by Lou Cameron
“It’s sort of complicated, but then I never understood why I was named Stuart, after a family of losers I wasn’t even related to.”
He broke out some oats and added, “While we’re on the subject of county history, viejo, you would have been around when they say Murrieta robbed that stage, right?”
Verdugo grimaced and replied, “There was no such person. Or, at best, like your own Robin Hood, Joaquin Murrieta was more than one bandit rolled into one. There were over four thousand killings during the height of the gold rush between, say, ‘48 and ‘54. Nobody could count the robberies. Gold does strange things to men’s minds. It also makes them see ghosts, like our Sulky Jack. The more probable Three Finger Jack would have been a Joaquin, in our tongue, too. I have a pretty good idea who robbed that stage when I was a boy. It was not Joaquin Murrieta or anyone else named Jack.”
Stringer waited and watched the old-timer comb the palomino for a spell before he asked, “Well, do you mean to go on, or just let me stand here, guessing?”
Verdugo hesitated. Then he said, “You and your people have always been muy simpático. You have never understood my people as much as you thought you did. But at least you have always tried. If I tell you enough for to relieve your mind, is it understood we are speaking as men of honor, who see no need to cause pain to the innocent?”
Stringer started to nod. Then he said, “I’d best warn you I can’t cover up for any outlaw who’s still around. The driver of that stage was murdered in cold blood, remember?”
“I do not remember that. I was not there. Let me see if I can phrase it delicado. I do not know the leader’s true name. He was called El Mejicano for the simple reason he said he came from La Baja. A cousin of mine who no longer lives tried for to recruit me as a, how you say, lookout. I refused. I told my cousin he was loco en la cabeza to play bandito so close to home.”
“It never occurred to you, of course, to let the gringo law in on family secrets?”
The old man sighed and said, “There was more to it than that. To begin with there was no law to report to in El Dorado. It was only a stage stop, not the hamlet that has grown up around it since. I was very young. I did not yet speak English. The nearest Yanqui lawmen were in San Andreas and they were vigilantes, not elected officials as today.”
“So you didn’t see fit to at least mention the matter to the stage line?”
“I told myself I could not betray my cousin. In God’s truth I was afraid to go near that stage stop. To assure me, my cousin had said the job would be, how you say, fixed. The El Dorado stop was far from the main office and some of the Anglo workers were not happy with the wages they were getting. How could I report a planned robbery to men who might be in on it?”
Stringer whistled softly and said, “That explains the old rumors my people tell, too. What happened then, viejo?”
The old man shrugged and said, “I never rode with them. Save for my cousin I don’t know who might have, from around here. At first all seemed to go well and my cousin kept after me for to join them, saying I was a fool and that there was no danger because they had an understanding with the stage crews. They stopped the stage several times, when it had much dinero in the boot, of course. But I have always thanked God I was at a dance in Angels Camp the night things went all wrong. For the vigilantes did question every one who spoke Spanish, a bit rudely, after that last robbery that went so badly.”
Stringer nodded and said, “I reckon Angus MacSorley and his pard, Gus, weren’t supposed to take out the stage that night. Did you ever hear who shot old Gus, or who rode off with a load of number-nine buck in him, viejo?”
Verdugo shook his head and said, “As I said, I was at a dance and, most fortunately for me, got to spend the rest of the night in the town lockup after the dancing got a little bit rough. They let me out early for to ride with the posse. They thought a Spanish speaker who could not have been with the killers they were after might come in handy. I think this mare is ready for her stall, now. But let me water her, first.”
As he did, Stringer said, “I know your posse didn’t make out so hot. My grandfather was riding with it, too. You say this long-lost relative of yours is no longer worth naming as a member of the gang. Could he have possibly been the one as rode off packing the strongbox and all that buckshot old MacSorley put in him?”
Verdugo said, “Quien sabe? I told you I was not there. Years later, I heard he’d been killed by Apache, herding sheep in Arizona. As I put it together, one of the less professional young banditos spoiled a good thing by blowing away that Anglo driver, whether from bravado or a hair trigger he should have been more careful with. Since some of the stage line employees had to know at least some of the band, they lit out for their lives and never came back. Your grandfather was a good man, but some of those old vigilantes could be very cruel. If my cousin had held on to that strongbox, as they scattered, I find it hard to believe he would have wanted for to herd sheep in Apache country, later. So do not ask me his name and I shall never lie to you. You know as much, now, as any of my people around here could.”
Stringer frowned and said, “Not quite. Where would old Hernan Garcia have been while all this hell was being riz?”
Verdugo laughed and said, “He was young Hernan, then, and he had a better alibi than me. For that was about the time he eloped with Rosa Sepulveda, and he’d have felt more comfortable with vigilantes than he might have if the Sepulvedas had caught up with them! In the end, of course, her family had to forgive him. They did not return until Rosa was showing a proud belly. I helped build their ‘dobe on the parcel of land Rosa’s family gave them as her dowry, as a matter of fact.”
“That ‘dobe’s not left over from Miwok-fighting times? I always figured it had to be, fitted with rifle loops and all.”
Verdugo said, “Oh, it’s old enough, for a ‘dobe, now. I guess we put it up around ‘54. Frame is better for the winter climate up here in these hills. I’m not sure why Hernan wanted his windows so skinny. He’s always been sort of odd, even before his mind started going. He never learned to get along with your kind as well as the rest of us did. I remember asking him at the time why we seemed to be building a fort for him and his Rosa. He said he had to protect her honor from you people. I didn’t find her that attractive, even if she was huera.”
“Huera?”
“Blond. The girl they kidnapped gets her hair color off her grandmother. Other than that, Rosa wasn’t much. Hernan was the pretty one. That’s the only reason a girl from such a distinguished family might have seen fit to elope with such a pobrecito. Hernan wasn’t the brightest vaquero in these hills, even before he started to stare into space a lot.”
Stringer said, “Dotty told me how he’d pissed most of the little they had away. You just spoiled a motive I was starting to chew on by confirming the fact there’s never been much to steal or extort from him. You said that old gang tried to get some of the local boys to throw in with them. Do you reckon they might have approached Hernan as well?”
Verdugo shrugged and said, “Is possible. But I know for a fact Hernan and Rosa Sepulveda were more interested in one another at the time than anything else. I once topped a rise for to spot them in a haystack, far from the Sepulveda ranch house. They were not robbing a stage. But her brothers would have no doubt killed him anyway. At best, if his mind was still with us, he could perhaps give you a few names of long-gone vaqueros. We found enough sign to conclude they split up after that robbery, rode hard and far, and never came back.”
Stringer shrugged and said, “This new gang seems to be mostly Anglo and well under seventy in any case. We’d best put ourselves in our stalls, now, viejo. The whole mess is making me yawn like hell.”
San Andreas was a hard day’s journey by ox-drawn wagon or two hours riding as hard as Gina must have been riding to wind up in the hospital. Stringer figured the sheriff and his boys would be in less of a hurry than a hot-natured Italian lady, so he saw no need to hurry breakfast even though C
razyauntida’s famous flapjacks turned out just awful. He got most of the taste out of his mouth with a lot of black coffee and excused himself to ride over to the hydraulic site again.
He still saw he’d made it too early. He tethered the roan gelding he’d chosen from Uncle Don’s remuda near the mounts he found still tethered to the abandoned shack. He led them to the water’s edge and they were too grateful to spook at the mangled remains of their former masters. By the time he had all three ponies together by the shack again the sheriff rode in with four deputies to join them.
The sheriff dismounted, had a look at the dead kidnappers, and asked what in thunder Stringer had shot them with. Stringer pointed at the hydraulic rig out on the water and said, “I had that fired up to dig more sedately when fate offered me a more interesting target of opportunity. If we fire her up some more it won’t take long to find out if there’s another body under that muck across the way. By daylight it’s easy to see how someone kicked a mess of spoil down from the top as if to bury someone else, easy.”
The sheriff shook his head and said, “Not with that water cannon, Stringer. I mean to identify the cuss, not paste him together again. That’s why we brung some folding camp spades.”
He turned to his men to command, “Mike, you and Slim get to work on the other side of the pond. Rafe, you and Jake better wrap them bodies in tarps so’s we can carry ‘em into town tidy. Make sure you find that one gent’s head. That’s generally the part most remember having seed afore. They sure look disgusting. But some infernal someone in this infernal county has to have seen at least one of these bastards in the past.”
As his deputies got to work the sheriff joined Stringer for a smoke, hunkered down with him against the wall of the shack. Stringer repeated much of what he’d already told the law over the party line and asked if the sheriff could tell him much about Miss Gina’s accident.
The older man snorted smoke out his nostrils like a mean old bull and said, “She got off easy, considering. Her horse had to be put down when they found it in a pasture a mile up the grade, favoring a busted foreleg. The gal was only knocked out a spell and maybe bruised more than a gent has any right to examine. Lucky for her, the farmer who came along next on his buckboard was going a lot slower than the silly son of a bitch who run the poor gal off the road.”
“Say again, Sheriff? I wasn’t told anything about another rider involved in her accident.”
The sheriff took a drag on his smoke and said, “She was sort of dazed when that farmer brung her in. Her dress was tore half off and she looked worse than it turned out, once they had her hosed down and bandaged up. Last night she was too shook up to make much sense. But when I paid her a call at dawn she was thinking straight and fussing to get out of bed. She said she had to get back to her boyfriend. Ain’t women romantical?”
“Never mind her love life. How did she wind up in the hospital?”
“We’re still looking for the speed demon. As she puts it together, after being rolled by her mount in the dark and may haps getting kicked in the head by the other one, she was on her way up the long grade from San Andreas to hereabouts when this crazy cuss come tear-assing downhill in the dark like a blind man playing Pony Express. He was on a big black thoroughbred and when they crashed her lighter pony went down. His didn’t. He just rid over her and kept going, the loco son of a bitch. She says the next thing she remembers is waking up in the town infirmary with the sawbones taping up her ribs. Doc says she wound up with a clear hoof print where it’ll only be visible to close friends as it fades. She still got off lucky as hell.”
“You’re right. He was a son of a bitch. Could she say what he might have looked like, Sheriff?”
“Hell, son, it was dark and all over afore she had time to rein her own mount out of his way. Oh, wait, she did say something about a big hat and a sort of rooster laugh he gave just as they bumped horses. Sounds like a crazy drunk Mex vaquero, but after that it’s all fuzzy. For all the gal could have really seen by that light, his big old horse could have been most any dark shade.”
Stringer pursed his lips and said, “It was black, if we’re talking about a gent who was scouting me yesterday and could have been part of that gang who kidnapped Dotty Montez. The timing works out about the way it should, allowing for considerable panic and a mighty fast horse running downhill most of the way.”
He elaborated on his sighting of his mirero and the sheriff decided, “We’d best take him more serious, then. Mireros aren’t supposed to hurt folk. It’s wicked enough to make ‘em nervous.”
They both looked up as they heard a shout. Mike and Slim were wading back across the water, each holding on to a booted ankle of the cadaver they towed behind them. As Stringer, the sheriff, and other deputies joined them at the water’s edge, they hauled the remains out to drain a mite. The crossing had cleaned most of the clay and grit away from the waxen face of the old man Buck Brown had shot in Miss Gina’s. Stringer told them, “That’s the body they stole, all right. What’ll you bet they cleaned out his pockets before hiding him out here?”
The sheriff hunkered to search the wet muddy duds, anyway, before he nodded with disgust and said, “They wouldn’t have had to hid him if he was a total stranger in these parts.”
Rafe chimed in, “I may have seen that face around San Andreas, Sheriff. Can’t say who he was. But, yep, he was one of them uninteresting old men you see now and again but don’t pay attention to unless they piss in public.”
Slim added, “Hot damn, I’ll bet that’s why they gunned that library gal. Old gents with nothing better to do spends lots of time at libraries, reading the papers free.”
The sheriff got back up, wiping his hands on his pants, and told Stringer, “Good help’s hard to find these days, but they try, slow as they are. We’ll carry all three of these rascals into El Dorado, first. This neater-looking one must have had at least one conversation with someone at Miss Gina’s before young Buck had to gun him.”
It was easier said than done, even with the extra ponies left over. Horseflesh spooked at the smells of blood and death and the long mud bath hadn’t made the less-bloody cadaver smell any better than he’d started out. But an hour or so later they had all three mysterious strangers propped up on the shady side of the El Dorado post office, and, from the crowd that assembled, one might have thought the law was offering a free look at a genuine elephant.
The storekeep from across the way said one of the younger ones could be a customer who’d come in for some .44-40 rounds and a can of Arbuckle coffee a few days earlier. He said he couldn’t swear to this, however, as the gent he’d served hadn’t been all torn up like that.
An old Swede who kept some dairy cows a steady drinker’s walk from town said he’d seen the older gent in the taproom next door more than once. This came as no great surprise, since Buck Brown had shot the cuss in Miss Gina’s to begin with. The sheriff sent a deputy to haul the ugly barkeep who’d witnessed the grim event.
The deputy found her in bed with one of the Chinee kitchen helpers and, as this was a felony under current California law, she agreed to do her damnedest. But, standing over him in her kimono, wiping sleep gum from her eyes, the gal who’d served the cadaver its last drink could only recall it had been gin, neat, paid for. She said, “I remember that because I’ve never trusted a man who drinks gin. It’s easier for a barkeep to keep tracks of drinks as don’t look like water, and gin drinkers know it. He didn’t drink much. Leastways, I didn’t catch him drinking much. He’d been in a few times afore that young cowboy shot him. But he wasn’t a regular. You’d see him now and again as if he meant to meet someone there. He never stayed long and, no, I can’t recall who he might have been meeting inside. I got enough trouble keeping an eye on the wilder ones.”
A townee who’d followed her and the deputy from the ‘dobe to see what was up kicked thoughtfully at the gravel at his feet and said, “I seen him drinking with old Angus MacSorley the other night.”
Anot
her man laughed and said, “Shoot, MacSorley would drink with the devil incarnate if he could get him to listen to him. MacSorley likes to shoot the breeze almost as much as he likes to drink. Trouble is, by the time he’s drinking a few minutes nobody can understand him.”
Stringer asked the first one if he could recall what the conversation between the dead man and old Angus had been about. The presumably involuntary eavesdropper shrugged and said, “Just crazy old-timer yarns. The one there at your feet was asking MacSorley about Joaquin Murrieta and, for a drunk, old MacSorley had it right. He was telling the stranger Murrieta was a made-up fairy tale and then—oh, yeah—he started telling the stranger about the time he rid shotgun messenger for the stage line. I headed for the poker game in other parts about then. I’d heard him tell that story many a time, when he could talk clearer.”
Another man in the crowd said, “It’s all the old man talks about, these days. Lots of old men get to living in the past. I hope when I’m that old I’ll have a more interesting past to live in. All the poor old cuss ever did was shoot a Mex one time and, shoot, he didn’t even kill the bastard.”
The sheriff decided, aloud, he’d leave the bodies where they were till quitting time at the Sheep Ranch Mine gave everyone in town a gander at ‘em. Then he meant to buckboard them down to the county seat and at least put the least messy one on ice for a spell, adding, “Not much use wasting effort to preserve chopped meat. Do we find out who their scout was, the rest ought to fall in place.”
Someone had to ask why the sheriff thought the older man had been some sort of scout. The shrewder lawman said, “Because that’s what it looks as if he was up to, that’s why. He was the one as came in close, sedate, to steal library books and question drunks about things. The other raggedy rascals only showed their faces, masked, after he’d figured out some trouble for ‘em to get into. He was the mastermind, see?”
