Working the Lode (22 page)

“Doggone if he wouldn’t,” Cormack mumbled in assent. “Leblanc would bathe her in salt butter and set her out for the flies. Then act surprised when she went under.” He thought. “Some desperadoes have to go under for this day’s work.”

“Speaking of doctoring, old chap,” said Tremaine. “Can you take a look at this odd lump on my side…?”

* * * *

An hour later, Joaquin rushed into Cormack’s room, swirling his serape about the tiny enclosure as he paced in agitation up and down Zelnora’s bedside. His enormous silver spurs the size of saucers jangled as he cursed at full chisel in Spanish. The basic gist of his rant involved
“pendejos”
and many remarks about donkey’s anuses, and he took off his gloves and slapped them against the flimsy wall as though challenging a foe to a duel. Cormack had to hand him several cups of whiskey before he calmed down enough to talk.

Joaquin tossed firewater down his throat and swallowed hard, his eyes flashing. “I think I know the men responsible, Cormack. I must apologize profusely that I was not aware of their intentions beforehand! Let us go into the next room so as not to wake your slumbering sweetheart.”

Leaving Tremaine there in case Zelnora awoke, they strode to the next tiny cell. A fellow’s possible bag and pickaxe lay there, so they continued to the next cell.

“I swear to you, Cormack, I had no warning of this plan!” Joaquin protested as they entered the enclosure, this one containing an actual fellow lying askew on the cot. “Of course I would have stopped these pistoleros from waylaying you if I had known!” He distractedly waved his pistol in the fellow’s face, and the fellow went like sixty out of the hotel, considerately leaving behind a half bottle of whiskey.

Joaquin sucked prodigiously from it, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, in his distress forgetting his impeccable Castilian manners. “This is unheard of, idiots racing about without my knowledge!”

Cormack accepted the grimy bottle. He didn’t want to address Joaquin’s protestations of innocence. “Eddie Tremaine is getting the word out to all assayers if they see a gold lump like that, to let us know straight off. We told no one about the strike.”

Joaquin pointed at the ground. “No one? What about that simple hombre who likes to feel the heads of people?”

He referred to Quartus’ phrenology hobby, and this irked Cormack. He had become very fond of Quartus. Quartus always eagerly pitched in with whatever was asked, and it was no fault of his own he couldn’t ride a horse too well. “Old hoss! Don’t you lay a hand on that child. He’s half froze for brains, but we didn’t tell him about the giant nugget. No, if anyone went crawling like a rattler along the bottom to raise the alarm about the nugget, it was one of the men you sent to work with us. How do we know we can trust them?”

“Did they see the nugget?”

“Not to my knowledge, but who knows where they câched themselves, lying handsome on their stomachs behind a boulder?”

Joaquin furrowed his silken brows and took a step toward Cormack. “How dare you accuse me of sending duplicitous men!”

Cormack took an additional step toward Joaquin. “Well, it sure appears there are certain folks roaming about that you have no control over. You don’t have the tiniest sign who these desperadoes are who nearly raised our topknots, leaving us lying there like wolf’s meat.”

“I will find them.” And Joaquin turned on his boot heel and stalked out.

Cormack finally breathed. He was heading into the hallway to check on Zelnora when there was a report of a pistol out in the street. There were a few womanly shrieks, then a brief silence, and then the auctioneer started back in.

“Will anybody say twenty-five? Will anybody advance on thirty dollars?”

The Mexican funeral procession resumed its march, headed by a dismal brass band, and Joaquin returned to the hotel. He pressed Cormack into the empty cell, even shoving him back against the flimsy wall as he holstered his pistol.

He poked Cormack in the chest. “You see? You see how I get things done?”

“By shooting a man?”

Joaquin closed his eyes in frustration. “That man owed me a hundred dollars. And I only shot him in the leg. And someone said they heard him boasting as he swaggered about, talking about an enormous nugget recently found on the Stanislaus.”

It was becoming difficult to concentrate with the proximity of Joaquin. He must have been on his way to some soiree or other, as under his serape he wore a velvet jacket trimmed with gold braid, and his clean, glossy hair smelled of cigar smoke. His beautifully straight, aristocratic nose was just inches from Cormack’s. Yet the idea Joaquin had crossed him kept Cormack’s palms flat against the wall, while his traitorous cock swelled and elongated against his thigh. “There may have been other enormous nuggets, Joaquin. Or you could have shot that man to deflect blame from yourself.”

Joaquin shoved his face so close to Cormack’s he sprayed spittle. “How can you accuse me of such a thing? Why would I betray you? You are helping my daughter regain life—why would I deny you a good living?” He gazed lewdly with heavily-lidded eyes at Cormack’s mouth. “Why would I betray you when I admire you so much?”

And all at once, as though unable to restrain himself, Joaquin kissed him. Full sucking kisses with his soft, pliant lips, hungry and defiant as Joaquin laved Cormack’s tongue with his own. They snorted against each other’s faces, a sudden wave of arousal sweeping down Cormack’s chest, stiffening his nipples, making him weak in the knees. Gripping a handful of Joaquin’s luxurious hair in his fist, Cormack snapped his neck back, exposing his vulnerable throat to him, and laid an openmouthed slurp on his Adam’s apple.

“Why do you admire me?” he demanded.

As if to distract Cormack, Joaquin enfolded his prick in his hand and squeezed almost lovingly. A low purring sound rumbled in the pit of his throat when Cormack licked the velvety brown skin. “You are strong…
muy masculino
…”

“Those aren’t good enough reasons.
Tu también eres muy varoni.
You are feared by everyone in California and Mexico.”

Fairly giggling like a youth, with his thumb Joaquin tickled the underside of his burgeoning erection. “I am just a mysterious black devil who arrives, then disappears. I do not want my life to be meaningless, all for nothing. I can only gain…
estabilidad
…stability through loving another.”

Loving? Ho, boy, who said anything about loving? Cormack kissed the bandit’s chin, throat, and scrabbled the shirt collar aside to suck on his smooth trapezius. Loving was between men and women. Although he supposed one could love one’s brother. Or trapping
compañero
…

Joaquin clasped Cormack’s muscular thigh between his and humped him like a sly fox. “I would crawl on hands and knees to show my admiration for you. You must not see me as a murdering, robbing fiend.”

Cormack flicked the tip of his tongue against Joaquin’s lower lip. “But you
are
a murdering, robbing fiend.” The murdering fiend’s cock was so stiff against his thigh Cormack feared Joaquin would waste his seed inside his
calzoneras.

“One who esteems you, and would never betray you,” Joaquin panted into his mouth.

Cormack slid his palms down Joaquin’s back and gripped the globes of his ass to him, briefly and brutally, causing the Spaniard to grunt. “Then prove it.” Cormack nipped the man’s lower lip. “First time I saw you, you whipped my poor swollen prick and balls till I nearly came in your face.”

Joaquin grinned with conspiracy. “You wish to slap my penis?”

“No,” said Cormack, although that was an enticing idea. “I wish you to display your admiration, how much you value and take pleasure in me.”

Joaquin groaned as Cormack rolled his bulging erection against his hip. “I would like to display…I do not wish to rule you…Only to share mutual pleasure.”

“Good.” And Cormack shoved the desperado to his knees.

Tugging his buckskin shirt over his head and flinging it to the floorboards, Cormack assisted Joaquin in smoothly unbuttoning his broadfall. His erect meat nearly brained the bandit alongside his skull, and Joaquin eagerly gripped it in his hand, with his thumb anointing the bursting head with the drops of semen that had trickled out. Cormack gasped and dug his fingers into Joaquin’s shoulders.

“I wish to eat you,” it sounded as though Joaquin said. “I wish to take you inside me, make you a part of me.”

“Good god.” Cormack groaned when the desperado swallowed the length of his estimable prick down his throat. This wicked fellow could devour a man’s penis wholesale! His alluring, snakelike tongue squiggled up and down the underside as he suctioned voraciously, the grunting in the pit of his throat vibrating sensually through Cormack’s distended prick and into his belly.

Of course the Spaniard knew how to suck a penis—he knew how he liked his own to be sucked, that was logical. He nearly gushed forth into the hot mouth, so embarrassingly swift! The loud slurps, the stifling late summer waves of air against his taut nipples, the heat of the dusky fingers digging into his white ass—and the knowledge that it was a man who eagerly gorged himself on his long, thick meat! And a heartless, malicious outlaw at that!—everything conspired to bring him to a swift climax.

When Joaquin detached his mouth briefly in order to lubricate a finger with spittle, Cormack nearly clobbered him in frustrated and pent-up rage. But when he inhaled Cormack’s purplish, angry cock to the hilt while sliding that titillating finger up his ass and tickling the backside of his prick, Cormack let go.

Surge after surge of jism down that hot, thirsty throat. Joaquin moaned in appreciation, gulping hungrily. The bandit ate every mouthful that Cormack spurted, his balls twitching and jumping as he quaked and thrust into the scorching mouth. Joaquin sucked ecstatically, like a hungry calf at the teat.

Joaquin milked his prick deliciously while still tickling the inner wall of his ass with his ringed finger. Cormack’s thighs quivered, and he gave way, sliding down the feeble wall and detaching Joaquin’s greedy mouth with a powerful slurp.

They sat on their asses, dovetailed, Joaquin’s legs slung over Cormack’s hips, leaning foreheads against each other, panting.

What in god’s name…
“I can only gain stability through loving another,” Joaquin had said. Cormack had not even known he was capable of a romantic idea of love until he’d met Zelnora. He was convinced he had not “loved” his Cherokee wife, not in the typical flowery, heart-fluttering sense of the word. Their marriage was based on sense, practicality, what they could do for each other. Nothing wrong with that. It was a satisfactory arrangement that had lasted until her death. Every mountaineer needed a wife! But with Zelnora had come that heart-stopping, unbounded, sentimental outpouring of emotion he could only categorize as “love.”

Now, so soon after beginning to acknowledge this new emotion, yet another person was referring to it? Maybe Joaquin referred to that brotherly love that comrades shared, that must be it. Maybe it was the only way Spaniards expressed strong emotion—though Cormack had never heard upstanding
gente de razón
speak this way. Maybe it was just an odd thing that he would strive to forget.

“I do not wish…” Joaquin huffed, a drip of sweat teetering at the tip of his nose, “…to continue this idiocy, this robbing of people. Before long, I will be caught and hung, and I wish to live. To be an old man
, si?
Let those other anuses have their heads shaved and their ears cut off. I wish to live in dignity, like General Vallejo.”

They laughed, their slick foreheads bobbing together. Cormack leaned back against the wall and said, “I’ve seen a petrified forest, Joaquin, sure as my rifle’s got hindsights and she shoots center. I’ve lived on my moccasins for six weeks, and poor doings that feeding is. Given my druthers, and my advancing age, I’d rather have a woman’s face around my palatial abode for the balance of my days.” He paused. “I’m just like you.”

Joaquin, too, leaned back on his palms and smiled genuinely, the crotch of his
calzoneras
full to bursting. For the first time ever, Cormack saw him relaxed and at ease, his handsome face open and inviting. “Your winemaking idea is a good one. I have met thousands of people who loathe this bad, expensive Boston wine. Before long, the Spanish government will not be able to control whether Californians plant good vines or not.”