Working the Lode (7 page)

Gold.
Cormack kissed Zelnora, sweetly and gently, loving her with his mouth. He kissed her again and again as she grasped his shirtfront, nearly melting into him. Ho, boy, was he a perverted old hard case to get an erection when they had just discovered gold? He should be more concerned about his future riches.
Gold, gold, gold…

As Quartus was now performing some new movement of polka steps, Zelnora broke away and walloped her husband a backhand across the chest. “Cheese it, Quartus! Captain Sutter told us to keep quiet any news of a mineral strike—there are bandits roaming the countryside ready to stick knives in us like porcupines if they hear of this.”

At the mention of “bandits” Quartus stopped his dance. His round eyes behind the spectacles spoke of his romantic reverence for highwaymen. “Bandits? Bear’s ass!” And he stumbled off to get some more bug juice.

“Sister Sparks!” bellowed Bigler, holding his tin cup up on high. “You are absolutely certain of this, then?”

“Oh, yes, Henry! This gold is of the finest quality, perhaps twenty-three carats. Give me some of that whiskey!”

At that moment, the door’s bell tinkled, and a local corncracker and a Californio entered, beaming from ear to ear in puzzlement at the spontaneous spree in Brannagh’s store. “Miss Sparks!” the farmer called. “What’s all the hubbub? Did we get a new supply of Forty Rod?”

Ho, boy, Forty Rod. Just a whiff of that firewater would kill a man at that distance, even around a corner. To distract the farmer, Zelnora went into the back room with the tray of gold and brought forth a presumably good bottle of some liquor.

Shoving it at the farmer, Zelnora said, “This brandy is of the quality that the Duke of Orleans drinks, Mr. Leese. Try some. Mercy, give the men cups.” Returning to Cormack’s side, she whispered fiercely, “Cormack. We simply must go back to Coloma and see to what extent this gold pans out. If we discover it’s worth pursuing, we build what’s known as a rocker, a sort of cradle to facilitate the process. But we can’t let anyone see what we’re doing. How will you hide it from Marshall?”

Cormack tipped his head to one side. Marshall? Who gave a flying fuck about Marshall? It was easy enough to hide the gold signs from him. “More to the point, Zelnora…What about Brannagh? If you come up to Coloma, what will you tell him?”

“He’s away for yet another week and a half. That’s plenty of time, right?”

Cormack thought, and nodded.

“Viva Carlos Quinto!”
the Californio cried at the taste of the Duke of Orleans’ brandy.

Death or glory!

Chapter Seven

Aquí está. Here it is.

The religious people had found color. Color was what Joaquin Valenzuela wanted.

Although he was an accomplished miner himself from Hermosillo in the great Mexican state of Sonora, his
compañeros
weren’t. Mostly a pack of idiots and imbeciles, men despoiled and burning for revenge on Americans. The imbeciles tended to receive passports to the other world at the hands of Judge Lynch, but there were always legions of others smoldering to pay off the wrongs done to them. In fact, Joaquin was now such a feared desperado there were more applicants for his gang than he could accept—being constantly on the move, the main band could only number twenty or so, to remain undetected, stealing horses and rustling cattle, although Joaquin had hundreds of men spread out across the state.

Joaquin’s majordomo, known by Americans as Three-Fingered Jack due to losing two fingers in the recent Mexican war, was a responsible, levelheaded enough fellow, although arguably more cutthroat than Joaquin himself. At least Jack made sure his victim was an American before slashing his throat, a detail that sometimes escaped the rest of the band, who had accidentally robbed Californios and Spaniards in their zeal.

Lying on his stomach between two boulders, Joaquin peered through his glass at the blindingly white, chile-haired American. This one seemed to be the leader, and Joaquin had been following him for several days. Having been about Sutter’s Mill, trading stolen beefsteaks for liquor, Joaquin under one of his many aliases had moved about at will, behaving with back-slapping jocosity with the mill workers. Clad in his fanciest
calzoneras
that buttoned up the side of the leg, his jacket trimmed with gold braid and a red sash around his waist, no one thought to question his heritage or his steaks. This was how he’d heard from Peter Wimmer and his brash, loud wife Gennie that some fellows had found color at the mill and were now pretending to go on daily hunting trips with the real goal of discovering more. Several other parties of the religious amigos had also sallied forth on their own “hunting” trips since Gennie Wimmer had gossiped to the four winds about the initial strike made at the actual mill. She claimed that a Henry Bigler had given her some gold to make into a ring for herself. Someone had even sent gold speck samples down to San Francisco, so it was necessary to act fast.

“There is also that
estúpido
one with the spectacles.” Three-Fingered Jack breathed from his perch atop Joaquin’s back. Joaquin tried to shrug him off bodily as the majordomo continued, “I wonder what his role is? He seems to be a surveyor of some sort, with that rod in his hand.”

“He is silly, but he can’t be very
estúpido
if he’s the surveyor,” Joaquin opined. “Maybe he just acts like a headless donkey to trick us off the track.”

“Yes, but he keeps spilling the rocker and tripping over the shovels.”

“Maybe that means they know we’re watching. Now, that fire-headed one, the
pelirrojo
one
,
he seems very strong and capable. I think he is the one to contend with. He is the one who constructed that scale out of wood, and built that rocker. They made twenty dollars yesterday by nightfall.” Indeed, the
norteamericanos,
although merely digging in rock crevices with jackknives by the river’s edge and picking gold out speck by speck, had made amazing progress.

“Why don’t we just pretend to join up with them then kill them when we make our first big strike? Besides the fact that it sounds like too much work,” Jack added.

“Yes, too much work,” Joaquin agreed. The blindingly white hombre worked assiduously in the river, sloshing shovel after shovel of gravelly sand into the rocker while another dark-haired hombre shook it, and the woman Joaquin had heard called Zelnora washed the sludge through the rocker with bucketfuls of fresh clear river water. The white fellow shoveled three times the rate the silly surveyor did. They were up to their waists in the melted snow of the river, but when it was sunny, it beat relentlessly on them, reflected off the water, and soon, the strong white man was more the pink of a pinto bean, though he wore the wide-brimmed felt hat of the brave and tough mountain man. Joaquin almost pitied him, investing so much physical labor when he could easily be doing what they did—taking whatever they wanted from whoever happened by, as long as he was an American. “It’s unusual they make a woman work for them. I wonder if she’s a slave of some kind. It also means they don’t have enough men.” Henry Bigler, who had originally found the first gold, worked downriver apiece with a wooden
batea
, but that was the extent of this crew.

“Yes, and if we joined up, who would get us meat?” Three-Fingered Jack finally slid off Joaquin’s back and sighed. “Speaking of meat,
jefe
. We need some more to trade for
aguardiente
.”

Sighing when the surveyor completely missed the rocker with his shovelful of gravel and dumped it into the dark-haired man’s lap, Joaquin put down his glass and rolled to face Jack. “All right. Send Garcia and most of the others out to that farm on the south fork of the Feather. You and I stay with these Americans, just leave Gonzalez here to cook for us.” They dared not rustle cattle in these parts, for that would give away their sign to Marshall and his men, so every night they had to travel far afield, the field becoming farther the more of the long-horned cattle they stole. Still, most of it seemed to be Sutter’s lands, so it was convenient to loathe Sutter, though the Swede had always treated them kindly as long as they appeared to be of noble Spanish ancestry.

Jack trotted off on his mission, and Joaquin observed the Americans again. The brunette woman shouted at the surveyor now, pointing a stiff and angry arm. She couldn’t be a slave and behave in that manner. But the way she yelled at the bespectacled man made Joaquin believe she was his wife. She wore the skirts and rebozo of a Californio woman, but he marked her as an American. She was quite bountiful and had pleasing features, and Joaquin’s regal penis engorged at the thought of what he could do with her if he didn’t kill her, only captured her for himself. He just had to get rid of the dazzlingly white man first.

Chapter Eight

April 1848

Lion Island

Brannagh grunted like a pig in clover—or was it akin to the giant worm Zelnora had seen once making its way laboriously across the cotton ticking that covered her bed, emitting actual wild animal sounds and rearing up on its hind legs? She sat in the office chair they shared to do the ledgers as he jerked his member to achieve satisfaction against her bared breasts. Fortunately, he still didn’t dare to penetrate her, so there was none of that ugliness to contend with, but the more time she spent with the savagely graceful Cormack, even the slightest proximity of Brannagh was enough to turn her stomach.

All she could think of while Brannagh pulled at his crooked bone was
I’ve got to find a way out of this.
She was dead sweet on Cormack, with his lazily smiling eyes all alight as though hit by a fistful of stars. Just watching him walk, with his long arms swinging at his sides, was enough to dissolve her innards into a mushy pool of feminine longing. But was he such a thorough out-and-out mountain man that he could never behave as a proper civilized husband? He gave no indication of wanting that, other than something Aaron Erskine had told Mercy, who had told Zelnora, “He wants someone to share his lodge with the rest of his days.” His lodge? That sounded a bit primitive and barbaric. It sounded as though his goal was to return to the mountains and find himself an Indian wife. Someone who didn’t act up or speak her mind like Zelnora. In fact, that was probably the ideal wife for most of the men Zelnora had ever known…A woman who rarely talked at all, and just took care of, well, the “lodge.”

For now, Zelnora knew that striking a rich gold vein was her only hope away from this disgusting mess that Brannagh had been creating. They had been making many little strikes of about twenty or thirty dollars a day up near the mill, and some fellow California Battalion members had snuck off to a place they called Dry Diggings. Marshall had lost so many men to the gold fever he had been forced to shut down mill operations, and Sutter was starting to complain of the same thing. A gambler named Lopez had already been attacked and robbed at the fort, presumably by the bandit everyone called Joaquin Valenzuela. Supposed to be the Robin Hood of all Spanish bandits, the story went that he gave some of what he stole back to his own people, wanting revenge for the Mexican loss of California lands, but Zelnora had seen no evidence of that. Valenzuela obviously had zest only for the rapine aspect of things, as his own wife had been raped and murdered by Americans some two years past while he was waiting to be hung alongside his brother, so Zelnora took to carrying her pocket pistol with her everywhere.

Grunting more forcefully now and with increasing agitation, Brannagh snarled, “Come to me…let me bless you with my seed!”

“Oh, yes,” Zelnora said flatly, with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “Cover me with your holy juices.”

He jerked against her bobbing breasts as she observed them, detached. Her breasts were very lush and full, were they not? Leastways, that’s what Cormack had said. Yet not good enough for him to fuck her? Cormack claimed he was holding off until she made some kind of break with Brannagh and stood up for herself, and she was as yet unable to do so. She had seen the poor love trembling and panting with desire, his cock proud, plump, and packing the crotch of his pants so stiffly it made an impression there, yet he was staying the course as a man of dignity would. And rightly so, she supposed…

Brannagh deposited a larger than usual pool of sperm onto the uplifted shelf of her breasts, while she pretended to moan in awe. After Brannagh coughed a few times and gave her his handkerchief, it was back to business, much to Zelnora’s relief.

Fiddling with the lock to the strongbox, Brannagh said officiously, “I have heard you’ve come into a sum of gold.”