Roy Bean's Gold (3 page)

“I heard him call out some name. Maybe Rosita? Know her?”

“Knew her all right.” Kirker eased back down by the fire with a long sigh. “So did most every trooper with money enough for a proper introduction.” He pulled his big Bowie knife from his boot top and watched the reflection of the flames run along its edge.

I didn't like the looks of that knife. It reminded me of a dead Mexican with his face shot off—even though I packed a Bowie in my own boot.

“Don't worry,” Jeff said, showing his teeth. “Like I said, you wouldn't have lasted five miles with me if I didn't cotton to you.” In a blinding move, he flipped the knife—and it shivered in the hard ground a scant inch from my big toe.

In that same instant he was staring into the muzzle of the Walker Colt, yanked from my waistband.

“Oh, hand back that sticker, Roy, and put up your weapon. That there knife only does its dirty work when I tell it to.”

Next morning when we rode across the edge of the Painted Desert with its miles of red, brown, blue, and splotches of purple it seemed we traveled over some giant devil's paint box. As I gawked at the haunting landscape, I kept mulling over what Jeff had fessed up to the past night.

“Trouble” was surely a good word for it. Kirker was a U.S. Army deserter wanted in California by the military authorities. But what the brass out there didn't even suspect, according to Jeff, was the fact that he and a wild California bandit, Joaquín Murieta, had pulled off the robbery of an Army payroll train. Murieta and his gang had blown the whole six-man escort right out of their saddles, leaving only Sergeant Jefferson Kirker, the Judas goat, alive to tell it.

“We took that pack train of four mules and drove 'em into the foothills west of Santa Rosa with fifty thousand dollars and more in gold eagles, and plugged the poor mules twenty miles away. Then I up and rid back to our post, all frazzled, and lettin' on that I was sole survivor of a dirty Mexican ambush. which I was,” Kirker had explained, grinning like some sort of a wildcat. “Everyone at the post remarked that I was damned sure the lucky seventh man.”

According to Jeff, two nights later he'd stolen the post commandant's favorite pacing horse, plus a pair of pack mules, and skinned out at midnight. He'd fetched up at the gold cache at daylight, uncovered the loot, loaded up his mules, and headed north into unknown territory as fast as he could push his animals, keeping his eyes peeled for both
bandidos
and the Army.

“Found myself a place where not one damned white man or Mex had ever set foot. She's all hid there . . . and she's bully!” And that was all he'd told me about the hiding place of a king's ransom.

A
s brother Josh used to say, you should never tempt the devil with loose talk.

Here we'd come all the way across the Arizona Territory to within a couple of miles of Zuñi Jack's trading post without having seen hide nor feather of a single redskin.

I mentioned this in passing and Jeff began, at once, to cuss out Indians in general and this Zuñi Jack in particular. I could see Kirker was toting a real skull ache from his bout with the bottle.

“You just wait until we git to his place, and see if he don't try to charge double for everything. damned highway robber!”

I didn't know this Zuñi Jack from a button but it struck me as pretty funny that an ex-highwayman like Jeff Kirker should be so all-fired self-righteous. But we needed some supplies and were running low on good water, and, according to Kirker, the Zuñi had a water hole famous for its sweetness.

“Indians are Indians,” I mentioned, grinning, “but it's funny we never saw any all this while. Old Fancher was positive we'd bump headlong into dozens.”

I was getting ready to chaff Kirker about highway robbers when a small, tawny puff of dust, hovering southward over the sloping mesas and cholla patches, began to swell and drift toward us.

“Indians only let you see 'em when they want you to,” Kirker grunted, then stiffened in his saddle, looking south. “And a dollar to a bent
peso
we got some comin' this way right now. White men don't lambaste horses like that. got more sense.”

“What do we do, make a run for Zuñi Jack's or stay and powwow?”

That cloud was getting mighty close as it swayed along, golden yellow under the blazing sun. Then we saw them. Five horsemen galloped toward us, rushing streaks of fluttering feathers and pounding hoofs, darting across the mesa grasses like a swooping flock of gaudy birds. War crests and feathered lances glimmered over feathered shields of painted bull's hide. Naked except for a red clout flanked by two antelope tails, the leader rode up and lifted his long lance at us. A pair of his fellow riders held up their hands, palms out, staring across at us with slitted, glittering eyes.

“Apache?”

“Comanche. And I don't know what they're doin' this far north,” Kirker muttered out of the side of his mouth. “Don't go to makin' any quick moves, and let's see if one of 'em can parley.” He raised his own hand, palm out, and tried both sign language and Apache. The leader shook his red-feathered topknot like a wary hawk, then answered Jeff in Apache lingo.

Presently Kirker and the chief pushed their horses forward and shook hands. Then the Comanche offered his hand to me and I took it, mighty easy-like.

“This here's a war party on the scout for Navajos or Zuñis. Seems some of the Arizona Indians got too far south to suit these Comanches,” Jeff translated the mixture of Apache and broken Spanish the chief used to me. “The Comanches got their own ideas of territory and this one says the Indians up this way are jest too big for their clouts. and he and his bunch are out to cut some down to size.”

The Comanches kicked their spotted, paint-daubed ponies around us, growling like a pack of half-friendly dogs. The leader nodded his head and made motions with his wicked-looking lance.

“Wants to smoke the pipe with us. They ain't on no warpath with the white man right now,” reported Jeff, “but keep your eyes wide and that cannon of yours ready, just in case.”

We all dismounted, staked out our mounts, along with the pack mule, in the shade of a small stand of scrawny pines, and proceeded to smoke the pipe with those wild-eyed Indians. It went off pretty well until Jeff made the mistake of fetching out our other bottle.

Those Comanches grinned from ear to painted ear as that whiskey went around the circle. And each time the bottle circulated, the Indians grew more friendly, patting us on the back and nodding their plumes until it seemed we were squatting in the midst of a flock of crazy, glare-eyed hawks.

And just like any bunch of drunks, those Comanches got to bragging about how many coup they'd counted, and the number of scalps taken—including no small amount of Mexicans. They didn't mention whites, but I suppose they were just being polite. The chief, who was called Big Wolf, finally had to break down and show off his medicine bundle, tugging out a knotted linen rag from under his antelope-tail flap.

He untied the small parcel and shoved the contents across at us. It held, among other things, a dry, smoke-cured hand of a white woman. The hand was small and shapely, with a plain gold wedding band, and perfectly mummified. That pitiful packet also held one of the new-fangled tintypes. The picture's oval frame dangled from a rawhide string around Big Wolf's neck.

“He says,” Jeff interpreted, “he got that hand and pitchure the spring of Eighteen Forty-Two. Says that dead hand is sure mighty big medicine, and there ain't been a bullet molded to puncture his hide since he's got that on him.” I looked at the tintype. A little girl peered out of the tinted picture. With wide blue eyes in a sweet, delicate face, framed by long blonde curls, she looked to be no more than seven or eight.

“Where in Hades did that ugly murderer get ahold of this?” I asked, while a chill rippled through me as far as my boots. That girl, young as she was then, would be sixteen or so by now—if she would have lived through the bloody butchery of a Comanche raid.

“Old Big Wolf here, when a young warrior, had a medicine man who told him that if he aimed to become a great killer and a taker of lots of coup, he'd need to get ahold of the left hand of a white woman who had a gal child. but he never got the chance for such big medicine until he went with a war party nigh to the California line,” Kirker reported. “His bunch got the bulge on an emigrant wagon train over there, and plumb killed off all the folks and burnt the wagons. While he was rummagin' through the shambles, he found a little white kid hidin' in a half-burnt wagon. the one in that pitchure. Then he up and cut off the kid's maw's hand and would have sliced her up and run a spear through that gal child, but some Mexican troopers showed up and the Comanches all run for it. They know when to run and when to fight, like the rest of us.” He gave a short laugh and shrugged as if the story had got to him, hard as he was.

“So he got the hand and the picture from that dead woman . . . but what about the little girl?” I asked, but Big Wolf wanted to do some talking with me and clamped shut about that wagon train or its people. I had a feeling that he or someone in his band of butchers had killed the little girl before they left on the run, and, looking at his broad merciless face, I was sure of it.

When the Indians could see the bottle was finally dead, they got up and made for their ponies. Big Wolf and a skinny Comanche with one eye and black stripes across his ugly face stood muttering at each other, then the Big Wolf turned back to us and said something.

“Like I said, he wants to know if you'll trade him for the pitchure of that little gal child,” said Jeff. “Must've watched you when you saw the tintype. These devils don't miss much. He'd admire that Walker Colt in your belt, or the big Tige rifle stuck on my hoss there.”

So while the rest of the Comanches, back aboard their nervous, little ponies, waited and belched and grunted at each other, Big Wolf and I made trading powwow. I wasn't about to add to those Indians' firepower, for their three big flintlock horse pistols and a pair of U.S. percussion rifles made them deadly enough for any bunch of wild men.

At last the Comanche chief settled for my Bowie knife and a cheap Mexican campaign medal and got on his horse after handing over the tintype; then the whole bunch galloped south without a backward look or a thank you for the whiskey.

“Damned cheeky devils,” Kirker growled as we rode up the great mesa he called Mars Hill in the direction of Zuñi Jack's place.

As we rode along, the purple-tinged San Francisco peaks reached up over the skyline all the way around to the Coconino Plateau where we were headed. “Hopis call them mountains the High Place of the Snows. They say they're so high that when the sun shines on one side, the moon's shinin' on the other,” said Jeff, making talk, which seemed his way anywhere near a skinful.

I wasn't paying him much attention, for it was as clear as mud, as my brother Josh would say, exactly why Jeff Kirker'd latched on to me.

With the U.S. Army after him for desertion and that bandit, Joaquín Murieta, also on the scout for him, Kirker had to get some happy-go-lucky bonehead to scout along and see if the coast was clear enough to ride in and dig out that $50,000 in gold. No wonder he'd cottoned to young Mr. Roy Bean.

Passing through a scattered stand of ponderosa pine, we crested the hill and could make out the cabins and corrals of Zuñi Jack's trading post in a shallow valley just ahead. Several small figures stood out by the corrals watching our approach.

“There's Zuñi Jack,” Jeff grunted, spurring into a brisk gallop. “Probably wonderin' if we're gonna fetch in his red brothers for a snootful of his bad grog.” As we racked downhill, Jeff went on to tell me that Zuñi Jack had been one of Kit Carson's scouts in the California campaigns and was said to be a pretty bad actor, tough as an old he-bear. In fact Jack had tangled with a mountain grizzly a few years back, with the bear coming out a close second best in a regular hand-to-paw Donnybrook.

Arriving at the corrals, we were hailed by a squatty-looking Indian in dirty buckskins who shuffled up, long musket cradled under his left arm. Another Indian, this one as skinny as Jack was fat, and dressed as shabbily, stood behind him holding a rusty pistol.

“Hey now!” the first man shouted. “Thought you were part of that war party. They wuz here this very mornin' but we made th' red buggers clear off. Saw the bunch of you up past the pines but couldn't make out who wuz who, since I busted my spyglass.” Zuñi Jack's English was passable enough, but it sounded sort of like he had a mouthful of hot mush.

“They was here before?” Kirker asked, while rubbing his black chin whiskers. “Well, they didn't git nuthin' from us, except a drink. And that reminds me, we need us some supplies.”

Jeff followed the Zuñi into the trading post's dim interior. I tagged along a few steps behind, as did the other Indian, who'd turned our mounts into the corral.

“Other trouble around here?” Jeff asked the portly proprietor of the Blak Bare Tradin Stashun, which was the way the crudely daubed sign read across the adobe building's front.

“Naw! Hardly never see a soul, red nor white, since th' wagon trains are takin' th' old Mormon Battalion route southwest inter Californy.”

“Why's that?” I horned in.

“U.S. dragoons keep that route open mostly, since that talk about th' gold strike,” Zuñi Jack explained, fiddling with the stub of an ear which was all the bear had left him on the left side of his head. “You headin' that way? Y'can pick up an escort of soldier boys down ter th' Pima Tradin' Post as they ride through once a week or so on the scout fer hostiles. like them damned feather-sproutin' Comanches.”

I knew what Kirker would reply before he opened his mouth.

“Oh, we're goin' around the old north route,” Jeff answered shortly, then ordered another round of Mexican beer from Zuñi Jack's squaw, who hovered near the rickety bar, looking for all the world like the spitting image of her lord except for a red skirt and two whole ears.