by W R. Garwood
“Ah there, Bean.” Powers stood up and, reaching for his ulster and wide-brimmed hat, crossed the floor to the doorway, as I stood aside, without a word to him.
“Host of things to do for the busy manager.” Powers waved a hand at a pile of luggage in the corner, all strapped and bound up with rope and cord. “I’m on my way to check with the rest of our company. Have to be on the road at first light.” Then he was gone out, shutting the door behind him—and I was alone with Dulcima.
“Now, I know you haven’t much use for Dick . . . ah, Richard. but he’s been a lifesaver for me, Roy.” Dulcima wavered slightly as she walked over to the dresser and, without asking, poured me a stiff drink of whiskey. “Here, you can drink to our forthcoming triumphs out in the wilds of California.”
I took the glass, sat down in the chair vacated by Powers, and looked at her. Dulcima’s eyes, always blue as the summer skies at midday, were sparkling with a different light, and her mouth was—mighty inviting. But I downed some of the drink and waited for her to speak.
She crossed back to the bed and sat down on its edge, tipped up her glass, and drained it like an old soldier. “You know that hellcat, that so-called aunt of mine? She had me kidnapped again and carried back to that hateful Salinas finishing school . . . that two-by-four prison for little milksop females.”
I nodded and downed the rest of my whiskey to keep her company, as I noticed Dulcima’s pretty knees appearing through the edge of that fancy gown—and even more. I felt like I needed another drink then and there.
“Roy, you must know that I’m old enough, nearly eighteen, and I’ll live my own life, in spite of that flashy perra.” She stood up again, and marched back to the whiskey, poured herself another glass, then came over to me. As she bent with the half-empty bottle, her dressing gown slid open, and I could see that it was her sole bit of clothing! “Here, let me fill up your glass.”
“How long have you known Powers?” I rasped, trying to get the drink down and smooth out the dryness in my throat. “He says a long time.”
Dulcima belted away half of her drink with the ease of an old toper, then sat the glass down on the carpet, dressing gown falling half off her shoulders as she did. “Ever since the first time I ran off from that old hairpin Miss Granville and her silly little school and came up to San Francisco. I hadn’t any money to speak of, and Dick Powers found me on the streets and was very kind. He bought me a meal, got me a room, and, when he found out that I wanted to go on the stage, had me in to Colonel McGuire’s little theater at the edge of town.” She smiled shyly as she settled her robe about her again. Then she frowned and shook her finger. “I know you think Richard is more . . . than a friend. Well, that’s neither here nor there, is it?” Her soft red mouth hardened somewhat. “He’s helped me get where I want, in spite of Rosita . . . Red Rosita Almada . . . and Joaquín Murieta!”
I gaped at her, then gulped down the rest of my whiskey.
“Yes, Roy, I know a good many things. I discovered Rosita’s brother was the bandit, and that her pretty hands, those perfumed little fingers, were not any too clean at that.” She leaned over to recover her drink and her gown fell from her—completely, revealing young, swelling breasts and deliciously dimpled body. But she paid no attention. “I knew all this five years ago, when I heard them plotting at the rancho. Rosita must have suspicioned what I knew, for she sent me off to that school at Salinas. and kept me there as much as possible.”
I stood up, weaving a bit myself from the warmth of the room and the alcohol. “Does Dick Powers know this?”
Dulcima also arose, completely child-like in her nakedness, looking at me innocently with her blue eyes, now a bit out of focus from drink. Then she shook her golden curls. “No, I know enough to keep certain things to myself, Roy. do you?”
She came to me and put up her arms. “Remember when I told you that I meant to come visiting?” Those slim, rounded arms were about me now, her smooth curves pressed hard against me, and her golden head buried against my chest. “Well, I did. only that she-cat came in the night and had me thrown into her closed carriage.” She raised her lips. “Did you miss me?”
I picked her up and toted her back to the bed. And mighty shortly I was showing her just how much I’d missed her.
* * * * *
Dulcima was mine at last. When I left her, I was walking two yards above the wooden sidewalk, as I recalled all the things we’d said—and done. There’d just been no way that I could have kept from telling her of that fortune out there—somewhere. And we’d planned that I’d search the country for it while she toured with the McGuire’s company.
I spent a good share of the next day, December 24th, thinking of her sweet embraces and her promise to wait for me until I’d found Jeff Kirker’s gold. Diamond Dick Powers was just a back number now.
Around suppertime that Christmas Eve, Josh came to where I was running the faro layout for a cheerful mob of celebrating miners, sailors, and Mexicans. “If you can stop mooning over that little piece of calico long enough to keep one eye on the game and the other on the place, I’ll go up the street and take some supper. We’re just too busy for the both of us to feed at once.”
“Wouldn’t need to double up like this if you hadn’t heaved out Charley Cora,” I growled, not meaning it, but irked by Josh’s reference to Dulcima.
He stood for a moment looking over the busy, smoke-hazed room, one thumb in his vest and the other twiddling with his goatee, as he always did when pleased with himself. “Well, that nigra Biggs does a mighty fair job handling the dice game when Shanghai takes a turn at the bar. And you have the makings of a first-rate gambler yourself.”
My brother had left his overcoat at the hotel to have some buttons tightened, so he pulled on his hat and my own ulster, then lingered to talk to me, between deals, of our family back home and wonder if Ma and Pa would still be having the same sort of big Christmas they used to have when we were all young ’uns.
“Sometimes, Roy, I wish I’d gone back to old Mason County after the war, and not stayed way out here. I think brother Sam showed better sense staying put in New Mexico after you two flew the coop out of Chihuahua City.”
I nodded and kept dealing, still out of sorts. And that was the last time that I saw my brother Joshua Quincy Bean alive.
He’d left the Golden Nugget and was walking through the gently falling drizzle toward our favorite restaurant when someone stepped from an alley off Sutter and fired two pistol balls into his back at such close range they set his coat on fire—despite the rain.
A gambler from the Red Rooster, who’d seen Josh fall into the street, caught a glimpse of someone in a serape and sombrero run up Sutter and fade into the night, then he beat out the flames from my brother’s clothing and began to yell for a policeman.
They fetched Josh back to the saloon and laid him on a poker table, while our customers and employees stood around in stunned silence. After we shut the place, Shanghai stumped back to the bar and brought over a couple of bottles, and we sat down and drank to Josh. The police had already been in, looking for any possible motives for my brother’s assassination, but I could only say that Joaquín Murieta was known to have made threats, and that Charley Cora and Dick Powers had little reason to wish Josh any too well. I didn’t mean to throw suspicion on either gambler, but it had to be said. A young reporter from one of the shabbier weeklies, named Ridge, who’d been tagging the police around heard me, but I didn’t think anything of it. “Shot by a person or persons unknown,” said Coroner Riley, who then began to jot down the cost of a funeral in his capacity as part-time undertaker.
As I sat there, drink in hand, looking at Josh laid out in his muddy clothing and thinking what a hell of a Christmas it was going to be, I recalled how glad he’d been to see me when I’d arrived at San Diego in the summer just past. Yes, it was just one hell of a jolt.
Then I got another jolt when Riley, long red face creased in unaccustomed thought, spoke up again. “Y’say
your brother there was a-wearin’ yore overcoat? Well”—he took a healthy belt of whiskey—“could be they was tryin’ for you.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Josh was buried the day after Christmas in a small cemetery south of town at Potero Hill. In use since the days of the rush it was a peaceful but lonely spot where a huge pair of redwoods stood like mournful sentinels at the back of the two-acre lot. Most of the great redwoods around San Francisco had long been felled for building everything from ore sluices to lumber for slap-up housing.
There weren’t many at the funeral, preached at graveside by the local minister, a tall, stoop-shouldered old fellow named Ashworth. Some of our regulars came out in one of the three hired hacks as did Shanghai Bender and Peter Biggs. Sim Watson, the local marshal, was also on hand along with Salvador Salazar.
Following the short service, a chilly December rain began to patter through the hazy sunshine and we piled into the hacks for town, following the empty hearse. Salazar rode with me, while Shanghai drove and Peter Biggs sat up front with him, wiping away at his good eye.
I’d sent Josh off in as good a style as I could, dressing him in one of his fancy alcalde get-ups, and with the very last of Jeff Kirker’s gold pieces in his vest pocket—to show St. Peter that he’d left the game standing pat.
“I seen you place the moneda de oro in your brother’s pocket,” Salazar jostled my thoughts—as to who could have back-shot Josh, and had those bullets been meant for me? “Sí,” he went on, tugging at his ox-horn mustaches that now drooped as mournfully as his battered sombrero. “I think that is the ancient custom, giving the dead one plenty pesos to pay the old ferryman for safe passage to the other shore.”
I’d a feeling the little officer meant to twist the talk around to those gold eagles of Kirker’s, as he’d done before, but he remained silent.
“Muerte. Murieta. There’s an hombre right well named, isn’t he? Death and a dealer in death,” I mused, my thoughts onto another trail. I stared back at the redwoods, where they loomed up like a pair of crimson monuments in the late afternoon but seeing again the cold handsome face of Carlos Hechavarría. “Where could that damnable Murieta be by now?”
“Only the devil himself knows where such hellfire bastardos get themselves off to,” Salazar grumbled. “Young Bean, again I must thank you for your help in saving the Benicia armory. though most of those villains escaped, as you know. But like I’ve told you before, all gold in the ground or out of it is our poor land’s curse. It brings much sorrow and death, as you know, poor fellow.”
Wondering again just how much Salazar knew of Kirker’s gold, I switched the talk to the whereabouts of the other murder suspects, Charley Cora in particular, who’d vanished since his fight with Josh. I was almost certain Diamond Dick was still away in the mining camps with Dulcima and the traveling troupe.
For all the talk on the ride back, we came to no definite conclusion as to who’d actually cut down my brother.
When our hack pulled up in front of the Golden Nugget in the rainy dusk, Salazar and I got down to stand before the locked door. He took my hand, wishing me well and asking as to my future plans.
“Suppose I’ll keep the place open for the time being,” I said to the obvious relief of Bender and Biggs, who thereupon drove up the street to turn in the hack at Johnson’s Livery.
The little marshal’s broad brown face sobered as he lingered under the gaslight by the saloon door. “I see you pack la pistola. I felt it as we sat side-by-side. bueno! But guard yourself well, amigo joven. It may be that the cowardly assassin who slew your brother might return.”
We shook hands again, and then Salazar walked off, his squat figure wavering and fading in the gathering darkness.
Standing before the locked and bolted door of our empty saloon, I made a vow that not only would I guard myself but I’d see someone paid for Josh. And paid in blood!
* * * * *
For the next two months I stayed close to the Golden Nugget, managing the place and taking care of the money, for we’d gained the reputation of being a straight house. Sometimes I felt as though I’d a couple of holes right spang through me, like poor Josh. One came from an emptiness of not knowing when I’d ever see Dulcima again, and also wondering about Rosita. The other gap in my life was the knowledge my brother could still be alive if I’d never come to California.
But other times, when the money came in hand over fist at the tables, and I’d nigh decided to become a gambling czar instead of my old daydream of being a merchant prince, I shrugged off all other thoughts.
That didn’t mean I didn’t watch my back whenever I went home to the hotel in the late hours or visited other saloons on the look-out for either Charley Cora or Carlos Hechavarría. But both rascals seemed to have vanished from California, though I figured that Carlos was off in the mountains licking his wounds after the whipping Salazar had given him, and who knew where that grinning wildcat Cora was.
I still kept up a haphazard sort of love affair with the San Francisco theatres. Even though Dulcima was no longer in town, I couldn’t keep away from McGuire’s Jenny Lind where young Lotta Crabtree was settling down for a long run, starring in Loan of a Lover, playing a pepper pot named Gertrude. A great little trouper, with all sorts of wild jigs and reels, she reminded me, again, of Dulcima and her electric enthusiasms.
The high point of the new year came when the great Lola Montez returned to San Francisco in February, after a two-year world tour, and knocked the theatre-going crowds into a cocked hat with her new production of Maritana at the San Francisco Theater, where she took three parts herself. Then the raven-haired thespian topped that smash with Charlotte Corday. And how those packed houses whooped it up when she gave the villain Marat the deep six between the ribs with her glittering Bowie knife.
But as much as I enjoyed the fabulous actress in her triumphs, I only attended two performances, for the sight of that lady’s well nigh incomparable looks brought memories of Rosita, partly from the two women’s past association and the fact they were two of the greatest beauties of the day.
By earliest March, spring was coming up the coast. Birds were returning from warmer climes below the border. Jays, larks, and magpies flew about in noisy clusters while wood pigeons and quail circled the outskirts in great masses. I had an idea that most restaurants’ bill of fare would soon feature roast pigeon as well as canvasback, for the latter were now swooping into the coves and backwaters in thundering gray clouds.
Riding White Lightning out to visit Josh’s grave at Potero Hill, as I did each Sunday, I saw California poppies, wild iris, and Indian paintbrush stitching tender stalks through the greening grasses, as hundreds of yucca reared their crowns of sword-shaped leaves about the countryside. The oak, manzanita, and laurel as well as the rest of the trees in the groves and woodlands were already a green shimmer in their new leafy shawls.
Foxes, coyotes, and deer trotted or loped out of my way as I racked along the country roads and several times I saw black bear lumbering into the shady protection of neighboring woods, but never did I see any lurking horsemen or suspicious riders, though I met and passed dozens of folk coming or going from the small farms or mines.
The chilling rains had ceased days before and now the winds, forever ranging the coasts, seemed more charged than ever with the unending roar of the vast Pacific reaches—a sound never entirely forgotten, though pushed backward into some corner of the mind.
So it was with Josh, I told myself as I stood staring at the sunken patch of earth with its raw wooden cross, already weathering into a faded-brown. His brutal and cowardly murder and the unseen threat still hanging over me was also something never completely forgotten. It was a situation filling me with a half-felt restlessness, compounded with such things as the low, insistent booming of the mighty Pacific, and the fact that I was young, and that it was spring, and that I should be on the move. Though it wasn’t yet time to start hunting for that golden hoard I had to be on the mov
e somewhere.
Returning to the Golden Nugget on the second Sunday in March, I made up my mind to ride over to the mining camps where McGuire’s touring company and Dulcima were performing. I already had their itinerary from the colonel. Grass Valley, the first four nights, Rabbit Creek, six nights, Taylor’s Gulch, five nights, Rich Bar, four nights, Gibsonville, two nights, and Hangtown, two nights. As it was now March 16th the company would be in Gibsonville by the time I could get there.
Three days later I was traveling the rough trail leading to the mining camp of Gibsonville in the Bear River Valley. On the way out from San Antonio Landing I’d taken a wrong turn, where the road forked at the old Mexican village of Río, and rode north for near a day before running onto the little mining camp of Bullard’s Bar at Feather River, where I finally got straightened out.
Even though I’d sighted the houses, shacks, and mining rigs of Gibsonville perched along the curving brown river in the late afternoon, it was deep twilight before I got down the steep slope of nearly two thousand feet and to ride up the shadowy main street.
Lamps were already glowing invitingly in the hamlet’s two hotels and several saloons, while the sounds of banjos, fiddles, and applause rippled out of the little log opera house between the hotels.
Though there was barely standing room at the back of the stifling-hot auditorium I paid my ticket and watched Dulcima, the Chapmans, and the rest of the company go through their paces in the evening’s performance, The Little Detective.
Dulcima, obviously reveling in the story, impersonated six characters. As one of them, Harry Racket, she minced out in a fawn-colored sporting outfit that drew waves of applause from the shabby miners. Switching from one role to another as she pursued the obvious villain, she brought down the house when she turned up as Barney O’Brien with a blarney-filled repertoire of jigs and reels.
