighty calculating looks, had been guests of Josh’s hoosegow.
All we learned in passing was they’d come across the southern Gila route and damned it for a red-hot griddle. All said they’d be blasted if they went back that way, not if they rotted in their tracks. They went on their way up the road yelling and cussing their heads off like a pack of wild men.
Salazar wheeled in his saddle to stare gloomily at the dusty mob. “They’re getting worse each month. just scum rising out of every hell hole on earth and swarming like two-legged locusts toward the gold. That bunch will mean more trouble for the Los Angeles officers, and for me. if they get up as far as Alameda before they’re tossed into jail.”
I rode along, watching the sky above me, all filled with slowly drifting clouds pushed along by an easy wind like huge clots of cream swimming in an enormous bowl of blue. Several high pairs of dark wings cut across the sky in front of us, some sort of huge birds that swam through the same sunny air. Salazar pointed them out as California condors, the largest bird of flight, with an average wingspan of ten feet or better. “And now the infernal miners are shooting those birds right and left just for their wing-feather quills in which to tote their cursed gold dust!”
“There must be hundreds of those birds in such a big county,” I said, thinking that I’d need more than some wing feathers to pack that fifty thousand in gold eagles—when I got them.
“Ah, señor, there’ll come a time when greedy man will have taken and destroyed every creature. and, someday, perhaps even himself.”
The stunning big birds soon sailed away on the cool winds that blew first from the east, and then meandered back from the direction of the nearby coast. And for the first time I felt the spicy tang of an ocean on my face and could taste it in my mouth.
“Do you hear that?” Salazar cocked his great mushroom sombrero and shrugged a shoulder at me as he pulled up his horse.
“I thought I heard the wind in those trees there,” I said, tugging on my reins and looking out across the rolling countryside, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.
“Turn down here.” Salazar guided his buckskin onto a small lane that forked westerly over a low hill.
Then there it was! As far as my eyes could see there was only sparkling, restless space, all filled with the reflection of the drifting clouds. It was like nothing I’d ever imagined—and yet, somehow, I fancied I could see the same grassy waves I’d drifted through on the wind-driven journey that fetched me to this.
“That, my young friend, is el Pacifico!” Salazar reined in beside me. “Great Balboa, they say, first beheld it in far-off Panama. And now you see it for yourself, young Bean. Wonderful, is it not? And out there, thousands of miles off, another land. China perhaps.”
I couldn’t answer. As often as I’d thought of this Pacific, and rolled the name on my tongue, riding the hot, sandy miles toward California, I never had the slightest idea it would be as it was.
While we stared off into the shimmering horizon, white feathers of surf rolled and unrolled along the empty strip of yellow sands below us with a velvety whispering that blended with the humming of the winds.
“Now come along, young compadre.” Salazar turned his buckskin’s head. “We have close to thirty miles before we can take our supper at San Juan Capistrano. Then we’ll be a good halfway to San Diego.”
* * * * *
The tavern at the little pueblo of San Juan Capistrano seemed to be about the same as all of those along the King’s Highway. A one-story, fort-like adobe, painted a dull yellow, with a sloping orange-tiled roof, it stood back from the wide white road among a grove of live oak and cottonwood, staring at us with its big green loop-holed shutters, like a watchful kind of an animal.
We arrived at gray dusk as the Angelus bells were ringing from the one remaining tower of the decrepit old Franciscan mission where it stood, lonely and neglected.
A burly, dark-skinned Negro, in ragged pants and red undershirt, slipped up and took our animals around to the rear of the General Santa Anna Taverna, eyeing my silver-studded sombrero with downright admiration.
The large and smoky barroom was well filled for supper, with a patrol of five troopers from Fort Stockton, at San Diego, along with some local Mexican merchants and rancheros, plus a dozen gold hunters, or what they were beginning to call themselves, ’Forty-Niners. On the whole these miners were a decent sort and not tenderfeet, for they’d been at the mines for a year. This bunch had been down to the Mexican diggings below the border, but the pay dirt had been scarce and so they had come back north and were now heading for the American River.
One of them, a long, limber New Englander who named himself as Yankee Jim Carson, had been in the thick of it from the summer of ’48, when he’d been a bank teller at San Francisco. He wasn’t a bit backward about telling some of the lunatic events that swept across California from the time a Mormon merchant, Elder Sam Brannon, had sauntered into San Francisco’s Portsmouth Plaza on May 11, 1848, and, hauling a bottle of gold dust from under his coat tails, had begun to holler: “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!”
“Old Sam knew all about that strike at Sutter’s Mill but had kept it under his stovepipe hat until he’d got himself at least four stores built and stocked up along the Sacramento,” said Carson. “When the folks heard him bellerin’. the real gold rush started right that very day. and San Francisco began to turn itself inside out. Over a quarter of the whole damned population of menfolks lit right out for the American River by next day. More than fifty new buildings goin’ up around town were left where they stood, while carpenters, hod carriers, and the rest headed for the diggin’s. Just about everybody, includin’ myself, came down with a ragin’ case of gold fever.”
“And it wasn’t just you civilians what ketched that there fever,” a trooper added, grinning as he helped himself to another stack of tortillas. “Lootenant Ord’s hull garrison deserted and went north. and I’d ’a’ been one of ’em but I was in th’ guardhouse at th’ time.”
Another of the miners lit a clay pipe, puffed out a cloud of smoke, fingered his chin whiskers, and chuckled. “A pard o’ mine named Jake Leese made himself over seventy-five thousand dollars in three months on th’ Yuba with jest a pick and shovel. Another bugger with th’ moniker of Sleepy Bill Daylor dug out fifteen thousand in one week, and when I was at Parks Bar th’ average yield per man was over a hundred dollars a day.”
“Yes, sir,” chimed in Yankee Carson, “the boys at Wood Creek cashed more than three hundred dollars each in chunks every evenin’. Guess I should have stayed put instead of leggin’ it down to Frytown and them blamed Mex diggin’s.”
“And that was away back in the middle of last year,” snorted the miner with the chin whiskers. “Lord above, just look what’s happenin’ this year of Eighteen and Forty-Nine!”
“Sí. Death and destruct
ion across the land, and it has only just begun. It is the beginning of the whirlwind,” Salazar butted into the conversation.
The company turned to look at the sheriff and took in his saucer-sized badge and the conversation dwindled away for a moment, until I signaled the bartender and ordered a round of drinks for everyone. That cheered up the bunch and a corporal began to tell of how he’d been riding up the coast from Santa Barbara and had been pitched from his mount when the sorry brute shied at a wind-tossed bush, leaving him dismounted miles from anywhere at sundown.
“That was bad enough,” he said, “for I walked along most of the night until I found an empty adobe hut about dawn. I didn’t look around in the dark. just up and rolled over in a corner of the front room and went sound asleep. But when I woke up, I surely wished I’d still been on my feet, and still walking. I’ll say so.”
He’d roused up to find himself surrounded by dead bodies, all stiff and stark. They seemed to be what was left of an emigrant family that’d taken up squatter’s rights to the adobe and must have had some money or property when they arrived. The dead man, about fifty, had his skull split completely open; a woman, probably his wife, had her head cut nearly in two; while their two children had evidently been struck down by blows from the same axe.
“Horrible!” said Salazar. And I felt his black eyes on my middle, where my money belt bulged. “That is the damnable scourge of gold. It calls up the demons in man.”
“Downright unpleasant to say the leastwise,” said Yankee Carson, who proceeded to liven up the gathering with a song.
I can’t recall all the foolishness, and only some of the choruses, but they went something like:
Oh, what a miner, what a miner was I!
All swolled up with the scurvy,
So I thought I would die.
I went to town, got on a drunk,
And in the morning to my surprise
I found I’d got me a pair
Of roaring big black eyes.
And I was strapped. had not one cent . . .
Not even my pick and shovel,
My hair was snarled, my britches torn,
And I looked the very Devil.
Then I took myself a little farm
And got me a señorita;
Gray-eyed, humpbacked, and black as tar,
Her name was Marguerita.
My pigs all died, hens flew away,
Joaquín he stoled my mules;
My ranch burn ‘down’, my blankets ‘up’,
Likewise my farming tools!
There was more but I can’t fetch it back. Another song one of the miners tackled, began:
Oh! Susanna,
Go to hell for all of me;
We’re all a livin’ dead
In Californ-ee!
They were still hard at it when Salazar elbowed me up and piloted me down the hallway to our room, as I was somewhat befuddled from the rounds of drinks.
“You hear!” Salazar spouted like a boiling teakettle, tugging off his boots. “Now that infernal villain of a Joaquín has got himself stuck right in the middle of a barroom balada!” He flung his boot against the wall. “Next, by San Gabriel’s tin-pot trumpet, he’ll be a hero in some Yankee penny dreadful!”
Chapter Nine
In spite of my heavy head, we were up and on the road by the first light while the stars were just fading out in the golden-red tint of a new day. It was a good hour or more before the Fort Stockton troopers caught up with us. For a spell there wasn’t much said on either side as the soldiers were as much under the weather as I was and Salazar was glooming to himself—probably about the song of Joaquín Murieta. But after we’d halted at a small cantina called El Ruiseñor—The Nightingale—where everyone, Salazar included, had a couple of passable shots of peach brandy, the tales and songs broke out again—and lasted the rest of the way down the coast to within a mile or so of San Diego.
One sawed-off trooper, nicknamed Flea, kept after the corporal of the unit, named Bates, singing the same off-key ditty so many times we all threatened to yank him from his horse and let him foot it the rest of the way to town. But that didn’t bother Flea one bit as he warbled over and over:
Oh, what was your name in the States?
Was it Thompson, or Johnson or Bates?
Did you murder your wife
Then run for your life?
Say, what was your name in the States?
Corporal Bates, trying to squelch Flea and change the subject, admitted many of the gold hunters, or what he called the Argonauts, had actually switched handles for one reason or another, but went on to say most were just cutting ties with an old life, and no known event, outside of the late war, had ever brought so many different men to one place. There were fishermen from Nova Scotia, loggers from the forests of Maine, farmers from New York’s Genesee Valley, doctors from the prairies of Iowa, Maryland lawyers, and college men from Yale and Harvard.
“Yes,” said Flea. “They’s pigtail chinks, South Sea cannibals, Florida crackers, and all them high-tone Southern gents with their herds of slaves.”
“And whole bloomin’ companies of New Orleans gamblers along with droves of calico queens and their low-life macks,” added a red-faced trooper.
“And whole squadrons of bandits,” said Bates. “And just about every dashed one a blamed Mexican.” He shot a quick look over at Salazar where he rode beside me, hand on pistol butt, searching each roadside thicket and grove with his keen black eyes.
“Sí, but you are right, Corporal. It is the great shame of our land that so many of my countrymen feel they have to take to the highways to obtain honor for their losses.” Salazar nodded his mushroom sombrero so hard it flopped like a flag in the breeze.
“They takes to th’ road for a whole lot more than any of their plaguey honor, I’d say,” stated the grinning Flea.
“With such a crew loose as Three-Fingered Garcia and old Juan Pico, it’s a wonder anyone gets to his proper destination with a whole windpipe,” said Bates.
“Don’t you forget that slippery Joaquín Murieta. They say he’s th’ boy with horses and can be in one end of California one night and in th’ other th’ next,” put in the red-faced private. “That’s one feller to match our old pal from th’ New York Volunteers and th’ Crossed Muskets Saloon, Diamond Dick Powers.”
We were just then skirting a sizable woods, and, as we passed the southern end of the timber, Flea let out a yelp. “Look at that!”
We hauled up on our horses to stare at a grisly sight. Two dead men dangled from a limb of a huge old oak. They slowly turned in the sea breezes, doing a silent sort of fandango all by themselves. Both were Mexicans. One was togged out in a mighty fancy outfit, silver-trimmed pantaloons and a fine yellow shirt. The other was just a ragged sort of a peon in dingy white trousers and a faded red shirt. They were a pretty ill-matched pair but surely equal in one respect: both were good and dead.
We all turned to stare at Salazar where he sat motionless for a moment. Then he swung down from his mare and stumped over to the hanging tree, and spat out: “Vigilantes!” He yanked a piece of paper from the shirt of the more prosperous-looking corpse and, after studying it, came back and handed it to me.
HIGHWAYMEN TAKE NOTICE!
This will serve notice to such vagabond outlaws as “The Avenger,” “The Blade,” and “José California” that the citizenry of this land will no longer tolerate further criminal acts! All perpetrators of robbery, rape, and brutal violence will be dealt with in the most summary fashion—as these two villains graphically depict!
Signed:
Men of the Night!!
“Knew things was gettin’ bad, but I didn’t think they was ready to call in old Judge Lynch down here.” A gangling trooper spat on the offside of his horse with a wry face.
“Men of th’ Night? And who might they be?” Flea wondered.
“Men of the devil!” Salazar gritted. “Corporal, cut down those poor devils. We’ll take them along to
the alcalde. Villains, or not, they deserve a plot of their own ground.”
Bates snapped out the order and the two corpses were soon stowed, facedown, over the cruppers of the troopers’ horses.
We rode the rest of the way down to the San Diego River without much to say.
Arriving at the muddy river a little past noon, we were ferried across the water by the old Mexican flatboat man, four at a time. He looked long at the troopers’ stiff cargo but said nothing.
Riding on into San Diego, we crossed Taylor and went on down Washington through a sleepy little hamlet of red-and-green-tiled adobes, parting from Bates and his men after they’d deposited the two corpses on the wide verandah of the Casa de Lopez on Twiggs Street, headquarters of the alcalde.
In scant moments the pepper-tree-shaded plaza began filling with quiet groups of citizens. I noticed one pair of pretty young señoritas in mantillas and flowing gowns of watered silk at the side of the gathering crowd, fans fluttering.
“And just what in the name of the old ring-tailed ’coon is this all about?”
I didn’t need to ask who that was. The voice booming out of the casa in that Kentucky twang could only be my brother Josh’s.
That mob of folks parted like the Red Sea before Moses as Joshua Quincy Bean strode forth in all his glory.
If I thought I’d cut a fair swath with my silver-studded sombrero and velveteen pantaloons, I was left far in the dust by that outfit of the alcalde of San Diego.
In gold-encrusted jacket, brilliant green sash around a pair of flame-red trousers, all gussied up with the embroidered outline of birds and flowers and wearing a gold ring in his right ear, Josh stood, one hand on his hip and the other twiddling with a narrow goatee, glaring first at the dead bandidos and then back at the crowd.
Then he saw me.
“Suffering hoop snakes, Roy!” He brushed the gawkers aside and grabbed me by the hand. “Welcome to California, you young coyote!” Then he marched me into the casa, leaving one of his flunkies, a big, scar-faced Mexican to get rid of the bodies and take Salazar up to the calabozo to look over the current catch of hardcases.