Working the Lode (23 page)

Cormack had thought about this already. “It would be good to have a partner with a lot of capital to invest in the vines. Especially if Spain sends men to burn down the new vines. Someone like you’d have men to protect the property.”

This idea seemed to make Joaquin hot. “Spain is losing influence—how dare they dictate what Californians do?”

The idea they were both now “Californians” stoked Cormack’s zeal. “Shall I ask Zelnora if she accepts you as a partner in the vineyard?”

Joaquin smiled widely. “Yes. Señorita Sparks is a good, hardworking woman. But I shall also ask that you take in Antonia. She needs a good house, protection from the weather, and the stability of a family.”

“Of course. Yes, Señorita Sparks is a good woman.”

Tremaine popped his head behind the curtain that served as a doorway. “Zelnora is awake and asking for you.”

The two men stood casually, arranging their clothing as though they had just had a gold claim parley.

Chapter Twenty-three

When Zelnora awoke, Joaquin vowed to her to find their robbers and would-be murderers, to restore their giant nugget to them. Then he went out into the street to discover who had been flushed out by his shooting of Jake Muggins.

He had not told Cormack the shining truth about shooting that worthy in the leg. Lying was an old habit, but he now had a different motivation for doing so. He didn’t want Cormack to know he’d intentionally shot the gambler’s foot clean off in his zeal to find out who had robbed his friends. Joaquin was making a sincere effort to refrain from activities such as shooting off gamblers’ feet, and he wanted to impress Cormack with his attempts to change his ways. So he had made light of the shooting, to Cormack’s face.

The crippling of the gambler had flushed out Three-Fingered Jack and Feliz, storming at a gallop past the brilliant bazaars of the dusty thoroughfare. Joaquin had grown weary of these two formerly valuable henchmen. Whereas in the early days his band had chosen victims based upon their resemblance to the Americans who had wronged their families, Jack and Feliz lately just randomly lifted the hair of any passerby, particularly Indians for the sport of it, as it was as yet no crime to shoot Indians. Indians had never harmed Joaquin, and he considered them of the same repressed tribe as his own, so the other day when Three-Fingered Jack proudly displayed the head of an Indian whose only crime was walking by his campsite in possession of a few eagle feathers, Joaquin had publicly struck Jack upside the head. These Sonorans. They would steal the woolly colt out of Barnum’s Museum.

Motioning the two bandits to a plot where a row of scurvy victims had been buried from the neck down, the two Sonorans dismounted with knitted brows.

“Jefe,”
Jack acknowledged with a mystified nod. “What is going on? Some gamblers came sobbing and wailing that you shot off Muggins’ foot.”

“
Si.
Never draw your pistol unless you intend to use it,” Joaquin affirmed.

“But why? Muggins always has plenty of money for us to steal.”

“He actually
gives
us his money,” Feliz added.

Joaquin briefly described the robbing of Cormack and Zelnora—as though he had any need to. He carefully scrutinized his cronies’ faces for signs of conspiracy. They were very good liars, as good as himself, but he knew them so well he thought he detected a few shadows of guilt pass over their slimy countenances. “Bowmaker recognized none of the five men, though they wore no masks.” He paused. “And one of them mentioned the name ‘Brannagh,’” Joaquin lied.

That one word tipped the Sonorans’ hands. Disbelief smoothed their craggy faces, and Feliz ignorantly cried, “Why would they mention Brannagh? He is off in San Francisco organizing the Vigilance Committ—”

Three-Fingered Jack nearly elbowed Feliz to shut him up. “Yes, yes,” he interrupted. “He is busy with San Francisco’s town council. Or so I have heard. How could he travel up here and back to San Francisco again?”

Joaquin paced slowly, not taking his eyes from their devious mugs. “Perhaps because he loathes Bowmaker on principle, and Señorita Sparks for abandoning him.” He stood absolutely still, his gaze boring holes into Jack’s eye sockets. “Did I say anything about Brannagh personally robbing them? Wouldn’t it be just as simple for him to hire men to rob the people he loathes?”

Jack and Feliz looked as though that had not occurred to them. “Oh,” said Jack. “Yes, I suppose he could hire someone to do it.”

Joaquin added, “Brannagh paid you to rob that religious party going over the Sierra Nevada. And that was just because he didn’t want them to reach the Colorado River. Why should he not pay you to rob two of the people he loathes the most in the world?”

Jack protested too stridently. He had already claimed that the band sent up the Sierra had not met with much success and had only robbed some parishioners of a few pounds of meat. “You know that was not a good raid! We already told you. There were just a few weak men struggling along building a road to nowhere. Rolling boulders up a hill.”

“Si,”
agreed Feliz vehemently. “It took them all day just to build six feet of a road! And all we got was some jerked beef and some disgusting whiskey that tasted like urine.”

“That was supposed to be wine,” Three-Fingered Jack told him.

Feliz continued, “We ourselves had to spend the night hungry in Guano Hill. It was not successful at all!”

Joaquin waved them away with distaste. “Yes, and don’t forget to find out about the colossal nugget. It will be hard to sell that without an entire town knowing about it.”

“Of course,
jefe
!”

However, Joaquin trusted them as far as he could throw them. During the Fourth of July spree at Sutter’s Fort, Ward Brannagh had approached him to rob and even kill Cormack, if such an eventuality were to come down the pike. Brannagh would not be overly grieved if Cormack were to die or lose a limb. Joaquin had at first hesitantly agreed but had quickly been stampeded by his emotional attachment to the couple. The next time Brannagh had propositioned him, Joaquin protested he was not a murderer for hire, and to hire the next fellow. The “next fellow” was apparently Three-Fingered Jack, as a week ago they’d gone on that binge in the Sierra at Brannagh’s behest, and Joaquin had stayed behind at Cormack’s cabin when Cormack had frigged him so lovingly, and they could have spent a few more pleasant hours in each other’s company were it not for Jack’s interruption…

Brannagh clearly had it in for Cormack, who had done nothing more heinous than “steal” his paramour. Couldn’t Brannagh have just paid Zelnora for her work at his store, as he had paid Mercy Narrimore? And to further defame Cormack’s good, upstanding name, Brannagh had spread the Sing Sing story around, tried to get Joaquin to propagate it. Even if the story was true, what was wrong with doing a stretch for something so honorable?

No. Cormack was an honest man, a superior doctor, the most intelligent and hardest worker Joaquin had ever known. A man with the good sense to marry Señorita Sparks. He would find out who had robbed the good couple.

And it would be difficult not to retaliate in his old manner. By blowing their heads off.

* * * *

“We have a potential investor in our winemaking scheme,” Cormack said.

True to his word, Joaquin had sent men to work about the cabin, repairing the horse corral, building a dry goods shed, putting real glass in the windows, and they had brought poor Thaddeus Martin’s stove. A couple of the Sonorans, Zelnora suspected, were also told to stand guard against marauders. So during her rehabilitation from the bullet injury, there was not a terrible lot to do except prepare supper for Cormack and Quartus when they returned from the mines near sundown. Today she had even traded the laborers some gold dust for a few green squash vegetables, an infrequent delicacy indeed, and the trio dined on succulent stew in the clearing in front of the cabin.

“Oh, yes? And who is that?”

Zelnora could guess. Cormack was undeniably fond of Joaquin Valenzuela. She attributed it to Joaquin’s tawny good looks, his angular high cheekbones and lanceolate eyes, and the adventurous danger he represented to Cormack, a reminder of his own daredevil, rustic existence in the mountains.

Cormack looked musingly at an owl on a branch. “Why, Joaquin, of all people.” Quickly he explained, “He seems to want to settle down, not really in the settlements, yet not really anywhere as disorderly as Sonoran Camp, or Groundhog’s Glory, or Nutcake Camp—”

Zelnora nodded. “Chucklehead Diggings.”

“Gomorrah,” Quartus added. “Or Rough and Ready! Last month over there, they interrupted a funeral because someone called out ‘Gold!’ Everyone raced off, dumped the casket right in a gulley. ‘The congregation is dismissed!’”

Cormack chuckled. “I heard that story, too. Those Rough and Ready boys will use any excuse to get out of a church service.”

Quartus said, “Or Hungry Camp. There’s no food there.”

Cormack seemed set on changing the subject, so Zelnora prodded, “Joaquin wishes to invest in winemaking?”

“Yep. Of course, we’ll have to give him a percentage of any profits. That’s only to be expected.”

“Of course.”

Quartus pointed a spoon at Cormack. “Will he be actually lending a hand in any of the work? I don’t want anyone jumping in on my surveying, or stamping and monitoring the juice.” For Quartus had already pledged to find the most fertile soil with his divining rod then hand-press the juice himself, as it had been ages since he’d drank grape juice.

“We didn’t discuss that much detail,” Cormack admitted. “He doesn’t strike me as a particularly servile labor sort of fellow. But he may want to oversee, if Zel doesn’t mind having a notorious desperado like him around.”

“Mind?” Zelnora echoed. “I don’t see why I’d mind. I’m rather fond of Joaquin myself, if he would just give up that annoying robbing occupation of his. He may have to take on a pseudonym. You know—‘Valenzuela Vineyards’ might not conjure up the ideal image.” She smiled. Of course it would be called Bowmaker Vineyards. She could draw a label of an archer for the bottle.

“Nothing wrong with the name Valenzuela,” said Cormack, “Leastways, not over in General Vallejo’s neighborhood, where the best grapes stood to be grown. Vallejo and Joaquin are kin of sorts. They are both
gente de razón,
anyway.”

“He’d have to be a secret partner,” Quartus noted, and Cormack and Zelnora nodded in agreement, surprised Quartus had formulated that plan on his own. Stretching and uttering rutting animal sounds, Quartus declared he would go catch them some fish with a new pole he had fashioned while he was supposed to be shaking the gold rocker earlier that day. The couple rose and retired to the cabin.

* * * *

“A rider,” Cormack murmured into Zelnora’s ear.

They lay on the bed constructed from willow tree poles, Cormack leaning against the wall with the woman between his thighs. It was unacceptable doings to hear a mounted rider cantering up their path from the main road.

Zelnora shot to a sitting position. “How many riders?” she gasped.

Cormack had not realized she was still touchy about their run-in with the bandits. Of course she was. How often did a pious gal from the minefields of Georgia get plugged while being robbed of a thirty-pound nugget?

“Sounds like only one.” Cormack rose to peer out the window. He exhaled with relaxation when he saw it was Joaquin alone, alighting with ease with those ridiculously oversized Californio spurs not causing him a moment’s pause.

“Just Joaquin—you don’t need to cover up,” Cormack advised. “He’s in a rush. I hope he brings good news.”

Serape billowing, Joaquin strode to the front door. When Cormack opened it, he expected to embrace the former bandit and monte dealer. Yet after touching Cormack’s arm briefly and uttering
“Buenos noches”
with thin, serious lips, Joaquin continued on to the bed, flinging off his serape and setting himself atop the mattress.