Roy Bean's Gold (6 page)

The bar was empty except for a scant-whiskered barkeep and several old Mexicans, drowsing over their
siesta
tequilas.

We had ourselves a couple of dust cutters at the long mahogany bar, and Salazar inquired for Powers, who he said had a saloon at San Diego as well as several other towns, only to learn the gambler was at Santa Barbara.

“This Powers came out to California with Stevenson's New York Volunteers. They were sure some scrappers. When he was going to be discharged at the end of the war, he made himself a stake by picking up a five-thousand-dollar bet that he could ride one hundred and sixty miles in eight hours!”

“A thundering big ride,” I said. “Who'd he bet with?”

“Some of the best riders in southern California,
vaqueros
from the De la Guerra Rancho. They said it couldn't be done, and not by any Yankee.” Salazar grinned. “
Sí
, that fellow Powers's time was just six hours and a half. He used twenty-five mounts and galloped an extra mile to show them what was what.”

“Sounds like the sort of riding this Murieta must be doing,” I said as I thought of fetching that phantom Red Rosita into the talk, but I dropped the idea when Salazar began to cloud up at the mention of Murieta.

We finished our drinks and went back to register for the night at the Bella Union over on Los Angeles Street, turning in our animals at a corral behind the hotel. When Salazar went off to check in with the local law, I headed for the nearest barbershop.

After a trim and a shave and an honest-to-God bath, in a tin tub in the shop's back room, I asked for the best clothing store and was directed to the Capital Clothing Emporium up on San Gabriel.

Standing there in front of the Emporium's full-length mirror was a pretty hard jolt. Here I was, Roy Bean, normally broad-shouldered and broad-faced, hitting onto six feet of bone and muscle. And now I was staring at some sunken-eyed, wind-scorched, rail-thin beggar!

I'd lost twenty-odd pounds riding the winding trail out of Chihuahua. In my ragged yellow hickory shirt and cactus-tattered jeans, stuffed into dusty, scuffed boots, I was surely one sorry-looking sort of a scarecrow. No wonder Salazar had thought he'd run onto a regular hardcase when we first met.

Another of brother Josh's second-hand sayings had something to do with new duds making some sort of a new man, so I decided to go the whole hog. I bought the best tip-top garments and extras that place had to offer and put a first-class smile on the face of the turkey-necked young gent who waited on me.

When I sauntered out of the Capital Clothing Emporium, I might not have been a completely new man, but I was a darned sight better-dressed one.

Scarecrow no longer, I was about as fine a dandy as could be found in the whole town. Turned out in black velvet trousers, midnight-blue silk shirt with flowing scarlet kerchief, shiny black hand-tooled boots, with the whole outfit topped off by a silver-spangled sombrero twice as stunning as the late Esteban Domingo's, I strode down the street and called on Salazar at the Los Angeles sheriff's office.

I made an impression, let me tell you, and even hard-bitten old Sheriff Persifer got up on his bow legs for the introductions. He knew my brother, the
alcalde
of San Diego, and said as much, though I noticed he didn't toss any bouquets toward Joshua Quincy Bean—but, I thought, politicians were always leery of each other and this must be the case.

Bowing out like a copper-bottom grandee, I took Salazar in tow down to the finest
cantina
in town—the Blue Wing.

“You are a
hombre mucho diverso
from the one who rode into town with me two hours past.” Salazar sat in the
cantina
lifting his amber glass of beer in salute. When he cocked his head admiringly, a sunbeam lanced through the shutters to touch the top of his missing scalp and give him a sort of halo, like one of his saddle-pardner saints. “
Sí
, you come to California looking like . . . how do you say? . . . a bummer, and here is
el caballero!
” He took a hefty pull of his beer, blinking at me with his bright black eyes. “If you had not a face,
sincero
, I'd think you carried
mucho dinero
from somewhere.”

So while we sat in the Blue Wing, tackling a prime good meal, all washed down with fancy Mexican wines, I let it be known all those eagles I'd been tossing around came from my family's venture at Chihuahua and were going to be used to start a new business at San Diego.

“
Ah
, San Diego.” Salazar stuffed his face with tortilla, worked his jaws a while, and then came up for air. “Sheriff Persifer reports some trouble down there. Just like here in town and elsewhere. He says your brother,
Señor
Joshua Bean,
el alcalde
, had to throw some of the gold seekers into his
calabozo
when they tried to take over his town on the way to and from the mining camps. and also that there has been robbers on the loose about that country.”

It appeared things were lively at San Diego and that suited me, for I'd been dreading having to go back behind some counter and bow and scrape for
pesos
and dollars. I'd lost my appetite for being a merchant prince and made up my mind to apply for some job with the law force.

According to Salazar, the riff-raff and toughs had been sweeping through the territory for the past year and times were getting wilder each month.

“It's getting to be a regular plague, let me tell you,” Salazar grunted, stuffing away more tortillas. “And now, by San Miguel's pinfeathers, they're arriving from every blessed corner of the world. Just as I left San Francisco, there were over one hundred abandoned ships in that harbor.
Sí
, sailors just row ashore and begin to hoof it for the mines. That bay up there looks like
la foresta
from the dozens on dozens of masts sticking up into the sky. captains and crews all out to grab off a fortune from those double-damned mines all springing out of the earth like mushrooms ever since they first found those infernal nuggets at Sutter's Mill!” He got himself so wrought up that I was afraid he'd choke on the food, but after he wheezed a minute, and washed down that wheeze with a generous gulp of wine, he went back at his plate with a will.

When I thought of all that gold out there just waiting for me, and without the need to sweat and strain to get it, my eyes narrowed and I smiled to myself. But Salazar, who seemed to have the knack of reading my thoughts, shook his head.

“Gold can be a blessing,
joven hombre
, but I think gold will prove a curse.
Sí
, a curse for many a man in California.”

I didn't try to argue the matter, for I knew for a fact that my eagles—the entire lot of them—had brought death to seven men. And that was curse enough, I thought.

W
hen I rode down Los Angeles' Main Street and out San Fernando the next morning, following a comfortable night's rest at the first-class Bella Union, Salazar rode at my side, astride his pudgy buckskin.

In talking to the local sheriff, he'd learned that some of the very rascals he was trailing were thought to be in my brother's
calabozo
at San Diego, or were a week back.

“
¿Quién sabe?
” Salazar shrugged when we mounted up and headed out of the old town. “Those infernal jails are all made to be broken out of. A blind
peon
with a spoon could cut his way out of our accursed adobe. But they don't get away with that sort of thing at our Alameda jailhouse. That place is all stone and iron, let me tell you!”

About five miles out of Los Angeles, we met a small crowd of folks coming toward us, mainly Mexicans along with some Yanks, and all heading north to the Sacramento mines. Some rode bony mules and some forked worn-out nags that didn't seem able to make it to town let alone any farther. They certainly were one rag-tag bunch, and I wondered if any of those hard-faced rapscallions, who stared at my fine horse and fancy duds with mighty calculating looks, had been guests of Josh's hoosegow.

All we learned in passing was they'd come across the southern Gila route and damned it for a red-hot griddle. All said they'd be blasted if they went back that way, not if they rotted in their tracks. They went on their way up the road yelling and cussing their heads off like a pack of wild men.

Salazar wheeled in his saddle to stare gloomily at the dusty mob. “They're getting worse each month. just scum rising out of every hell hole on earth and swarming like two-legged locusts toward the gold. That bunch will mean more trouble for the Los Angeles officers, and for me. if they get up as far as Alameda before they're tossed into jail.”

I rode along, watching the sky above me, all filled with slowly drifting clouds pushed along by an easy wind like huge clots of cream swimming in an enormous bowl of blue. Several high pairs of dark wings cut across the sky in front of us, some sort of huge birds that swam through the same sunny air. Salazar pointed them out as California condors, the largest bird of flight, with an average wingspan of ten feet or better. “And now the infernal miners are shooting those birds right and left just for their wing-feather quills in which to tote their cursed gold dust!”

“There must be hundreds of those birds in such a big county,” I said, thinking that I'd need more than some wing feathers to pack that fifty thousand in gold eagles—when I got them.

“Ah,
señor
, there'll come a time when greedy man will have taken and destroyed every creature. and, someday, perhaps even himself.”

The stunning big birds soon sailed away on the cool winds that blew first from the east, and then meandered back from the direction of the nearby coast. And for the first time I felt the spicy tang of an ocean on my face and could taste it in my mouth.

“Do you hear that?” Salazar cocked his great mushroom sombrero and shrugged a shoulder at me as he pulled up his horse.

“I thought I heard the wind in those trees there,” I said, tugging on my reins and looking out across the rolling countryside, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“Turn down here.” Salazar guided his buckskin onto a small lane that forked westerly over a low hill.

Then there it was! As far as my eyes could see there was only sparkling, restless space, all filled with the reflection of the drifting clouds. It was like nothing I'd ever imagined—and yet, somehow, I fancied I could see the same grassy waves I'd drifted through on the wind-driven journey that fetched me to this.

“That, my young friend, is el Pacifico!” Salazar reined in beside me. “Great Balboa, they say, first beheld it in far-off Panama. And now you see it for yourself, young Bean. Wonderful, is it not? And out there, thousands of miles off, another land. China perhaps.”

I couldn't answer. As often as I'd thought of this Pacific, and rolled the name on my tongue, riding the hot, sandy miles toward California, I never had the slightest idea it would be as it was.

While we stared off into the shimmering horizon, white feathers of surf rolled and unrolled along the empty strip of yellow sands below us with a velvety whispering that blended with the humming of the winds.

“Now come along, young
compadre
.” Salazar turned his buckskin's head. “We have close to thirty miles before we can take our supper at San Juan Capistrano. Then we'll be a good halfway to San Diego.”

* * * * *

The tavern at the little pueblo of San Juan Capistrano seemed to be about the same as all of those along the King's Highway. A one-story, fort-like adobe, painted a dull yellow, with a sloping orange-tiled roof, it stood back from the wide white road among a grove of live oak and cottonwood, staring at us with its big green loop-holed shutters, like a watchful kind of an animal.

We arrived at gray dusk as the Angelus bells were ringing from the one remaining tower of the decrepit old Franciscan mission where it stood, lonely and neglected.

A burly, dark-skinned Negro, in ragged pants and red undershirt, slipped up and took our animals around to the rear of the General Santa Anna Taverna, eyeing my silver-studded sombrero with downright admiration.

The large and smoky barroom was well filled for supper, with a patrol of five troopers from Fort Stockton, at San Diego, along with some local Mexican merchants and
rancheros
, plus a dozen gold hunters, or what they were beginning to call themselves, 'Forty-Niners. On the whole these miners were a decent sort and not tenderfeet, for they'd been at the mines for a year. This bunch had been down to the Mexican diggings below the border, but the pay dirt had been scarce and so they had come back north and were now heading for the American River.

One of them, a long, limber New Englander who named himself as Yankee Jim Carson, had been in the thick of it from the summer of '48, when he'd been a bank teller at San Francisco. He wasn't a bit backward about telling some of the lunatic events that swept across California from the time a Mormon merchant, Elder Sam Brannon, had sauntered into San Francisco's Portsmouth Plaza on May 11, 1848, and, hauling a bottle of gold dust from under his coat tails, had begun to holler: “Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!”

“Old Sam knew all about that strike at Sutter's Mill but had kept it under his stovepipe hat until he'd got himself at least four stores built and stocked up along the Sacramento,” said Carson. “When the folks heard him bellerin'. the real gold rush started right that very day. and San Francisco began to turn itself inside out. Over a quarter of the whole damned population of menfolks lit right out for the American River by next day. More than fifty new buildings goin' up around town were left where they stood, while carpenters, hod carriers, and the rest headed for the diggin's. Just about everybody, includin' myself, came down with a ragin' case of gold fever.”

“And it wasn't just you civilians what ketched that there fever,” a trooper added, grinning as he helped himself to another stack of tortillas. “Lootenant Ord's hull garrison deserted and went north. and I'd 'a' been one of 'em but I was in th' guardhouse at th' time.”