The Mother Lode

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Joe Moss awoke to feel someone tugging at his pants. He was just sober enough to realize he had to act fast or he was going to be robbed or maybe even murdered.

He stabbed the thief just below his rib cage and then twisted the blade upward. The man let out a horrible scream and Joe felt his warm, spurting blood.

The light was poor, but Joe recognized the second man to be Charley. Joe's tomahawk glanced off Charley's head, shearing off an ear. Charley yelled and tried to gouge out Joe's eyes, but that stopped when Joe began hacking the man's scalp from his skull.

“You sonsabitches drank my whiskey and then tried to rob and kill me!” Joe raged. “I'll have
both
your scalps!”

Charley was hysterical as Joe chopped off his scalp and then buried the blade of his tomahawk in the man's forehead, splitting it open like a ripe melon.

By now, everyone in the upstairs rooms of the Lucky Lady was pouring out into the hallway and filling Joe's doorway. Someone had a lantern and then they saw Joe waving two bloody scalps.

“I've never seen anything the likes of him!” a man whispered, his eyes wide with pure horror.

“That's Charley's and Willard's scalps that he's waving!” another gasped.

“Get him!” someone growled.

Joe was still drunk and quite proud of himself for the fight he'd won when the mob in the doorway came down on him like a mountainside.

MAN OF HONOR
THE MOTHER LODE

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

THE MOTHER LODE

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley edition / August 2007

Copyright © 2007 by Gary McCarthy.

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ISBN: 978-0-425-21660-6

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J
OE MOSS LEFT California on a tough Spanish mule with only one thought on his mind ... get over these towering Sierras and find his beloved Fiona and their bastard child somewhere on the Comstock Lode. He had been a mountain man, a Santa Fe mule skinner, and a wagon master, but now he felt as if he'd been nothing but a failure.

Tall and angular, at forty years of age, he'd killed and scalped enough men to warrant a ticket straight to hell, but in sweet Fiona McCarthy and the child they had created, he felt that he might somehow find redemption, if not in the eyes of the Lord, then at least in his own. Only days before, he'd learned that the only woman he'd ever loved had borne his child, which they'd conceived on an ill-fated wagon train four years earlier. As wagon master and chief scout, Joe was responsible for bringing those sixty wagons out from St. Joseph, and he'd done a pretty good job, too. But then he'd fallen in love with Brendan McCarthy's daughter, and lain with Fiona in the grass while one of the stock tenders had gotten his scalp lifted. And for that single hour of joy and pleasure, he'd been sent packing when his train reached Fort Laramie.

“I thought I could drive Fiona out of my heart with liquor and other women,” he told the hard-laboring mule as it trudged up toward Donner Pass. “But I never did. I would have let her go and lived a life of regrets, except now I just found out she bore my child. Boy or girl, it don't matter to me. The baby has my blood and is birthed from my seed. Mule, as God is my witness, I mean to give both Fiona and our child my name . . . if that Irish girl will show forgiveness and still have me.”

Joe Moss had lived a hard, free life, and it wasn't in his nature to attach to anything . . . especially a woman. To his way of thinking, if you loved something, it was just too damned painful to lose it, so it was better never to love. But he had fallen in love with sweet Fiona, and then brought her nothing but heartache and shame. Maybe if her mother hadn't fevered and died on the trail, and her father hadn't been such a roaring asshole, things would have gone smooth. But when Fiona's mother had passed beside the Platte River, Fiona had sworn to look after her daddy, and so she'd been bound to keep her word. Joe didn't blame Fiona for honoring a deathbed promise to her mother, but it sure had caused them both a dung pile of pain.

“Some men are lucky at cards and some are lucky at finding gold or fortune,” Joe told the poor mule as it labored up toward the high pass, “but me . . . well, I've never been lucky at anything, and good only at stayin' alive be it fightin' red man or white.”

The mule was really struggling because of the steep grade and high altitude. Joe had bought the little beast in Denver, and it had packed all his gear while he'd almost killed a good Appaloosa gelding on his frantic quest to reach Fiona in California. The Palouse had carried Joe's weight and run its heart near to burstin', and he'd left the horse right about here . . . left it to live . . . or die . . . as it would, and he'd cursed himself for his desperation and cruelty.

Joe Moss reckoned that he had a great big hole in himself where his soul should have rested. And he believed that his only hope for this world or the next rested in making things right with Fiona and taking her as his wife . . . if she'd have him.

But what if Fiona was married? They'd told him in California that her father had married her off once to a prospector in the expectation of having a rich claim on the Feather River. But the claim had proven a bust and Brendan McCarthy had killed the prospector in a rage, and taken his daughter to the Comstock Lode. Maybe that sonofabitch had married Fiona off a second time to another miner, this one a hard-rock man who worked deep under the Comstock Lode.

Just the thought of poor Fiona being married to a man she did not love and bearing a child whose father she thought never again to see was enough to send Joe Moss into utter despair. And what of their child? Had it lived . . . or had it died? If it had died, then he'd fathered a child he'd never known or seen. Gawd! It was enough to make a grown man weep.

“Hurry along, mule!” Joe cried, jumping off the animal when it staggered and seemed ready to drop. “Hurry along!” he urged as he tugged on the lead rope with sweat pouring down his bearded face into his dirty buckskins.

The mule was nearly dead when they reached a sorry little settlement named Pine Town just an hour before sun-down. It wasn't much of a place at all, hard-looking and with only a few stores fronting a muddy red rut of road.

“We'll stop here for the night,” he told his badly flagging mule. “I'll get you some grain and all the hay you can swallow. Maybe some new shoes because I hear that the Comstock Lode ain't nothin' but a barren mountain with no trees nor grass nor any sweet water. It's just a hell hill of pure gold and silver.”

Joe found a livery and dismounted. The owner came out and said, “Looks like you've been doin' some hard travelin', mister.”

“We have been,” Joe admitted with some shame.

The livery owner was a man in his early sixties, dirty, with bib overalls tucked into the tops of boots worn out at the heels. He wore a little top hat thick with dust and it rested on his bat ears. Beyond him, Joe could see a corral with five horses inside and a barn that seemed to have more air in the walls than wood. Two big Missouri mules saw Joe's little Spanish mule and brayed a challenge at the beaten animal.

“You want I should put your mule in with those two?” the liveryman asked. “Be cheapest for you.”

“No, thank you,” Joe told the man, knowing that his little mule would get bullied and bitten. “Put him in his own stall with fresh straw and grain him good, then feed him all of your best hay that he can stomach.”

The livery owner frowned. “Little skinny fella like that ain't hardly worth botherin' about, mister. Why, he ain't worth much of nothin'.”

“I know that,” Joe said, feeling irritated by the comment, “but he's all I got and he's given me his best so take good care of him for the night. How much added to let me sleep in your hay and wash in your water trough?”

“Two dollars for you both will handle the charge and I'll loan you a bar of lye soap. You
do
sort of smell rank, mister. Why didn't you jump in a river on your way up from Sacramento?”

“ 'Cause I don't swim so good and I don't want to die by drownin',” Joe confessed. “Rivers hereabouts are all fast. Probably drunken prospectors drownin' in 'em most every day.”