The Seekers

by F. M. Parker

  The fog began to roll up before the thrusting fingers of the wind and moved toward the shore. The ships at the other piers both to the left and the right became visible. Farther away in the bay, steamships and sleek clipper ships at anchor came out of the fog and into the light of the growing day.

  The end of the pier became free of fog and Celeste saw men standing unmoving. She recognized Dokken and the surgeon who had accompanied him. She thought a third man near them would be Dokken’s second. A fourth man stood beside a horse-drawn buggy. He was the good Dr. Suazo, Ernesto’s surgeon, who had already arrived. She hoped the doctor’s skilled services would not be needed.

  A fifth man stood off by himself. He was the judge of duels. He was a gringo, old and gray with age. He wore a long cape and stood very erect. He had once been a duelist who fought other men’s enemies for pay. For the past several years he had taught the use of pistol and sword at his academy, and sometimes officiated at the duels of others. Celeste had heard he was a fair man with allegiance to none of the forces striving for power in San Francisco. The duels the man judged were said to strictly follow the Code Duello.

  Ernesto brought the buggy to a stop near the judge. The three climbed out.

  The judge of duels glanced at the newly arrived men, and the woman. What was she doing here? Should he try to send her away? No, let it be. He checked his watch and then looked at the eastern sky. The heavens above the hills on the distant mainland across the bay were rapidly changing from gray to blue. The hour for the contest was at hand. He hoped there would be no killing. A strange thought for someone like him to have, but he had seen far too many men die for little reason.

  “It is time to begin,” the judge called to the adversaries and their seconds.

  The duelists and their seconds moved toward the judge. The surgeons with their satchels of scalpels and tourniquets and other medical paraphernalia drew together near the edge of the pier and out of the probable line of fire. Celeste went to stand beside Dr. Suazo.

  Dokken and Ernesto removed their coats and hats and handed them to their seconds. Both men wore thin silk shirts so that should a bullet strike them, it would not carry pieces of wool or cotton into the wound and thus be more likely to cause infection.

  The judge spoke to the two duelists. “Is there any argument that I can make to persuade you to forego this?”

  “No,” Dokken responded quickly.

  “Then I must also say no,” Ernesto said. He felt a slight quiver run through his body and the wind seemed suddenly colder.

  The judge looked from the confident face of Dokken to the strained countenance of the young Mexican. This was not a fair match. Dokken had fought eight duels that the judge knew about, and he was still hale and hearty. Beremendes had never fought a duel. Still, the judge thought Beremendes must have considerable skill or he would not have accepted the challenge. Who of the two was the quickest and most accurate marksman would soon be known. Chance sometimes intervened and one man’s weapon would misfire, and then even the least experienced might win.

  “Allow me to see both weapons,” said the judge.

  Lucas de Cos and Dokken’s second removed Navy Colt revolvers from the wooden cases they carried and presented them to the judge.

  “Will one loaded cylinder in each weapon suffice?” the judge asked the duelists. “In that way if a man misses his opponent, there shall be no second shot at him.”

  Dokken chuckled. “One bullet is all I have and all that I’ll need.”

  “One is enough,” Ernesto said.

  Celeste felt the throb of her heart in the temples of her head as Ernesto and Dokken responded to the judge. The haggard face of her brother was terrible to see. She should have done something, anything to prevent this crazy duel. Oh, God, it was now too late.

  The judge checked the cylinders of both revolvers and examined the firing caps. “They are satisfactory.” He handed the pistols to the duelists. “As agreed to by your seconds, the distance will be ten paces by each of you. I will call fire when the duel is to begin. Is that understood?”

  “Right,” Dokken said. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Ernesto nodded in the affirmative. He tightened his grip on the cold butt of the pistol.

  “Then stand before me and face in opposite directions. Go ten paces, then halt and turn. Stand ready, guns pointed at the ground. I caution you, don’t raise your weapon to fire until I give the command.”

  The judge paused and glanced at the faces of the two men. “Go ten paces,” he directed.

  The duelists paced out over the pier. Their seconds backed away to stand beside the surgeons.

  Celeste watched Ernesto and Dokken finish their last stride and pivot a quarter turn to present the thin side of their bodies as targets. They stood motionless staring at their opponents. A deep hush held sway over San Francisco Bay.

  The raucous call of a hunting seabird ravaged the early morning stillness. Celeste jumped, startled by the sudden sound. The gray bird sailed past, its head turned downward and its black eyes examining the gathering of humans on the end of the pier.

  Celeste concentrated on the judge, listening for his signal as if she, as well as Ernesto, stood poised to jerk up a pistol and fight the duel.

  “Fire!” the judge’s command came sharply.

  Celeste saw Ernesto raise his revolver with a swift lift of his hand. Then he staggered backward. At the same instant, Celeste heard the explosion of Dokken’s heavily charged pistol.

  Ernesto leaned forward at the waist. His grip loosened on the pistol and it clattered down on the planking. He tottered on his feet, then steadied himself with a supreme effort. He turned his head and looked at Celeste, his eyes wide with pain. He tried to speak but no sound came from his lips. He reached out with his hand as if trying to support himself on the air. He crumpled and fell face down on the pier.

  For a moment Celeste was frozen by the shock of seeing the ghastly expression on Ernesto’s face and him falling so lifelessly. She screamed a wild, animal scream of pain and fear and bound forward. She screamed out again as she sprang across the last of the space separating her from Ernesto.

  She choked off her cries and dropped to her knees beside her brother. His white shirt was quickly becoming soaked by the blood streaming from a hole in his side directly in line with his heart. She lifted his head and stared into the slack face and the brown eyes swiftly glazing with death.

  “Oh, merciful God. No! No! Ernesto you can’t be dead. Please speak to me.” Her voice rose to a shrill command. “Brother mine, speak to me!”

  Dr. Suazo, Lucas and the dueling judge hurried up. The surgeon knelt and hastily began to examine the still body. Dokken strutted up with a pleased expression on his face and swinging his pistol by his side.

  “Ernesto is dead, Celeste,” the doctor said sadly.

  “He can’t be!” Celeste’s voice was brittle with anguish.

  “I’m afraid he is, Celeste,” the doctor said and put his hand on her shoulder.

  She angrily knocked the doctor’s hand away. “This affair from the very beginning was all a trick to kill my brother.” Her hot eyes swung up to lock on Dokken. “You murdering bastard. I know your reason for challenging him to a duel. But you won’t win. Never! Never!”

  She lowered her view back down to her brother. She saw his cocked pistol laying beside his shoulder. Her boiling anger surged. Swiftly and without warning, she snatched up the pistol and swung it up to point at Dokken smirking down at her. She squeezed the trigger.

  Chapter 5

  The judge of duels turned from the dead man to the young woman vehemently cursing Dokken as a murderer. Her angry eyes were hard with the urge to do murder herself. The judge agreed with her it had been an execution rather than a duel.

  He was caught by surprise when the woman suddenly grabbed the unfired pistol from the pier. With unsuspected swiftness, she pointed it at Dokken. The judge could not let her kill the unarmed man. He thrust out his hand an
d knocked Celeste’s pistol to the side.

  The bullet zipped past Dokken, stinging the side of his face. He dodged to the side. By instinct as he moved, he jerked up his gun to point at Celeste and pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped on an empty cylinder.

  Dokken was startled at the pistol failing to fire. Remembering his gun was unloaded, he lunged toward Celeste drawing the pistol back to hit her. “You Mexican bitch, I’ll knock your head off,” he bellowed fiercely.

  “Stop!” the judge shouted at Dokken, and stepped in front of the rushing man.

  Dokken continued to bear down on the judge, intending to shove him out of the way. He halted as the judge’s hand disappeared inside his cape. The man was old, but he was not one you could insult by laying a hand on him. And Dokken’s pistol was unloaded. He stared threateningly past the judge at Celeste. “She Goddamned near shot me.”

  “She just saw her brother killed,” said the judge. “She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  “She knows all right. See the look on her face.”

  Celeste watched Dokken closely. How wonderful it would be if there was another round in Ernesto’s pistol she still held. The judge now had his back to her and there was no one else close enough to stop her from shooting Dokken.

  “If you were a man, I’d kill you,” Dokken growled.

  “You’re going to be the one that dies,” Celeste said, her voice controlled, and eyes cold, black spheres of obsidian. “I can’t do it now, but soon someone will put a bullet through your heart.”

  Dokken laughed disdainfully at Celeste. “No Mexican can beat me with a pistol. You and your kind are finished in this city.” He took a white handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the thin trickle of blood from the bullet burn on his face. He held the handkerchief out to show Celeste the blood. “That’s as close as you’ll ever come to shooting Dokken.”

  He glanced at his second and the surgeon who had accompanied him. “Let’s go, there’s nothing here worth wasting time on.” He took his coat and hat from his second, and pivoting on a heel, strode off along the pier toward the shore.

  Celeste’s face was taut with hate as she watched Dokken’s retreating back. She felt a deep sense of helplessness for she feared the man might be correctly forecasting the Mexican people’s fate in California. They had come into a wilderness more than a century before and through bitter toil and hardship made California a pleasant land to live in. Now they were being ruthlessly robbed and killed by the conquering Americans. Celeste’s head lifted defiantly. The years since the American victory in 1848 had been horrible, and now her brother was dead, but she would not surrender easily.

  She bent over the corpse lying so still on the pier and spoke in a whisper. “Ernesto, my brother, you have my solemn vow that Dokken will soon join you in death.”

  “Celeste, what do you want done?” Lucas asked.

  “I’ll take Ernesto to the rancho and bury him in the family cemetery,” Celeste replied. She took her brother’s coat and hat from Lucas, and laid them and his pistol on the seat of the vehicle. “Dr. Suazo, will you please help Lucas put Ernesto in the buggy?”

  Celeste spread her long cloak on the floor of the vehicle, and Lucas and the doctor placed Ernesto’s body upon it. She climbed up into the buggy and seated herself. She laid the pistol in her lap and it felt comforting to her. She picked up the reins.

  “Do you want me to go with you to help, Celeste?” Lucas asked.

  “No. I can take care of what must be done. The burial will be at the rancho in three days. Ernesto would want for you to be there.”

  “I’ll be there, you can be sure of that.”

  “Thank you, Lucas, and you too, Dr. Suazo, for your help,” Celeste said. She tapped the reins on the rump of the horse and the buggy moved off.

  Celeste looked down at the face of her brother and his blood soaked chest. “Dokken will die,” she promised again, her voice like brittle ice breaking.

  Half dazed with her grief, Celeste guided the carriage around the piles of lumber and toward the shore. In her deep sadness, she did not hear the iron-rimmed wheels rumbling on the wooden planking of the pier. Nor did she see the stevedores and sailors coming along the pier and staring at her and the body at her feet as she passed.

  The fog was lifting on the shore and San Francisco was coming into view. Normally she would have delighted in the sight of the beautiful and fabulous city built on the hills above the great blue bay. Now her eyes never rose above the horse’s ears.

  She reached the end of the pier and reined the horse onto The Embarcadero, the main way fronting the bay. She unconsciously avoided the other vehicles on the street. Three blocks later, she turned left onto Mission Street and climbed steadily up through the city.

  * * *

  Celeste halted the buggy in the driveway of her hacienda. The building was single story, long and rambling, and made of adobe with a tile roof, the tile had long ago faded from red to a rusty brown. The windows were small; at the time of construction, glass had been very expensive. The house was nearly three-quarters of a century old, one of the most ancient in the city. It sat in the center of ten acres of wooded, rolling land overlooking the city. Her grandfather had purchased the land and built his home outside the town for privacy. Now the town had grown into a city and expanded to press against the borders of the land. Celeste noticed the worn appearance of the house. Repairs and new paint were needed but she had no money to spare for something that was not an immediate necessity.

  The two Mexican servants, a man and woman, both old, had been waiting for Ernesto’s and her return and now had come out of the house and into the courtyard at the sound of the carriage. They halted when they saw Celeste driving the buggy and the body of Ernesto lying motionless on the floor of the vehicle.

  “Come and help me,” Celeste called, climbing down from the vehicle.

  The woman began to cry as she and the man drew near. The man turned his face away from the scene.

  “Stop that,” Celeste ordered. “It is done. Ernesto is dead. Now we have tasks to perform. Come and help me carry him inside. Then I have something very important for Ignacio to do.”

  The three tenderly clasped Ernesto’s body and lifted it from the floor of the buggy. They carried it through the wide entry door and into the big sala of the hacienda.

  “Elosia,” Celese said to the woman, “you took care of Ernesto when he was a child. Now for the last time bath and cleanse him and dress him in his very best clothing. When that is done, we will take him on the ferry up the river to the rancho. Tomorrow the ceremony for the dead shall begin with all his friends around him.”

  Celeste motioned for Ignacio to follow her and led him outside.

  “Who’s the most brave and skilled pistolero of all our people?” she asked the old man.

  “The great man, Vicaro Zaragoza, senorita,” Ignacio replied, surprised at the question. “I’ve heard many tales of his fights with the Americans, and also Mexicans. He always wins for nobody can beat him shooting a pistol.”

  “I agree. My father often spoke of him and said he was a friend. When I was a girl, I saw him at the rancho. Saddle a horse and go find Vicaro. Tell him the last of the Beremendes needs his help.”

  “The Americans call him a bandit. It would be dangerous for him to come to San Francisco.”

  “I know. Tell him to come to the rancho.”

  “Perhaps I’ll not be able to find him for he does not stay in one place for long but travels through the tall mountains. What then?”

  “Leave word with trusted people who might know his whereabouts. He’ll hear and come.”

  “Should I find him, he will ask why you need him. What shall I say?”

  “Tell him he will learn that from me.”

  “Very well, senorita. I’ll search for the famous man. I hope he’ll let me find him.”

  “Ride swiftly, Ignacio, for I have made a vow that I must keep.”

  Ignacio hastened into the
hacienda and dressed in garments suited for riding, with spurs for his boots. He was old and was very pleased the senorita felt he could accomplish such a search. In the stables behind the hacienda, he saddled a horse and mounted. The strong caballo carried him through San Francisco at a gallop. The bay ferry transported man and horse across to the mainland. Ignacio rolled his big spurs over the animal’s ribs. They raced east into the foothills leading up to the Diablo Mountains.

  * * *

  “Beremendes is dead,” Dokken said.

  “Since I see you’re still alive, I would think so,” Mattoon replied. “Did you have any trouble?”

  “Yeah, from that Beremendes woman. She was at the duel. After I’d killed her brother, she grabbed up his pistol and came damn close to shooting me.” Dokken touched the bullet bum on the side of his face.

  Mattoon’s sight flicked to the slight injury and then away. “Just one of the hazards of a duel, the unexpected. I believe we agreed on a price of a thousand dollars.”

  “That’s right,” Dokken said. He had not been asked to sit down and stood before Mattoon, who was seated behind his big mahogany desk and watching him with his strangely colored eyes—snake eyes Dokken always thought. The two men were in Mattoon’s office on the third and top floor of his bank. The office was large and richly appointed with oak paneled walls and thick wool carpet.

  Mattoon reached into a drawer of his desk and extracted a packet of bills. “Here is your pay.” He tossed the money as if it was of no significance.

  Dokken snatched the money from the air and slid it into his inside jacket pocket. Mattoon was wealthy and could easily afford to pay a high price for the services he desired. However, he did not accept failure. “Thanks,” Dokken said.

  Mattoon rose from his desk and walked past Dokken to the window overlooking Market Street lying below. He clasped his hands behind his back and tilted his head to stare down on the mounted riders and horse drawn vehicles moving on the street and the pedestrians on the sidewalk. Several prosperous businessmen he knew entered the bank. They would be making large deposits, as were many others, deposits amounting to millions of dollars. The reason for all their good fortune, and Mattoon’s, was war. The Civil War in the East between the Northern and Southern states was causing tremendous destruction. That war, at least the destructive part, had not touched California. It never would, Mattoon thought. But due to that same war, orders for the material needed to fight battles, cannon, all manners of small arms and ammunition, clothing, food, and hundreds of other items, was making the merchants and bankers of San Francisco rich.