by Lou Cameron
She seemed to feel a mite awkward about it, too, as they let go of one another. She made up for it by screaming at the drunk old man like a fishwife and told her son to make sure he hadn’t soiled himself before putting him away for the night.
Stringer told her why he needed to use her telephone. She led him back to her kitchen and cranked the wall set for him, to tell Central they wanted the sheriff, right now, in a no-nonsense tone she seemed to have picked up running a fair-sized spread as a widow woman.
When she had the sheriff she gave the ear horn to Stringer and stood by, arms folded above her apron, as he told the law about the kidnapping and what he’d done about it, leaving out the carnal knowledge that was neither the sheriff’s nor Fionna’s business. The sheriff said well he’d never, and promised to get out as soon as he could after sunrise. Stringer agreed to meet him at the hydraulic site and hung up.
Fionna said, “Heavens, it’s no wonder you haven’t seen fit to pay old friends a proper visit, Stuart MacKail! I hope you were able to save that poor Mexican child with her virtue still intact.”
He said, “She allowed they hadn’t trifled with her.” Which was true enough when one studied on it. He glanced up at the wall clock behind her and said, “Thunderation, it’s even later than I thought. I’d best let you all get to bed, Miss Fionna.”
She arched an eyebrow and said, “We’ll see about that. You’ve been away for years, and we’ve so much to talk about, Stuart! Would you like some coffee and cake, or shall we sit out on the porch swing and catch up with one another?”
He said he’d had all the pastry he could stand for one day and she took him by the hand, like an old friend, and let him out to her brick-paved front veranda. He saw that, sure enough, they’d hung a mail-order porch swing from the rough overhead beams. She plumped up the canvas pillows and sat him at one end. Then she sat sort of in the middle as she took his hand in both of hers and said, “I told Buck I was sorry for yelling at him so sharply when I heard on the party line he’d been mixed up in a shooting. I didn’t know till he told me that he had to shoot that villain to save you, of all people. Have they found his body, yet?”
“No. But I figure we might, come morning. The gang must have known that hydraulic crew had cleared out and, lucky for Dotty Montez, they were using it to hide all sorts of things.”
He reached for his makings without thinking, held up the Bull Durham tag for her approval, and, when she nodded, proceeded to roll himself a smoke with the one free hand she’d left him. She said, “You always had such skilled, strong hands. I fear my Buck takes after my poor Jeff when it comes to being butterfingered.”
He licked the paper to seal it and said, “I heard about Jeff leaving you, Miss Fionna. I’m really sorry. He was a good old boy, as I recall. Roped pretty good, for a butterfinger, too.”
She looked away and sort of sighed before she replied, “I suppose he was a good man, in his own stolid way. I know a lot of my classmates were jealous when we posted the banns, way back in another century. We had a pretty good marriage, I guess. Jeff left me well provided for, and our boy is a dear. But, it’s odd, since he’s been gone, it seems as if it never happened. Do you reckon I’m getting senile already, Stuart?”
He struck a light, got his smoke going, and shook the match out before he said, “If you’re fishing for compliments, I can count. You ain’t forty yet and I may as well say you look younger than I do, now. I reckon I’ve been beat up more times than you, since last we met, Miss Fionna.”
She dimpled and said, “You have been around since I said adios to a skinny schoolboy a million years ago, haven’t you? I heard about you way off in Cuba with the Rough Riders, and they say you have your own grand home on Nob Hill, now.”
He smiled crookedly and said, “It’s Rincon Hill and not all that grand, Miss Fionna.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call an old friend ‘Miss.’ It sounds so distant, and you don’t hear me calling you ‘Mr. Mack-ail.’ I guess you don’t think back much about the friends you left out here in the sticks, now that you’ve been leading such an exciting life as an important newspaperman, huh?”
He laughed and told her, “I’ll call you Fionna if you’ll forget some of your other odd notions. I’m not important. I’m only a stringer for the Sun and, to tell the truth, I’ve seen a lot more excitement since I came home to these so-called sticks than you could shake a stick at.”
She said, “I know. Buck told me someone seems to be trying to keep you from writing an exposé on Joaquin Murrieta.”
He laughed again and said, “I’ve already writ it, and I can only hope my boss won’t yawn too much when I hand it in. I don’t know what those other gents want me to do or not to do. They’re just loco, I reckon. If they’d have just left me alone I’d have been back in Frisco by now.”
“Without coming to see me?” she demanded, a mite sharply for a dreamgirl. He squeezed her hand in his reassuringly and said, “I meant to look up all my old pals while I was up this way. But, as your boy told you, I’ve been too busy ducking enemies I never knew I’d made, here or anywhere else.”
Her big kid, Buck, stuck his head out at them to say, “I’m turning in, now, Mom, if you don’t have no better use for me.”
She bade her son sleep tight and not let the bedbugs bite and, when they were alone again, confided, “He has his own lean-to, out back. You know how boys that age are about their privacy.”
He wondered idly why Fionna seemed to consider where Buck might or might not be bedded down important enough to tell company about. Their hands were getting sweaty, pressed together so tightly. Otherwise the mountain air was cool at this hour. He wondered what she’d say if he suggested warming her shoulders the way he’d warmed Dotty’s, earlier. He decided he’d better not.
She seemed to find his silence awkward. She almost gushed as she asked how often he got to the opera and such down in San Francisco. He said he hardly ever got to the opera, but when he told her about his favorite chop suey joint in Chinatown she said that sounded thrilling, too. He made a mental note to tell Chin Tung his noodles were thrilling, next time he stopped in for some.
He said, “As one old pal to another, Fionna, I’d best set you straight about the outside world you seem to think you’ve missed out on. For openers, like that tale about the bluebird of happiness says, folk make their own exciting places. I know a gal on a second landing who leads a life you might find downright shocking, but she seems to lay about looking bored as anything and, did I tell her I knew a lady who got to chase cows with a rope and string her own bob wire and all, she’d no doubt find you exotic, and then some.”
“Oh? And just what is this Frisco gal to you, Stuart?”
“Nothing. Art students over on Russian Hill get to look at her naked a lot, but I’ve never even fed her chop suey. I was only using her to make a point.”
“I don’t think I want to know how else you might have used her. I suppose she’s a lot younger and prettier than me, being a famous model and all?”
He grimaced and said, “She’s younger. She’s not prettier, and famous gals don’t live on Rincon Hill. You just proved my point by assuming a Frisco gal who posed for art students had to be all glamoursome. I know for a fact she has trouble keeping up with her rent. I’ve heard the landlady yelling at her on the stairs. She’d no doubt envy you for owning the roof above your head, with all this land you have to thrown in. You lead a better life than many a city gal, and they’d no doubt say you was glamoursome if they saw you riding your own horse any time you felt like it. Have you any idea how much it costs a city gal to ride in Golden Gate Park?”
“I didn’t know there was such a park, stuck out here as I am in the middle of nowhere.”
He said, “It isn’t anywhere near the Golden Gate, but that’s the way they name things in Frisco. You’re not in the middle of nowhere, Fionna. Calaveras County is famous. Kids all over this nation have read about that frog-jumping contest and the orphans of Angels Camp
.”
She laughed, bitterly, and said, “Those were just made-up stories. All anyone ever really gets to do up here is listen to the wind through the trees at night, and you know it. Why did you leave, so young, if you found it so exciting around here?”
He said, “I didn’t know how exciting it could get till I came back this time. I left the first time to go to Stanford. I wanted to go to Stanford because I’m a curious cuss and I already knew enough about riding and roping.”
She said, “Oh, Lord, I wish I didn’t know so much about riding and roping, Stuart. You’re about the only one who had the imagination to get out of here. If only I’d waited. I mean if only things had been a mite…different.”
He shrugged and told her, “Things never work out any way but the way they are, Fionna. There’s no sense living in the past. I know, I’ve tried. And despite what that English writer, H.G. Wells, says, there’s no place one can buy his time machine.”
She wiped a hand on her calico as if to get a better grip on his and sobbed, “Oh, Lord. I read that very story in a magazine I have sent all the way from New York City and, when I did, I cried.”
“Well, it did turn out sort of gloomy.”
“You big silly, I didn’t cry because of the way the story turned out, or even because I couldn’t have that time machine. I cried because, here in Calaveras County, there wasn’t one soul I could talk to about it! Jeff was still alive, and Jeff was gentle, in his own way. But he never wanted to talk about anything but beef or maybe range fires when the air was dry and flash floods when the clouds rolled in from the distant—God, how distant—sea. I’ve never seen the ocean, Stuart. Can you believe that?”
He shrugged and said, “I have. Just picture the biggest flash flood you ever saw and that’s close enough. I sort of wish you wouldn’t dig your nails into my wrist like that, Fionna.”
She looked down, blinked in surprise, and primly moved her hands to her lap, saying, “I must be coming down with cabin fever. You must think I’ve become a crazy old mountain woman, Stuart.”
He smiled kindly and told her, “You’re too young and pretty. But speaking of crazy old mountain women, my Aunt Ida said something about buckwheat and currant flapjacks in the morning and if I’m not there she’ll likely wind up rolling on the floor and frothing at the mouth.”
“Don’t leave just yet,” she gasped, grabbing his hand again as she added, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you for years, Stuart.”
He didn’t answer. She asked, “Do you remember that Christmas party at the Martin spread, the time I teased you about the mistletoe over the barn door?”
He looked away and growled, “I do. I still consider what you did to me that night cruelty to dumb animals.”
She lowered her lashes and replied, “It was, Stuart. I know you thought I was just teasing a bashful younger boy. I thought I was, too, until I kissed you and felt, well, like no eighteen-year-old lady has any call to feel about a boy that young.”
He didn’t answer. He sure hoped she didn’t remember the effect it had had on him at the time. Apparently she did. She almost whispered, “I went home and cried half the night, Stuart. I felt so ashamed. Not because of the way you sort of, ah, bulged at me while we were kissing and everyone was laughing, but because of the thrill I’d felt shoot through me when I realized what was happening to both of us and because, try as I might, I couldn’t feel as ashamed as the Good Book says I should have felt about it. Were you ashamed, that night, you wicked child?”
He grinned sheepishly and said, “Yeah, I figured I was on my way to hell for sure. But I sure was sorry all I’d gotten was a kiss.”
She laughed, too loud, and said, “I guess I found out I was a woman, that night. That’s why I never kissed you again until that time you danced with me at my wedding. I guess that was a mistake, too. For later, that night, I didn’t enjoy kissing my husband half that much. What do you reckon it was, Stuart? Some sort of magic that only happens between the right people when they kiss?”
He looked away and said, “We weren’t the right people for each other, Fionna. You were old enough to be getting hitched. I was still a fool skinny kid, younger than your Buck is right now.”
She said, “I know. Five years seems such a long distance when nobody involved has made it past twenty. Now it doesn’t seem half as important, to me, at least. Does it seem important to you, Stuart?”
He shrugged and said, “I’ve bought chop suey for gals older than you, in Frisco, if that’s what you mean.”
She sobbed that was just what she meant and leaned forward to kiss him, sobbing something that sounded like “chop suey.” It was hard to tell with her tongue in his mouth like that.
He held her closer and kissed her the way he’d always pined to kiss her. It was as exciting as he’d always figured it might be, but, somehow, not the same. When they came up for air, he said, “If I don’t leave now you’ll have a time getting rid of me, old pal.”
She clung to him and said, “Don’t go. My menfolk are both fast asleep and no one will ever know, darling.”
He said, “You’ll know. I’ll know, and after that things get mighty complicated, Fionna. I can’t take you back to Frisco with me. Not because you’re too old, but because I’m too poor. A man who’d take a woman away from all you, Buck, and Buck’s father worked so hard to build would be less than a man, or even a snake that could hold its head up around decent folk.”
She clung harder and sobbed, “Dammit, I’m not asking you to marry me, darling. I just want one night of love, in the arms of a man I think I’ve loved since I was a high school girl!”
He said, “I may as well confess I think I’ve loved you more than I should have all my adult life, too, Fionna. That’s why we can’t do it.”
“Are you crazy? There’s nothing standing between us, now. Are we to go to our graves without ever consummating this beautiful feeling between us, Stuart?”
He kissed her again. It felt grand. Then he said, “We’d best keep it beautiful, Fionna. It might not keep, if we give in to moonlight and natural yearnings that sometimes don’t seem so sensible by the cold gray dawn.”
“You are crazy! You do want me. I can feel it, darling!”
He moved her hand to a more wholesome position and told her, “What’s right to want and what’s right to do aren’t always the same. Sure I want you—so bad I’ll likely never forgive myself for not having had you when I had this chance. But one of us has to be strong and I reckon that makes it my chore, Fionna. I don’t want to bust a pretty bubble I’ve been admiring all these years and, if we went any further we’d surely bust it, no matter how things turned out.”
“You bastard! You’ve just been teasing a poor old lady! You never wanted me at all!”
“I’m not finished. I’m older, now, too. But it’s not age I’m worried about, it’s bubbles. What would happen to a love dream if one or the other turned out to be less in bed than a love dream? Worse yet, what on earth would we ever do if it turned out that magic you spoke of was really there, and we wound up in love entire instead of just dreaming about it? We’d be in a hell of a mess, Fionna. For how could true lovers part after one night of true love and just go on as if it had never happened?”
She didn’t seem to understand. She leaped up suddenly and ran into the house, bawling. He sighed, got up, and swung over the rail to untether the palomino and ride, muttering, “Well, so much for lost causes and love bubbles. I always thought she had more sense than that.”
CHAPTER
TEN
*
He rode in quiet and led the palomino into the stable in the dark. But as he unsaddled her, Verdugo appeared out of nowhere with a lantern in one hand and a Walker conversion in the other. When he saw who it was he holstered the old .45 and Stringer asked him, “Don’t you ever sleep?”
Verdugo replied, “Not much. Do you? That mare has been in much chaparral. I’d better get a curry comb.”
Stringer s
aid, “I’m not after your job, viéjo. We’ll both put the lady to bed.” Then Verdugo smiled, a rare sight, and Stringer knew he’d been accepted by the old Californio as they worked together.
While they did, he naturally brought Verdugo up to date on his recent excitement, leaving out the more romantic details. Verdugo agreed the kidnapping of Dotty Montez was a poser. Then he suggested, “The girl is not wicked, but perhaps a little wild, with no father for to chase the muchachos away. They may have been, how you say, white slavers?”
Stringer was willing to consider anything. But he decided, “So far the gang’s lost at least four men. That seems sort of brave for pimps. I also have reason to assume that library gal was sort of wild and I know for a fact she was pretty. But they didn’t try to enslave her. They shot her down like a dog, the sons of bitches.”
Verdugo shrugged and agreed, “I can’t see them shooting at you so often for to recruit you as a lady of the evening, even if you were built right. But what could the desperadoes be after? Almost any of those Italian families in El Dorado would have better means for to ransom a daughter. There has to be more in the cash till at Miss Gina’s than poor Hernan Montez ever saw in his life.”
Stringer frowned thoughtfully and asked, “How come he’s a Garcia if Dotty says she’s a Montez y Sepulveda, Viejo?”
Verdugo proved he was an old-timer by explaining, “Hernan Garcia eloped with Rosa Sepulveda. Their daughter, the Maria you know, became a Montez when she married the father of Pedro’, Dorotea, and Tomas. He was killed in a mining accident, as you know. There is a limit to how long a name one might wished to be called and, since the Garcias of this neighborhood were what you people call trash, the children go by ‘Montez y Sepulveda’ because they must use their father’s name, Montez, and the Sepulvedas on their maternal line were what you people call quality, see?”