Roy Bean's Gold (27 page)

There weren't many at the funeral, preached at graveside by the local minister, a tall, stoop-shouldered old fellow named Ashworth. Some of our regulars came out in one of the three hired hacks as did Shanghai Bender and Peter Biggs. Sim Watson, the local marshal, was also on hand along with Salvador Salazar.

Following the short service, a chilly December rain began to patter through the hazy sunshine and we piled into the hacks for town, following the empty hearse. Salazar rode with me, while Shanghai drove and Peter Biggs sat up front with him, wiping away at his good eye.

I'd sent Josh off in as good a style as I could, dressing him in one of his fancy
alcalde
get-ups, and with the very last of Jeff Kirker's gold pieces in his vest pocket—to show St. Peter that he'd left the game standing pat.

“I seen you place the
moneda de oro
in your brother's pocket,” Salazar jostled my thoughts—as to who could have back-shot Josh, and had those bullets been meant for me? “
Sí
,” he went on, tugging at his ox-horn mustaches that now drooped as mournfully as his battered sombrero. “I think that is the ancient custom, giving the dead one plenty
pesos
to pay the old ferryman for safe passage to the other shore.”

I'd a feeling the little officer meant to twist the talk around to those gold eagles of Kirker's, as he'd done before, but he remained silent.

“
Muerte
. Murieta. There's an
hombre
right well named, isn't he? Death and a dealer in death,” I mused, my thoughts onto another trail. I stared back at the redwoods, where they loomed up like a pair of crimson monuments in the late afternoon but seeing again the cold handsome face of Carlos Hechavarría. “Where could that damnable Murieta be by now?”

“Only the devil himself knows where such hellfire
bastardos
get themselves off to,” Salazar grumbled. “Young Bean, again I must thank you for your help in saving the Benicia armory. though most of those villains escaped, as you know. But like I've told you before, all gold in the ground or out of it is our poor land's curse. It brings much sorrow and death, as you know, poor fellow.”

Wondering again just how much Salazar knew of Kirker's gold, I switched the talk to the whereabouts of the other murder suspects, Charley Cora in particular, who'd vanished since his fight with Josh. I was almost certain Diamond Dick was still away in the mining camps with Dulcima and the traveling troupe.

For all the talk on the ride back, we came to no definite conclusion as to who'd actually cut down my brother.

When our hack pulled up in front of the Golden Nugget in the rainy dusk, Salazar and I got down to stand before the locked door. He took my hand, wishing me well and asking as to my future plans.

“Suppose I'll keep the place open for the time being,” I said to the obvious relief of Bender and Biggs, who thereupon drove up the street to turn in the hack at Johnson's Livery.

The little marshal's broad brown face sobered as he lingered under the gaslight by the saloon door. “I see you pack
la pistola
. I felt it as we sat side-by-side.
bueno!
But guard yourself well,
amigo joven
. It may be that the cowardly assassin who slew your brother might return.”

We shook hands again, and then Salazar walked off, his squat figure wavering and fading in the gathering darkness.

Standing before the locked and bolted door of our empty saloon, I made a vow that not only would I guard myself but I'd see someone paid for Josh. And paid in blood!

* * * * *

For the next two months I stayed close to the Golden Nugget, managing the place and taking care of the money, for we'd gained the reputation of being a straight house. Sometimes I felt as though I'd a couple of holes right spang through me, like poor Josh. One came from an emptiness of not knowing when I'd ever see Dulcima again, and also wondering about Rosita. The other gap in my life was the knowledge my brother could still be alive if I'd never come to California.

But other times, when the money came in hand over fist at the tables, and I'd nigh decided to become a gambling czar instead of my old daydream of being a merchant prince, I shrugged off all other thoughts.

That didn't mean I didn't watch my back whenever I went home to the hotel in the late hours or visited other saloons on the look-out for either Charley Cora or Carlos Hechavarría. But both rascals seemed to have vanished from California, though I figured that Carlos was off in the mountains licking his wounds after the whipping Salazar had given him, and who knew where that grinning wildcat Cora was.

I still kept up a haphazard sort of love affair with the San Francisco theatres. Even though Dulcima was no longer in town, I couldn't keep away from McGuire's Jenny Lind where young Lotta Crabtree was settling down for a long run, starring in
Loan of a Lover
, playing a pepper pot named Gertrude. A great little trouper, with all sorts of wild jigs and reels, she reminded me, again, of Dulcima and her electric enthusiasms.

The high point of the new year came when the great Lola Montez returned to San Francisco in February, after a two-year world tour, and knocked the theatre-going crowds into a cocked hat with her new production of
Maritana
at the San Francisco Theater, where she took three parts herself. Then the raven-haired thespian topped that smash with
Charlotte Corday
. And how those packed houses whooped it up when she gave the villain Marat the deep six between the ribs with her glittering Bowie knife.

But as much as I enjoyed the fabulous actress in her triumphs, I only attended two performances, for the sight of that lady's well nigh incomparable looks brought memories of Rosita, partly from the two women's past association and the fact they were two of the greatest beauties of the day.

By earliest March, spring was coming up the coast. Birds were returning from warmer climes below the border. Jays, larks, and magpies flew about in noisy clusters while wood pigeons and quail circled the outskirts in great masses. I had an idea that most restaurants' bill of fare would soon feature roast pigeon as well as canvasback, for the latter were now swooping into the coves and backwaters in thundering gray clouds.

Riding White Lightning out to visit Josh's grave at Potero Hill, as I did each Sunday, I saw California poppies, wild iris, and Indian paintbrush stitching tender stalks through the greening grasses, as hundreds of yucca reared their crowns of sword-shaped leaves about the countryside. The oak, manzanita, and laurel as well as the rest of the trees in the groves and woodlands were already a green shimmer in their new leafy shawls.

Foxes, coyotes, and deer trotted or loped out of my way as I racked along the country roads and several times I saw black bear lumbering into the shady protection of neighboring woods, but never did I see any lurking horsemen or suspicious riders, though I met and passed dozens of folk coming or going from the small farms or mines.

The chilling rains had ceased days before and now the winds, forever ranging the coasts, seemed more charged than ever with the unending roar of the vast Pacific reaches—a sound never entirely forgotten, though pushed backward into some corner of the mind.

So it was with Josh, I told myself as I stood staring at the sunken patch of earth with its raw wooden cross, already weathering into a faded-brown. His brutal and cowardly murder and the unseen threat still hanging over me was also something never completely forgotten. It was a situation filling me with a half-felt restlessness, compounded with such things as the low, insistent booming of the mighty Pacific, and the fact that I was young, and that it was spring, and that I should be on the move. Though it wasn't yet time to start hunting for that golden hoard I had to be on the move somewhere.

Returning to the Golden Nugget on the second Sunday in March, I made up my mind to ride over to the mining camps where McGuire's touring company and Dulcima were performing. I already had their itinerary from the colonel. Grass Valley, the first four nights, Rabbit Creek, six nights, Taylor's Gulch, five nights, Rich Bar, four nights, Gibsonville, two nights, and Hangtown, two nights. As it was now March 16th the company would be in Gibsonville by the time I could get there.

Three days later I was traveling the rough trail leading to the mining camp of Gibsonville in the Bear River Valley. On the way out from San Antonio Landing I'd taken a wrong turn, where the road forked at the old Mexican village of Río, and rode north for near a day before running onto the little mining camp of Bullard's Bar at Feather River, where I finally got straightened out.

Even though I'd sighted the houses, shacks, and mining rigs of Gibsonville perched along the curving brown river in the late afternoon, it was deep twilight before I got down the steep slope of nearly two thousand feet and to ride up the shadowy main street.

Lamps were already glowing invitingly in the hamlet's two hotels and several saloons, while the sounds of banjos, fiddles, and applause rippled out of the little log opera house between the hotels.

Though there was barely standing room at the back of the stifling-hot auditorium I paid my ticket and watched Dulcima, the Chapmans, and the rest of the company go through their paces in the evening's performance,
The Little Detective
.

Dulcima, obviously reveling in the story, impersonated six characters. As one of them, Harry Racket, she minced out in a fawn-colored sporting outfit that drew waves of applause from the shabby miners. Switching from one role to another as she pursued the obvious villain, she brought down the house when she turned up as Barney O'Brien with a blarney-filled repertoire of jigs and reels.

When the threadbare red curtain rippled down, she returned to complete her conquest of the laughing, shouting audience with a final, naughty little ballad, “Chaff and Wink Your Eye.”

I slipped out into the street ahead of the jam-packed mob, waiting till I was able to force my way back to the dressing room, and saw an old acquaintance, Captain Harry Love, puffing on a cigar and striding along with some of his rangers.

Watching Love elbowing through the crowd toward a saloon, I felt a touch on my arm and turned to find Dulcima beside me.

“Oh, Roy, I felt you were here. But don't ask me how.” Her blue eyes were dim with tears. “I heard about your brother Josh and felt so bad for you.” Suddenly she stamped a little boot. “But why did you wait so long to come to me? We could have been together again. I've thought of nothing else.”

When I tried to explain, she brushed all aside with a sweep of her hand. “No matter. Dick Powers has gone and changed our schedule and is waiting for the company at Hangtown, where they've had a big strike. Our coach leaves in less than an hour!”

* * * * *

Late next morning, after an uneasy night at the hotel, I was riding through a pine grove along a ridge twenty miles west of Gibsonville when some sound or movement broke in on my thoughts. I pulled up White Lightning and let him take a breather while I turned in the saddle to stare back down the twisting, brush-fringed trail. Nothing.

As I scanned the empty landscape, all those bitter, anxious words of Dulcima's swept into my mind again.

I slapped the great stallion's reins and rode on down the steep slope. Dulcima! How I'd felt the pressure of her firm, young thigh against me when she'd stood close in that laughing, jovial crowd as we waited for the evening stage.

“It would be so wonderful, Roy, if you could find that money. that gold of ours,” she'd whispered to me. “But I want us to get far away from this country. I've hated this terrible land since I was a little child. a child nearly killed by those terrible red beasts when they destroyed our wagon train.” She shuddered against me. “It was those savage animals and this wild country that threw me straight into the arms of those murderous Almadas, making me the helpless, orphaned ward of a red-headed bandit and that red-haired slut.”

I'd shuffled my boots in the sand to hear such words coming from those softly kissable lips, and asked about Dick Powers's whereabouts the night Josh was shot. But she told me Diamond Dick had been nearly a hundred miles away from San Francisco, at Murderers Bar on the Sacramento, that evening.

Once more thinking of her farewell kiss, I reined in at another tree-crowned hill, listening. All was still except for the rusty-hinge creaking of a pair of mountain jays and a dismal wind slipping through wavering oak and pine boughs.

Kicking up my mount, I'd started down the next slope when a rifle cracked out from an oak grove to my left, the bullet creasing White Lightning's shoulder. In less than a breath, I'd hit the rocky ground with a teeth-rattling jolt as my wounded stallion plunged into the underbrush. I could spot nothing but a faint blue thread of smoke drifting upward. Then a second shot banged flatly and the rifleman rode out of the woods, calmly leveling his weapon down at me, where I crouched by a boulder.

Yanking my Colt, I thumbed off two shots. Though it was a far piece I saw the stranger's black sombrero fall off, then he toppled stiffly from his big, gray mount.

Stumbling through the thickets after White Lightning, I heard shouts and calls break out from where the murderous drygulcher lay.

“Murieta! Hey, Captain, here's Murieta!”

And I heard Captain Love's bass voice cheering back exultantly at his men, like an excited hound dog that had treed his 'coon.

After a five-minute search I, at last, found White Lightning in a rock-strewn gully, quivering but sound enough, save for that bloody gash across his shoulder. After wiping his wound with moss and water from my canteen, I led him through the tangled undergrowth and around the hill to where I could mount and ride to hell out of there.

Murieta. Murieta dead or taken. I'd not waited to find out and now there seemed nothing more to worry about except for finding my gold.