by W R. Garwood
“I remained in town for a day, meeting with Kirker to refine the plan, and then returned to my band . . . and Carlos.
“The Twenty-First of the month arrived to find me flat upon my back with a raging fever from an old wound that has plagued me every so often since the war. Thus it was decided Carlos would lead my assigned men out on the raid. this much I agreed to, and then went out of my head with that vile fever. I took such a bad turn that one of my right-hand men rode full tilt into San Francisco and brought Rosita back to care for me.
“When I came to myself three days later, there was many a long face around camp and Rosita was forced to tell me that Carlos had taken his own men and ambushed the U.S. soldiers, killing all but that blue-bellied picaroon of a Kirker, and then worked with him to cache the gold, as it proved much too heavy to carry away in a hurry.
“The following day after the raid, Carlos and his bunch rode back to the site of the hidden bullion only to return like a pack of whipped dogs. for Kirker had come out ahead of them with pack mules and fled the country with a king’s ransom. It was as simple as that.”
After my visitor finished there came a lull, while I began to cipher the best way to answer a question that was just about bound to come up. And while I rubbed my chin, staring at the ceiling, at my toes, and even over the bandit chieftain’s head at the half-closed shutter, the wind that had been whining around the tavern began to buffet and bang that shutter and I could hear raindrops pecking at the window frames.
“Rather like a certain day, not long ago, when I was luckily near enough to pluck you out of that wolves’ den you were galloping into, is it not so?” Joaquín leaned forward again to light up a long cigarro from the sputtering flame of my dwindling candle, while he cocked his head at the rattle of the rain. “My poor mount out there will be getting a fine wetting from this storm, but he’s used to hard knocks, the same as his master.”
I could catch the jingle of bit and the thud of hoofs as the great gray stallion moved about in the downpour and shook his head.
“Well, I certainly thank you most kindly for that act of neighborliness.” And I yawned, wishing this dangerous young gent would take the hint and leave the same way he’d come—through my window.
“Oh, I was most happy to be of service.” Joaquín clasped one knee over the other and blew out a thin ribbon of smoke. “Your kindness to many of the poor folk of the area has not gone unnoticed by some of the more observant. Sí, even if Rosita had not sung your praises, it would have eventually come to my attention. I have friends very close to you.” He laughed quietly, tapping the ash of his cigarro into one of my boots. “But I must remark that such generosity was also bound to come to the notice of one other.”
Suddenly his eyes narrowed, for another sound was threading through the muted hush of the rainfall. A horse was coming down the road at a good clip.
Joaquín sprang from the bed with the swift grace of a panther, deliberately knocking over my candle stump as he passed. I could hear him slowly push open the shutter and caught a glimpse of his dim silhouette as he peered out into the rainy night. All at once he gave a sharp exclamation and turned back in the hazy darkness. “That is one of my company. Don’t make any sort of sound. I’ll return.” He was gone before I realized it.
I didn’t cause any commotion but wasted little time getting my six-gun out from under the pillow.
Then I waited—and waited. He was absent for less than a couple of minutes, but they seemed more like two hours apiece.
All at once, though I scarcely heard a sound, he was back in the room and striking a lucifer to light up the bit of candle. “Take this and put up your pistol. Here is a Spanish musketoon loaded with double buckshot. That idiota of an alcalde and those accursed night riders have gone and hung all three of those poor devils at the calabozo! There will be pure hell to pay if Carlos Hechavarría comes this way.” He slapped the rain from his sombrero and wrapped himself in a serape he’d been carrying. “When you get out of here in the morning, get yourself to San Diego and warn that madman brother of yours to guard himself well, for he’s a dead man if Carlos ever gets near him!”
Young Almada was back through the window and mounted upon his big gray before I could poke my head out into the rain and thank him.
“Next time we’ll talk more of Kirker’s gold.” Then he and his heavily cloaked companion were gone into the black night with a thunder of hoofs.
Chapter Sixteen
I was up at dawn, having spent an uneasy night on the lumpy straw mattress with nothing in my arms but Joaquín’s musketoon. There’d been no trouble during the hours after the bandit’s departure, and either the tavernkeeper was a mighty sound sleeper or he certainly knew how to keep his jaw clamped, for he fetched around my horse from the stable without the slightest expression on his wide brown face. He also seemed to ignore my extra weapon, though I thought I saw a glint of recognition as he noticed it in my hand. I also caught him looking at the scores of hoof prints in the soft, rain-damp earth about the tavern door.
Paying my bill, I was on my way as the rising sun spangled shrubs and grass with thousands of ruby-red and glittering-golden water gems, covering the miles into San Diego as fast as I could without harming the beast. And as we galloped along, I kept an eye open for any strange riders, for, as on the day I’d wound up tax collecting, I felt the nearness of unseen horsemen. I had to believe that Rosita’s brother, for his own reasons, had again given me free passage through another chunk of Murieta country.
By the time I finally pushed my lathered mount down into the plaza, the entire town seemed up and in the streets. All was a great hullabaloo over the lynching of the calabozo prisoners by unknown riders. Some called out that it was Sánchez himself who’d again fetched in the victims—this time from a nearby cypress grove on the coastal road, where they had been discovered around dawn by a peddler.
I had dismounted and was tying my horse to one of the hitching rails on the east end of the plaza when someone poked me in the ribs. “Señor Roy, here is one mighty big trouble.” It was Sheriff Salazar, his big sombrero rumpled and mighty dented and his duds covered with dust. In a few words he told me that he’d arrived about an hour earlier on his way back from below the border and headed north. He had come down with second thoughts on the way back from Mexico and decided to stop at San Diego and pick up his two young horse thieves. “But by the infernal second-hand bugle of San Gabriel I had myself a feeling that something like this might happen.”
He pointed out the three bodies, wrapped in serapes, lying over on the south side of the plaza under a pepper tree. “They died along with that villainous Murieta’s man. Sí, young Roy . . . whoever strung up Pico took along those two boys and killed them to keep them from talking. There’s murder here in this little town, by hell!”
While the crowd milled around, voicing their opinion of the dark deeds of the Men of the Night, some cursed the act as brutal and downright cowardly, but others only laughed and shouted out that it was bueno and the only way to handle all such rascals.
I noticed Diamond Dick Powers, the gambler, laughing and joking with a group of saloon regulars, as well as with Sánchez himself. Josh’s deputy strutted around tugging at his long mustaches and seemed to be almighty pleased with the excitement—and himself. Yet when someone in the crowd jostled him in passing, Sánchez blanched and slapped a hand onto his gun butt. So it seemed pretty plain that the alcalde’s lawdog was on edge and as jumpy as a tarantula on a hot rock.
“Where’s my brother?” I hadn’t seen anything of Josh in the milling crowd, yet he should have been on the street in his capacity as headman of San Diego. I started off for the alcalde’s casa on foot.
“Hold on there, young Roy. Your brother and several of the leading citizens have rode out to the woods, near Alcalá Point, to look at the site of the crime. I was going out there but decided to wait for them to come back. and you might as well wait with me.” Salazar looked down at the wicked little
weapon in my hand. “For the everlasting love of Santa Cecilia’s brass-bound harp! Where’d you come by that? The last time I saw such a murdering gun was when we shot one of Murieta’s rogues, Black Bonito, out of his saddle at Placerville.”
“And what happened then?”
“What happened?” Salazar wrestled off his flapping hat and beat the dust out of it while the morning sun gilded the top of his vanished scalp. “You mean what sort of a revenge did that bandit king extract from us? Well, I’ll tell you. Not one damned thing!” He squinted at me and slowly pulled on his headgear. “I know what you mean. Sí. This Murieta has often threatened those who’ve slain or interfered with his rascals, but a mighty few times has he ever carried out such threats.” He stared thoughtfully at the swaggering Sánchez. “Of course, there might come a time when. . . .”
I was about to ask just what he was driving at when shouts broke out in the crowd, and here came Josh with several sober-looking gents, among them Señor Castañeda, all riding into the plaza.
“Come along. Let’s see what your brother has to say.” Salazar pushed his way through the throng and I followed, still toting my little man-killer of a gun.
Josh sat there on his horse, his fancy clothes all rumpled and misfitting, and from the look of him he hadn’t been to bed at all. When his bloodshot eyes focused on Salazar and myself, he sort of stiffened in his saddle and just waited for us to come up to him.
“Well, here’s Roy and Salazar. So you’re both back. This is one devil of a thing, isn’t it? You can ride pride just so far, and then you’re apt to get bucked off damned good and hard. To think we’ve lost those three prisoners . . . even if they were a batch of low-lifes.” He wheeled his horse and started up the street toward the alcalde’s casa, while the other riders rode off through the crowd, all as mum as oysters.
Two hours later, when the bells chimed for noon, Josh was still talking, and Salazar and I were still listening. My brother rattled on and on about the “infernal outrage” as if he couldn’t stop. He ranted about the jailer’s lack of common sense, that fat old man who always seemed more than half asleep. He deplored the absence of any of his deputies during the night, but then turned around and excused them by saying they all had word that Murieta or some of his gang were said to be prowling the outskirts of town, ready to break out Juan Pico and setting up some sort of ambush for any overambitious lawmen.
Josh just about pulled his hair to think he’d been so deep in his account books and ledgers, preparing a report for the headmen in San Francisco, that he hadn’t been thinking straight. “I’m as big a blockhead as any of my men. and now I’m paying for it!” He rambled on, figuratively kicking himself in the tail bone, so that in spite of myself I was just about convinced Francisco Almada had made a mistake in my brother.
But I could sense that Salazar himself wasn’t completely sold that something wasn’t wrong, though he couldn’t put a finger on it yet. But when we finally got away from Josh and walked uptown for a drink at the American Flag, the little Mexican sheriff spilled his thoughts good and strong.
“I tell you, Roy, there’s something about this affair that has a strange look. something odd-like.” Salazar hoisted his glass, then set it down as if he’d all of a sudden lost his thirst. “Sí, I don’t want to say it, but, by damn, your brother does what your Señor Shakespeare has one of his characters say about another. that he protests too mucho.”
“Josh is covering up something?” My neck began to prickle. This fat little Mexican lawdog wasn’t half as sleepy as he looked. No, he was mighty wide awake.
Salazar picked up his beer and downed it with gusto, then ordered another round. “I tell you that listening to all the alcalde’s words, words words has me dry as a chunk of old adobe. Drink up, young Bean. I guess you’ve got an idea or two as to what’s been going on around here. And I myself have learned a thing or two since the time I pinned this on.” And he tapped the nickel-plated little pie plate of a badge with a broad thumb.
Then, for a spell, we just sat there over our drinks. All of a sudden, be damned if Salazar didn’t come at me from away around Robin Hood’s barn. “Señor Roy, that gold you had when we first met back on the trail, the gold you told me was for a business here. you remember that?”
“I sure guess I do.”
“Have any of it left?”
“Well, that’s a mighty unusual sort of a question.” I gulped half of my beer and wiped my chin. “Sure I’ve still got it. We just haven’t had a lot of time to speculate for likely business prospects.”
“Sí, and I guess there ain’t too much doing in the way of business in such a place as this.” Salazar sipped at his beer, and then turned his head slowly to look at me. “Maybe you ought to come up toward San Francisco and put some of that gold into some sort of business thereabouts. I tell you they’re still making money hand over fist, and not just in the mines. Things ain’t as loco as they were a year or so back, but even with old Sam Brannon’s stores around the diggings there’s real opportunities for young fellows like you, with all your Yankee get-up-and-go. Flour ain’t eight hundred dollars a barrel any more, nor eggs three dollars each, but boots, picks, and shovels and suchlike still fetch some mighty fancy prices, and there’s no risk of running into bandidos like Murieta and Pancho Ruiz if you stay put in town and do your trading.” Salazar, for some reason, had got to rattling on just like Josh. “Speaking of Murieta, where’d you say you come by that little murdering gun? Wasn’t one of the alcalde’s?”
“No, it wasn’t!” I said sort of short and sharp-like and decided to change the subject. “What d’you know about the girl you came down on the coach with week before last? You know. the one who was in that Comanche wagon train raid with you.”
“Only what I’ve told you before, young Roy. We were both in that terrible set-to and escaped only by the grace of all the holy angels.” Salazar crossed himself hurriedly. “I still carry this decoration, as you see”—he tapped his vanished scalp—“and the young señorita. . . .”
“Yes?” Here could be some more information about the tintype girl, or maybe her folks.
“Poor creature . . . she carries her own scar, where no one can see.”
“You mean she was hurt bad somewhere?”
“No, young man. I mean that her scar is here, in the espíritu. the soul. That young girl, she will never be quite as other girls. And that is something for you to consider. At least that is what I believe.”
The sheriff stood up, clapped his disreputable sombrero back on his head. “The day grows shorter and I have mucho to do before I start on up the road. a report to take down from that black coyote of a Sánchez, and another word or two with the alcalde.” He pushed out his hand, and we shook.
As I sat there trying to cipher out what Salazar had meant about Dulcima, the sheriff paused at the saloon doorway. “By the way, young Roy, were all of your gold eagles minted in Eighteen Forty-Eight?” Before I could do more than give him a surprised nod, he’d stepped on out of the shadowy barroom into the golden afternoon and was gone.
Next morning I still hadn’t thought of a way to tip Josh off about Joaquín’s warning. I didn’t fancy my brother digging away at me as to where I’d come upon such information, and I didn’t feel like letting him know I’d had suspicions of him being in cahoots with those black-hearted cowards—the Men of the Night.
At breakfast I made a try at getting something out of him about the lynchings, but he ignored me and began to harp away about the upcoming elections that were due to replace the temporary alcaldes with regular bona-fide mayors.
“Just about a month, Roy, and I may be out of a job. Some damn’ fool politician back in Washington had a brainstorm and my job could be gone up. so why pry into things that don’t concern you? I know the better class of folks, Castañedas and others, feel that such jailbird rascals need to be taken care of any way possible. so drop it. Remember what old Æsop said. uh, something about not looking at things too close.”
I saw that Josh was so wrought up he couldn’t even steal himself a second-hand saying. “I don’t give a damn in a bucket for Æsop or any other blowhard. I’m asking you straight out if you ever had anything to do with any of these necktie parties. You might as well answer, for you’re sure in one hell of a lot of trouble if you did.”
By now I was so riled up with Josh that I didn’t care what came out. My Bean temper was at the boiling point and I was ready to knock some sort of sense into him or go down trying.
“Trouble? Trouble from who?” Josh stared at me as if he thought I’d up and gone completely loco. Then he lounged back at the breakfast table and began to fiddle with a fork. “You’ve gotten to listening to some of that penny-ante gossip at the taverns, eh? I’ve heard that tinhorn Dick Powers has been making a heap of wild talk to all the rounders. It’s either got to be that or this interfering galoot of a Salazar has gone and pumped you full of balloon gas. You ought to up and remember, Roy, that plenty of these Mexicans are born troublemakers. and Salazar had lost out on the reward for that bunch of prisoners, Pico in particular. He was supposed to bring them up to San Francisco alive. and you know what happened.”
Before I could answer that, Abraham slipped in from the front hallway and, after a mighty curious look at me, whispered in Josh’s ear. My brother got up from the table in such a rush that he knocked over his chair. “Come on, Roy!”
I followed Josh on out at a dead run to the stable behind the casa. As we saddled up, he told me what had happened. Some traveler, riding down the Camino Real from San Juan Capistrano, after taking the flatboat over the river, had passed by the San Diego de Alcalá woods and found another corpse swinging in the sea breezes—and at 9:00 in the morning. They couldn’t turn up Sánchez anywhere, so the fat old jailer, Manuel Boronda, had come huffing over to the alcalde’s.