Roy Bean's Gold (15 page)

While the crowd milled around, voicing their opinion of the dark deeds of the Men of the Night, some cursed the act as brutal and downright cowardly, but others only laughed and shouted out that it was
bueno
and the only way to handle all such rascals.

I noticed Diamond Dick Powers, the gambler, laughing and joking with a group of saloon regulars, as well as with Sánchez himself. Josh's deputy strutted around tugging at his long mustaches and seemed to be almighty pleased with the excitement—and himself. Yet when someone in the crowd jostled him in passing, Sánchez blanched and slapped a hand onto his gun butt. So it seemed pretty plain that the
alcalde
's lawdog was on edge and as jumpy as a tarantula on a hot rock.

“Where's my brother?” I hadn't seen anything of Josh in the milling crowd, yet he should have been on the street in his capacity as headman of San Diego. I started off for the
alcalde
's
casa
on foot.

“Hold on there, young Roy. Your brother and several of the leading citizens have rode out to the woods, near Alcalá Point, to look at the site of the crime. I was going out there but decided to wait for them to come back. and you might as well wait with me.” Salazar looked down at the wicked little weapon in my hand. “For the everlasting love of Santa Cecilia's brass-bound harp! Where'd you come by that? The last time I saw such a murdering gun was when we shot one of Murieta's rogues, Black Bonito, out of his saddle at Placerville.”

“And what happened then?”

“What happened?” Salazar wrestled off his flapping hat and beat the dust out of it while the morning sun gilded the top of his vanished scalp. “You mean what sort of a revenge did that bandit king extract from us? Well, I'll tell you. Not one damned thing!” He squinted at me and slowly pulled on his headgear. “I know what you mean.
Sí
. This Murieta has often threatened those who've slain or interfered with his rascals, but a mighty few times has he ever carried out such threats.” He stared thoughtfully at the swaggering Sánchez. “Of course, there might come a time when. . . .”

I was about to ask just what he was driving at when shouts broke out in the crowd, and here came Josh with several sober-looking gents, among them
Señor
Castañeda, all riding into the plaza.

“Come along. Let's see what your brother has to say.” Salazar pushed his way through the throng and I followed, still toting my little man-killer of a gun.

Josh sat there on his horse, his fancy clothes all rumpled and misfitting, and from the look of him he hadn't been to bed at all. When his bloodshot eyes focused on Salazar and myself, he sort of stiffened in his saddle and just waited for us to come up to him.

“Well, here's Roy and Salazar. So you're both back. This is one devil of a thing, isn't it? You can ride pride just so far, and then you're apt to get bucked off damned good and hard. To think we've lost those three prisoners . . . even if they were a batch of low-lifes.” He wheeled his horse and started up the street toward the
alcalde
's
casa
, while the other riders rode off through the crowd, all as mum as oysters.

Two hours later, when the bells chimed for noon, Josh was still talking, and Salazar and I were still listening. My brother rattled on and on about the “infernal outrage” as if he couldn't stop. He ranted about the jailer's lack of common sense, that fat old man who always seemed more than half asleep. He deplored the absence of any of his deputies during the night, but then turned around and excused them by saying they all had word that Murieta or some of his gang were said to be prowling the outskirts of town, ready to break out Juan Pico and setting up some sort of ambush for any overambitious lawmen.

Josh just about pulled his hair to think he'd been so deep in his account books and ledgers, preparing a report for the headmen in San Francisco, that he hadn't been thinking straight. “I'm as big a blockhead as any of my men. and now I'm paying for it!” He rambled on, figuratively kicking himself in the tail bone, so that in spite of myself I was just about convinced Francisco Almada had made a mistake in my brother.

But I could sense that Salazar himself wasn't completely sold that something wasn't wrong, though he couldn't put a finger on it yet. But when we finally got away from Josh and walked uptown for a drink at the American Flag, the little Mexican sheriff spilled his thoughts good and strong.

“I tell you, Roy, there's something about this affair that has a strange look. something odd-like.” Salazar hoisted his glass, then set it down as if he'd all of a sudden lost his thirst. “
Sí
, I don't want to say it, but, by damn, your brother does what your
Señor
Shakespeare has one of his characters say about another. that he protests too
mucho
.”

“Josh is covering up something?” My neck began to prickle. This fat little Mexican lawdog wasn't half as sleepy as he looked. No, he was mighty wide awake.

Salazar picked up his beer and downed it with gusto, then ordered another round. “I tell you that listening to all the
alcalde
's words, words words has me dry as a chunk of old adobe. Drink up, young Bean. I guess you've got an idea or two as to what's been going on around here. And I myself have learned a thing or two since the time I pinned this on.” And he tapped the nickel-plated little pie plate of a badge with a broad thumb.

Then, for a spell, we just sat there over our drinks. All of a sudden, be damned if Salazar didn't come at me from away around Robin Hood's barn. “
Señor
Roy, that gold you had when we first met back on the trail, the gold you told me was for a business here. you remember that?”

“I sure guess I do.”

“Have any of it left?”

“Well, that's a mighty unusual sort of a question.” I gulped half of my beer and wiped my chin. “Sure I've still got it. We just haven't had a lot of time to speculate for likely business prospects.”

“
Sí
, and I guess there ain't too much doing in the way of business in such a place as this.” Salazar sipped at his beer, and then turned his head slowly to look at me. “Maybe you ought to come up toward San Francisco and put some of that gold into some sort of business thereabouts. I tell you they're still making money hand over fist, and not just in the mines. Things ain't as loco as they were a year or so back, but even with old Sam Brannon's stores around the diggings there's real opportunities for young fellows like you, with all your Yankee get-up-and-go. Flour ain't eight hundred dollars a barrel any more, nor eggs three dollars each, but boots, picks, and shovels and suchlike still fetch some mighty fancy prices, and there's no risk of running into
bandidos
like Murieta and Pancho Ruiz if you stay put in town and do your trading.” Salazar, for some reason, had got to rattling on just like Josh. “Speaking of Murieta, where'd you say you come by that little murdering gun? Wasn't one of the
alcalde
's?”

“No, it wasn't!” I said sort of short and sharp-like and decided to change the subject. “What d'you know about the girl you came down on the coach with week before last? You know. the one who was in that Comanche wagon train raid with you.”

“Only what I've told you before, young Roy. We were both in that terrible set-to and escaped only by the grace of all the holy angels.” Salazar crossed himself hurriedly. “I still carry this decoration, as you see”—he tapped his vanished scalp—“and the young
señorita
. . . .”

“Yes?” Here could be some more information about the tintype girl, or maybe her folks.

“Poor creature . . . she carries her own scar, where no one can see.”

“You mean she was hurt bad somewhere?”

“No, young man. I mean that her scar is here, in the
espíritu
. the soul. That young girl, she will never be quite as other girls. And that is something for you to consider. At least that is what I believe.”

The sheriff stood up, clapped his disreputable sombrero back on his head. “The day grows shorter and I have
mucho
to do before I start on up the road. a report to take down from that black coyote of a Sánchez, and another word or two with the
alcalde
.” He pushed out his hand, and we shook.

As I sat there trying to cipher out what Salazar had meant about Dulcima, the sheriff paused at the saloon doorway. “By the way, young Roy, were all of your gold eagles minted in Eighteen Forty-Eight?” Before I could do more than give him a surprised nod, he'd stepped on out of the shadowy barroom into the golden afternoon and was gone.

Next morning I still hadn't thought of a way to tip Josh off about Joaquín's warning. I didn't fancy my brother digging away at me as to where I'd come upon such information, and I didn't feel like letting him know I'd had suspicions of him being in cahoots with those black-hearted cowards—the Men of the Night.

At breakfast I made a try at getting something out of him about the lynchings, but he ignored me and began to harp away about the upcoming elections that were due to replace the temporary
alcaldes
with regular bona-fide mayors.

“Just about a month, Roy, and I may be out of a job. Some damn' fool politician back in Washington had a brainstorm and my job could be gone up. so why pry into things that don't concern you? I know the better class of folks, Castañedas and others, feel that such jailbird rascals need to be taken care of any way possible. so drop it. Remember what old Æsop said.
uh
, something about not looking at things too close.”

I saw that Josh was so wrought up he couldn't even steal himself a second-hand saying. “I don't give a damn in a bucket for Æsop or any other blowhard. I'm asking you straight out if you ever had anything to do with any of these necktie parties. You might as well answer, for you're sure in one hell of a lot of trouble if you did.”

By now I was so riled up with Josh that I didn't care what came out. My Bean temper was at the boiling point and I was ready to knock some sort of sense into him or go down trying.

“Trouble? Trouble from who?” Josh stared at me as if he thought I'd up and gone completely loco. Then he lounged back at the breakfast table and began to fiddle with a fork. “You've gotten to listening to some of that penny-ante gossip at the taverns, eh? I've heard that tinhorn Dick Powers has been making a heap of wild talk to all the rounders. It's either got to be that or this interfering galoot of a Salazar has gone and pumped you full of balloon gas. You ought to up and remember, Roy, that plenty of these Mexicans are born troublemakers. and Salazar had lost out on the reward for that bunch of prisoners, Pico in particular. He was supposed to bring them up to San Francisco alive. and you know what happened.”

Before I could answer that, Abraham slipped in from the front hallway and, after a mighty curious look at me, whispered in Josh's ear. My brother got up from the table in such a rush that he knocked over his chair. “Come on, Roy!”

I followed Josh on out at a dead run to the stable behind the
casa
. As we saddled up, he told me what had happened. Some traveler, riding down the Camino Real from San Juan Capistrano, after taking the flatboat over the river, had passed by the San Diego de Alcalá woods and found another corpse swinging in the sea breezes—and at 9:00 in the morning. They couldn't turn up Sánchez anywhere, so the fat old jailer, Manuel Boronda, had come huffing over to the
alcalde
's.

“Another present from the Men of the Night?” I shouted at Josh while we lashed our horses up the street and pounded out the sandy roadway toward the woods two miles away.

“How the devil should I know?” Josh snarled back at me, and from the expression on his face, it looked as though he was telling the truth.

Galloping up a gravelly ridge and through a great patch of yucca fringing the road, we flushed out a flock of brown quail that exploded right into our faces. Fighting to keep my mount on the road, I heard Josh give a choked sort of shout and saw the body of a man dangling from the bough of a huge old cypress at the wood's edge.

We both slowly rode up to the suspended corpse, staring into its face. In spite of the shade there was no doubt but that Josh had lost himself a deputy. Sánchez hung there, glaring at us with bulging eyes.

“Murieta!” Josh looked over his shoulder, but we three were alone except for the wind keening through the cypress grove.

T
wo days after Sánchez's unlamented end, the Castañeda girls arrived, traveling in from the
rancho
in Rosita's surrey, along with
Señora
Castañeda and Dulcima.

I happened to be in the plaza, lounging in the shade of the pepper trees, gossiping with some of the locals, the talk revolving about the lynchings and the murder of the
alcalde
's deputy. Abraham, Josh's servant, was also there, having stopped on his way to the town's butcher shop. Though he had no more to say than usual, I felt he was almost as uneasy about the subject as I was, and I think both of us welcomed the appearance of the Almada conveyance.

As it rolled past, Lucia Castañeda called: “Here we are at last, and now you've no reason for neglecting us,
Señor
Bean! And we insist on beginning our daily rides again.”

“You are especially invited to our home tonight,” her sister echoed. “Just come by at eight and we'll have a surprise ready for you. the three of us . . . Just see if we don't!”

Dulcima, who sat by the
señora
, smiled at me and waved gaily. She'd changed considerably from the quiet young lady who'd gotten off the Los Angeles coach so recently. I supposed her sudden blossoming was helped by close herding with that bouncing Castañeda pair. There were few folks who got near those young pepper pots who didn't feel the better because of it, if only for the time being.