Working the Lode (28 page)

Zelnora handed Cormack the nugget. Her arm was as weak and useless as a feather. “We have his blood on our fortune,” she nearly sobbed with relief.

“Literally.”

Cormack’s chuckle made her feel better. “Are you sure he’s dead?”

“Sure.” Cormack’s tone was light, as though he’d just wrung a squirrel’s neck with his bare hands. “Such a heap of fat meat won’t shine any longer.”

At last, Zelnora relaxed enough to exhale, and buried her face against Cormack’s chest. “But…Joaquin!”

Why was he leading her back to Joaquin’s body? Enough dead meat for one day! “Not to worry, my mountain flower.”

There was a weak, wavering voice coming from the grass. “Has he gone under?”

Joaquin!

Zelnora found the strength to run the next few steps. Joaquin sat up in the grass, peeling his shirt away from a shoulder wound that looked nearly identical to the one Zelnora had incurred a few weeks back—so she would know how to nurse it. She fell to her knees as Cormack assured Joaquin, “He went under, all right. No worries.”

“Cormack, let’s get this ball out of his shoulder. Joaquin! I thought you were dead!”

Joaquin grinned, his almond-shaped eyes glinting with amusement. “I was nigh giving you hell,” he said, taking on Cormack’s manner of speaking. “My pistol soared about ten yards off, so I thought it best to play dead while I crawled for it. But I see I didn’t need to.” He looked up at Cormack with open adoration, although Cormack was unsheathing his formidable bowie knife, about to cut into his flesh.

“I’ll see if there’s fresh water in that awful cabin,” Zelnora offered.

When she stood, she saw Erskine and Mercy at the end of the timberline, trotting along on Cormack’s horse. Zelnora waved, and they waved back madly.

Epilogue

Sonoma, California

August 1849

“This day shines any way you fix it.” Cormack raised his champagne glass—a proper crystal one, at that—and clinked it against the uplifted glasses of Joaquin and Erskine. “Here’s luck!” he declared, the usual mountaineer’s pledge.

They were dressing in their best clothes in Cormack’s chambers. They needed to reckon with odd habiliments they were unaccustomed to: red silk sashes knotted at the hip, rust-colored leggings, stiff gold-trimmed velvet jackets. Joaquin claimed the sash should be knotted at the small of the back, but Erskine balked at this and pulled the ends of his out like a peacock’s tail feathers. General Vallejo had offered his tailor’s services, and he himself had even been in the chambers earlier to advise on waistcoats with buttons stamped with Mexican eagles. Cormack felt a deal too “foofaraw,” like a sappy picture, but it was for a thoroughly good cause—and well worth it, to laugh at how stiff and formal Erskine looked—and now Joaquin even became maudlin with the spirit of things, toasting:

Batallas, tempestades, amoríos,

por mar y tierra, lances, descripciones

de campos y ciudades, desafíos

y el desastre y furor de las pasiones,

goces, dichas, aciertos, desvaríos,

con algunas morales reflexiones

acerca de la vida y de la muerte,

de mi propia cosecha, que es mi fuerte.

Which, as far as Cormack could make out, went something like:

Battles, tempests, love affairs,

by sea and land, deeds, descriptions

of countryside and cities, challenges

and the disaster and furor of passions,

enjoyments, happiness, successes, deliriums,

with some moral reflections

about life and death,

of my own harvest, that is my strength.

“‘Deliriums’?” Cormack questioned. He shrugged. “I guess that could mean a happy sort of delirium.”

“A rebellious and romantic poet from Spain wrote that,” Joaquin explained.

Erskine beamed widely from ear to ear. “That just about describes all of us. Rebellious and romantic! And tomorrow, for a fortnight at least, I’ll have my own palatial lodge in San Francisco with a wondrous view of the field of topmasts choking that pacific bay!”

Erskine referred to the hundreds of ships abandoned by frenzied gold-seekers. The windows of the front room in Cormack’s new house displayed a rowdy theater of comings and goings as longshoremen tossed unsalable items overboard before abandoning the town for the gold mines. As property was already at a premium, a new landfill was being created in the tidal flats, building lots created out of tossed cast-iron stoves, chamber pots, nail kegs, and sacks of flour. Fact, a sign near Casa Bowmaker declared of the thigh-deep mud, “This street is impassable, not even jackassable.” The place was a morass of reeking humanity, but Cormack’s manor shined in the muddiest kind of crowd.

Joaquin pointed at Erskine with a
cigarito
he kept clenched between his teeth, squinting against the smoke that drifted into his eyes. “At least this time, you’ll have a roof over your head. And it’s not the rainy season.”

Holding his champagne aloft, Erskine agreed, “
Viva Carlos Quinto
!”

The other two men grinned like donkeys at Erskine’s favorite new motto, but choked in mid-gulp when there came a pounding of bare feet down the adobe corridor outside Cormack’s bedchamber.

“Señor Bowmaker!” Someone beat on the heavy oak door.

Cormack grimaced at the ticklish champagne rising in his nostrils, and the fact that he’d expressly instructed all of the hacienda’s servants to approach his rooms with a quiet demeanor, if at all.

“Cormack! It’s an emergency of the highest order!”

Joaquin raised one silken, handsome brow. “Shall I let him in?”

Cormack shrugged, adjusting his cravat in the gilt-framed looking glass. This hacienda had been loaned to him by General Vallejo until his winemaking business showed a profit, which it looked to do, given the hundreds of orders Erskine and Joaquin had collected from enthusiasts hard up for decent bug juice—old Californio families as well as the rush of thirsty
norteamericanos
. Of course, they had to make and age the wine first. And sometimes Cormack forgot whether he was supposed to be referring to Joaquin as “Antonio Carillo,” depending on whether their new customer was a pickled pioneer Joaquin’s band had robbed before.

Speaking of bug juice, Quartus Stringfellow burst into the cool adobe room with outstretched talon hands and eyes behind his thick spectacles bulging like a housefly. Oddly, his fancy embroidered
calzoneras
were rolled up to his knees, revealing bare feet stained purple-black up his white calves. He even tracked purple footprints onto the adobe tiles.

“The priest is here!” he shrieked. “The priest!”

“Quartus!” cried Cormack. “You’re ruining your best
calzoneras
!”

“I know!” Quartus replied, clutching the air with his talons. “My
calzoneras
! The priest!”

Erskine clapped a brotherly hand on his shoulder. “All right. Calm down, Quartus. So he just got here a little early. Did Captain Sutter come with him?”

“Yes! I was finishing stamping the grapes for the wedding wine, and I thought I had enough time, but bear’s ass, that—that—man of amativeness and hoarding came too soon with the priest, and—”

“All right, Quartus,” Cormack said mildly. “Erskine, will you go greet Sutter and the padre?” As Erskine skedaddled from the room, Cormack attempted to explain. “Quartus. You can’t just stamp on the grapes one minute and have wine the next. It takes awhile to set.”

“Besides,” Joaquin pointed with his
cigarito
, “we bought that new mechanical winepress. You don’t need to stamp anymore.”

Quartus looked about to sob. “But I did it the other week.”

Cormack said soothingly, “Yes. Those were white grapes. They don’t take nearly as long to mature. Why don’t you go and get some of the white wine from the cave?”

Cheered at having a new juice errand to attend to, Quartus meandered off. The two men stood side by side adjusting their finery in the looking glass. Joaquin looked especially exotic with the new pointed beard he had recently grown, perhaps to throw potential customers off the track of his notorious past. One of the several other Joaquin bandits had been decapitated by militia near San José a few months back, and Joaquin Valenzuela was perfectly willing to let people think that had been him. Since Three-Fingered Jack and Feliz had been with this newfangled Joaquin at the San José necktie party and both sent immediately to Judge Lynch & Company’s Fast Line, most people believed Joaquin Valenzuela had gone under. The militia had exhibited the counterfeit Joaquin’s pickled head in a jar in San Francisco, and Joaquin, Cormack, and Zelnora had gone to visit it.

Fingering his cravat, Joaquin said, “Does Quartus really think Sutter is a man of ‘amativeness and hoarding’? He’s lost nearly his entire fortune since all his workers ran off, and gold squatters took over his land.”

Cormack grinned. “It’s hard to tell what he really believes. It’s that phrenology business. Remember when he said your head told him of your ‘blandness’ and ‘stability’?” Turning his friend to face him, Cormack caressed the smooth side of his face. It was always sheer pleasure just touching the velvety skin. “Maybe Quartus can see the future. You’ve certainly improved your stability, becoming my business partner.”

Joaquin reached up, rubbing his thumb against Cormack’s lower lip. “And ‘hope for the future,’ don’t forget Quartus’ premonition about that. Before I met you and Zelnora, I was just a hopeless bastard. Now, my daughter is healthy, and I don’t have to rob anyone.”

Although it might muss his shirtfront, Cormack couldn’t resist kissing the former bandit. Although these days he preferred to think of him as a former monte dealer.

* * * *

Zelnora swept into her bedchamber, feeling resplendent in her turquoise satin gown. When she saw the two men holding each other gently and kissing each other with softly licking tongues, she closed the door behind her and waited. It was always pleasant to view a display of their affection. Although not an appropriate moment to become hot as monkeys, what with the padre and
gente de razón
of Sonoma waiting for them, Zelnora breathed heavily as Joaquin threaded his ringed fingers through Cormack’s
pelirrojo
locks, fingering the beautifully strong nape of his neck.

This was a shining day, as Cormack would say. Tonight, Vallejo had arranged a plush banquet, though tomorrow they would have to get back to the business of grape-growing. Zelnora could not resist joining her fingers with Joaquin’s in stroking the heated back of Cormack’s neck, rising on her toes to kiss him there.

“Come,” she whispered as the men broke apart. “We have to get out to the chapel.”

Cormack smiled down at her, tickling her under the chin. “You’re ravishing, my mountain flower. Today is almost like last June at our wedding.”

Smiling, Zelnora tugged Cormack toward the door. “Except our wedding took place in San Francisco before we put the roof on our house.”

“Yes,” Cormack agreed. “There’s that difference. Today Erskine and Mercy have a roof over their wedding.”

Buckling a sword around his waist, Joaquin said, “That was the first time I’ve ever seen it rain in California in June.”