Salomon 3

by David Xavier

  Salomon (Part Three)

  David Xavier

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  THE RIDER CAME FORTH pale in appearance, small upon those rolling hills. Two round reflections glinted as he looked about. He stopped and looked back, then carried on, stopping often to turn in his saddle left and right, riding like a lost boy scout. Across his lap he balanced a long-legged setup. He wore his shirt buttoned to a tie and he wore a stiff hat the sun had not yet dulled nor wear had creased.

  Salomon came afoot through the trees upon dried pinestems, his rifle in the crook of his arm and his eyes on the distant rider. As he walked with bent knees he parried with one hand, bending branches in his path. At treeline he walked into the open shrubs without a pause. A bird called out behind him but he continued forward, drawing further away from cover. The rider continued at his slow pace, his spectacles catching the sun, the piece across his saddle teetering. The bird called out again.

  “Get down from there.” Salomon said over his shoulder without taking his eyes from the rider. He reached for a tall grass and stuck it in his teeth. He looked back.

  There was a moment where nothing moved, then a tree behind him shivered from top branch to bottom, sending needles and small twigs spiraling downward. A pair of legs appeared dangling from the final branch, spradled childlike, then Marquez dropped to a grunting sit. He looked about then brushed his clothing and stood, jumping several times at the lowest branch. His sombrero fell. He came crouching in Salomon’s path to squat beside him.

  “He has been out there for over an hour.”

  “I saw him.”

  “Why does he ride that way?”

  “He is not a rider.”

  “He is looking for something.”

  “Or someone.”

  Marquez looked up at Salomon, then stood. “What is he carrying?”

  Salomon did not say.

  “It could be shovels. It could be…something. Why did he come alone I wonder.”

  Salomon looked at him. “What kind of bird was that?”

  Marquez held a look on Salomon, then turned back to the rider. “Look. Where is he going now?”

  The rider had turned directions and now went toward a small ridge. Salomon and Marquez watched, turning their heads slowly as the rider made his way across their vision. The rider went down a shallow draw and disappeared. Marquez exhaled and crossed his arms, shifting his weight. The rider appeared again and made his way up the short ridge. He stood there for some time, outlined small against the sky. He raised both hands to his mouth and his body stiffened, but no sound came out at that distance. The rider called again, then waved his hat in the air. Marquez spoke out of the side of his mouth, his eyes staying on the rider.

  “You think he has lost a dog?”

  He looked over but Salomon had gone to a protruding rock in the weeds. Lying prone he had his rifle steadied on the rock and he was sighting in, shrouded beneath his sombrero. Marquez went to him in a stoop.

  “You think he has lost a dog?”

  “He can’t hear you.”

  Marquez spoke in a normal voice. “What are you going to do, shoot?”

  “This thing does not just make noise.”

  Salomon jerked as the rifle boomed across those open hills. Marquez fanned his sombrero and the two of them raised their heads.

  “You missed.”

  “I hit what I aimed for.”

  The rider had his hands in the air. He no longer held his hat. The teetering piece he had across his saddle had toppled over one side. The rider dismounted and cradled the contraption and slung it over his saddle, steadying it with open hands. He mounted and held his hands up again.

  He was a writer for the Los Angeles Star. He had been searching the hills for three days. Salomon and Marquez were standing side by side when he came forward, his hat recovered and held over the balancing equipment.

  “Hola, señors. Yo soy amigo.”

  The bandits looked at each other, then back to the rider. “We speak English.”

  “I am glad I found you,” he told them smiling. “I do not have much food or water left.”

  Marquez took the horse’s reins. “I think it was us who found you.”

  “As you say, sir. Si, señor. I was going to starve a few days before I gave up searching. I told myself I would.”

  With the rifle across his shoulders and his arms propped over, Salomon pointed. “What is that you are carrying?”

  “This thing? This is a camera. It is for taking photographs of various subjects. Landscapes. People. For newspapers.” He smiled. “I am a writer.”

  “You are a writer?”

  “That is correct.” He removed his spectacles for cleaning.

  “How old are you?”

  “I am twenty-six.”

  Marquez looked at Salomon and shook his head. Salomon asked the writer, “What are you doing out here?”

  “Well, you are Salomon Pico, right?” He hooked his spectacles back on and smiled. “The most wanted man in California.”

  Salomon did not answer for a moment, then he lowered the rifle from his shoulders and propped it before him. “I am Salomon Pico.”

  As they came into their camp the writer was smiling and looking around.

  “So, this is the hideout,” he said. “You are nestled right in here, aren’t you. I would have ridden on for days.”

  Arturo stood from the firepit and walked at them with his knife held forth. “Who is this boy? I thought you were bringing meat. I heard a rifleshot. All we have is a few sage hens. Is this boy lost?”

  “He is twenty-six,” Marquez said.

  “This boy?”

  “He is a newspaperman,” Marquez said. “He has come to write about the famous bandits.”

  “He will spoil our location.”

  “He does not know where he is, or how he got here. He does not even carry a compass.”

  The writer leaned from his saddle and held a hand out to Arturo. “Charlie Milton, of the Los Angeles Star.”

  “The Star?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Arturo touched his bladetip to the man’s pointing finger, causing him to pull back. “I don’t like the Star.”

  Milton held his hand drawn in a fist at his chest, the thumb tucked. Arturo stared at him over the blade. Milton looked at his fingertip, now red. He looked up.

  “You must be Arturo Leyva.”

  Arturo did not blink.

  “Skilled tracker and metalworker.”

  Arturo let a smile come to him. Milton continued.

  “A man who is known in all of California for his craftsmanship with knives. Your blades are legendary.”

  He lowered the knife. “Yes, I am Arturo Leyva. l-e-y-v-a.”

  “And I am Marquez, with a q and a z.”

  Milton looked over. Marquez was sitting straightbacked upon a stone by the fire. Milton nodded with a smile. He bounced a finger. “The Short Man.”

  “The what?”

  The writer dismounted. “My friends, I am not here to paint a picture of bad men out to harm others. Nobody likes to read that.”

  “What is it they call me?”

  Milton shouldered his camera and carried it to a spot where its lens could capture the image of the rocks and trees and the men by the fire. He set it down and kicked its legs apart and bent behind the black box.

  “I am here to give the modern reader a look at the lives of men who have lived a hard life, have been driven from their homes. Tell me who you are. Tell me what has brought yo
u out here.”

  “You are here to make a name for yourself,” Salomon said.

  Milton looked up from behind his camera.

  “Oh, yes. Yes, I am here to do that as well.”

  He lowered again and held his hands out as if to encase the image before him and squeeze it all together. He stepped lightly back to his horse – “Make no mistake about that. I am here to do that too, yes sir.” – and put a hand in the saddlebag, pulling out a writing tablet, a pencil, a few sheets of paper and a few rolled newspapers which he held close to him as he stepped to the firepit and took a seat upon a stone. The men watched him as he pulled a small filing knife from his pocket and began to scrape his pencil to a point, looking up once as he did so to lift his eyebrows several times to their watch before lowering his head to finish the delicate point. He held the pencil before him and blew it clean, then brushed the filings from his pants and situated the writing tablet and paper on his lap.

  “Now,” he said. “Tell me about the gold.”

  For over five years they had straddled the canyons over El Camino Real, springing from the rock walls upon travelers, leaving the road south strewn with heedless warnings, the remains of men dead or dying, their riches stripped and buried in these hills. Most of these travelers carried gold in various amounts. Marquez had said once it must be over a million dollars’ worth. Salomon guessed it lower.

  “Some newspapers have said there is over three million dollars’ worth of gold buried in a cave somewhere nearby,” Milton said.

  Marquez snapped his head over. “Three million?”

  “That is what some newspapers have reported. Buried in a cave.”

  Salomon sat drilling the end of a stick into the ground, turning it in his fingertips. He looked up. “Where?”

  “Well, now that is my question. I read once that there were several caves with secret doors in the rock walls, undetectable to anyone but a man who knew where to look. That there were tunnels between the caves and that you carried the gold from cave to cave to avoid being found.”

  “Carry it from cave to cave? Three million. I would not have time in the day for anything else. And I invite to you search the rock walls of the canyons. Knock all you want. Be my guest.”

  Charlie Milton looked to each of them. “No cave?”

  “No cave.”

  “Then where is the gold?”

  Salomon sat drilling the stick for a moment. He raised his eyes. “You promise you will not print it?”

  Milton’s eyes were wide behind his round spectacles. He neither spoke nor nodded his head. Salomon smiled.

  “The truth is I don’t know.” He spread an arm out. “It is in these hills. From El Camino Real to Santa Maria. Scattered in pockets across fifty miles. Some here and some there. You look long enough you may find some yourself. Again, I say to you, be my guest.”

  Months ago, El Heraldo de San Diego, a newspaper still run by the Californios and partly owned by Pío Pico, the former governor of Alta California and cousin to Salomon, printed a serial on Los Bandidos del Pueblo to much success. People stood outside the Herald offices each Monday with coins in their hands, awaiting the next episode, a highly speculative piece of journalism, comprised mainly of stories and quotations from people who claimed to have seen Salomon Pico riding through the streets. The mornings after the sightings, people woke to deeds of charity on their doorsteps, on their windowsills, in their chimneys, and the church collection basket tipped to the side by the weight of gold and coins.

  “The bandits of the people?”

  “Yes, that’s what they’re calling you,” Charlie Milton said. “The writer at El Heraldo called you the Robin Hood of California.”

  “The Robin Hood?”

  “Yes, you see Robin Hood is a character in a storybo–”

  “Yes, I know who he is.”

  By the final installment of the serial in San Diego, Salomon Pico was a hero. It was an understanding among the people to take Salomon under their roofs if he was in danger, if the law was on his trail. Small boys and girls watched from their windows after dark. Mothers prayed for his appearance at their doors holding bags of gold, and men stood by the roadsides with old pistolas in their belts and sharpened pigstickers and machetes in their hands, waiting for a chance to join the champion of the people. To join the cause.

  “Is that how you see yourself?” Charlie Milton put his pencil to the paper. “That you are a hero. The uprising the Californios need?”

  Salomon did not raise his eyes. The Americans had pushed the Californios off their land and gotten rich off it. Salomon simply gave to the Californios what they were forbidden to earn otherwise. They had been robbed of their land and their security. Their freedom. He saw the gold the Americans had taken from California soil as taking back what was stolen in the first place.

  “But the Mexican government signed the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hildago. It says the Californios are granted citizenship if they want it. They have been granted their lands as before.”

  “That is what it says.”

  “In that case, some say you cannot be a hero. You are stirring up trouble between the sides. Some see that as an impediment to peace.”

  Salomon stood and pointed the stick. “The treaty is nothing more than a way to control the Californios. The United States says we can keep our land. That all open pasture, the very land the Californios have used to run cattle for many years, must remain open. But the Americans put a fence around it and call it their own. Suddenly they call the ground beneath the Californios’ cattle herds their own and we are trespassing. We have become serfs on our own land.”

  He pulled his stick away from Milton’s face and turned his back and walked a few paces. Milton pressed a finger to his spectacles, blinking several times. He cleared his throat.

  “The American papers are not so kind. You are not written as a hero.”

  Salomon remained with his back to the writer and addressed the rock surroundings. “What do they say?”

  “They say you are the most violent gang of murderers California has ever seen.”

  Salomon turned.

  It was the Los Angeles Star that reported each incident on El Camino Real. The Star dug into each of the bandits’ pasts – Arturo’s knifing of an American in Monterey when he was still a teenager, the incident that set him on a pathway strewn with death. The murder was so vicious the coroner could not count the knife wounds, nor could he keep the body on a slab without pieces falling. One writer in San Luis Obispo called Arturo Leyva “The Blade of California”, but the name did not stick. It was not memorable. Instead, Arturo was known as somewhat of a cliché, “The Butcher of Monterey”.

  “That is a ridiculous name,” Arturo said, and he lowered his head and went back to fileting the few sage hens at his feet with a huge knife. He looked up again and waved the knife as he spoke. “Not the Slayer of Monterey? Or the Cutthroat Assassin? There, write that one down. And why just of Monterey and not all of California? The first writer had it correct.”

  Charlie Milton looked to Salomon. “The sheriff in San Francisco has placed a ten thousand dollar reward on The Salomon Pico Bandits.”

  “I have met him.”

  “It is a new sheriff. He said you are difficult to capture. That only vigilantes with knowledge of the land should hunt for you, and only in great numbers. The one you are referring to said that you are a coward when confronted. That you ran from him and disappeared in the night.”

  Salomon smiled. “I let him live.”

  “He said he came back only to resupply.”

  “If that is what he says.”

  “Let’s get back to you.”

  “Let’s get back to the three million,” Marquez said.

  Charlie Milton blinked several times and turned back to Salomon.

  Dozens of Americans had gone south on El Camino Real and had not been heard from again. Skeletons had been found as far as the Los Alamos Valley with bulletholes in the skulls. They were left as wa
rnings to Americans to stay away.

  “And still they came,” Salomon said. “There are only so many ways you can tell a bad dog to sit.”

  “And then you hit the bad dog?”

  Salomon shrugged. “You do you what you have to.”

  It was the San Francisco Daily that ran a piece on the disappearance of the wealthy cattle baron, George Bancroft. He had skirted El Camino Real with a dozen ranch hands only to be ambushed in Los Olivos, his men massacred, and his body hung from the rafters of a cantina.

  “That was not us,” Salomon said.

  “No, it was attributed to Joaquin Murrieta. But Murrieta is said to run with you at times.”

  Salomon shook his head. “I have met Joaquin only one time. A few years ago in Branciforte. I only knew it was him when later I read about the pistola he wears. An old piece from a buccaneer. He is very young.”

  “You are young yourself,” Charlie Milton said.

  “I am older than you are.”

  “How do they know it was Murrieta?” Marquez said. “Who hung the cattle baron from the rafters.”

  “He was missing an ear.”

  Marquez nodded.

  Joaquin Murrieta was known to run as far north as Santa Rosa, seeking out mining towns and gold claims, killing Americans and taking their ears as trophies. Vigilantes had once chased him north where they lost him among the giant redwood trees. Separated from the safety of his gang, the vigilantes thought him to be less dangerous, and they spread out to search among the forest. One by one Murrieta cut them down, his buccaneer’s pistola echoing against the redwoods. The bodies were found later, each with only one ear on their skulls.

  “Some were found with the left ear and some with the right ear,” Milton said. “I don’t understand if there is a side he prefers.”

  “He takes whichever ear is bigger,” Marquez said.

  Milton looked at him. Marquez stood and gestured with a hand. “Stand up.”

  Charlie Milton set his writing tablet aside.

  “Go on,” Marquez said again. “Get on your feet.”

  He turned the writer and stood back-to-back with him, holding a hand to the tops of their heads. He turned to face the writer and held out his finger and thumb in a gap.