California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1) (25 page)

"I have the farm, a place to live
and raise enough to live on, perhaps even make a little profit. Almost all the
debts, the big ones, are paid off. There are a few left, and I suppose someone
could try to force me to sell the Hock Farm…"

"If that ever happens, John, I would
feel ashamed if you did not come to me for help. I could never live with myself
if you were hounded out of your own home."

"I do not think it will
happen," he said, uncomfortable, impatient to leave. "It will take
time, but I believe the crops I raise will earn enough for me to slowly pay off
the remaining debts. But I appreciate your offer."

"You have done much for me, kept my
secret."

"I would under any
circumstances…"

"I know that." She put her arms
around him and kissed his cheek. "And I know you would never take
advantage of our friendship. So will you promise that you will come to me if
you are ever in danger of losing the farm?"

He coughed and looked away, embarrassed
again. "I promise."

"You have promised before and—"

"And I wish I had kept to my word. I
do not think I could have changed the course of things, but I often wish that I
had tried when you urged me to."

"This time you will keep your
promise, then?"

"I will have no choice." He
smiled and gazed off through her window at the mountains. "I will miss
this place. And the fort. But I will have more than enough company."

"What do you mean?"

"August. For a time he will be with
me, helping at the farm." He sighed. "And," he added, smiling
again at the irony of it, "I have had another little surprise, another
letter from Switzerland. From my wife. She, my daughter, Elise, and another son
are on their way here from Europe."

"Oh, my God."

"Is it not interesting, the way
things work out?" Sutter attempted a smile. "Perhaps it will all be
for the best. The woman has always had some love for me. We
had
to
marry, and I
was
'beneath her station,' but perhaps, without her mother
breathing down our necks, we may be able to make a life together after all
these years."

"I hope so. I want you to be happy,
more than… just about… anything else."

When he was gone, she sat for a long
while on a boulder by the waterfall, gazing at the tumbling, white water, her
thoughts turning for some reason to little John Alexander.
I wonder what
fate holds in store for me,
she thought.
And if, when it is all over,
when I have accomplished what I have set out to do about Mosby, if Alexander
and I might come together after long years.
She pictured him working at
Larkin's store in Monterey. She saw herself setting supper out for him in a
modest little house, then turning and running to him as he walked in the door.
The thought held her for a moment, wistful, but then she pushed it out of her
mind. She got up, walked slowly for a few seconds, then forced herself into a
purposeful stride.

"There is work to be done," she
said out loud to herself. "And it is late afternoon. The men will be
finished soon. I had better stop this foolishness and see what the yield has
been today. Sooner or later, Mr. Mosby, it will add up to enough to bring you
to a reckoning."

There were ten thousand men in the fields
by December 1848. Their numbers disquieted Esther. At night she often thought
she could actually hear them all breathing. The comfort of being far from civilization—and
the things people did to one another—diminished with each passing day.

Blue Star recovered rapidly as
prospectors flooded back into San Francisco that fall to spend their fortunes,
or to find jobs after meeting with failure in the placers. The additional
manpower brought the volume of the firm's shipping back to normal and then
some, the profits almost doubling Esther’s revenue from her claim. Murietta
oversaw the gold shipments, and there were no incidents or losses. The hard
goods, shipped now to Hyman Kellerman's new wholesale-retail store opposite the
embarcadero
in
Sacramento City, flowed steadily eastward from San Francisco. Esther's share of
Kellerman's sales increased her bank account by another 20 percent. The
riverbed was yielding less and less gold, but it was of little concern to
Esther; she had always known that sooner or later the gold would run out. But
now her income from Blue Star, Kellerman, and the half-dozen other mining-town
stores that bought her goods was much more than enough to satisfy her needs.
And the gold had already provided her with all she required to deal with Mosby.

A town had risen two miles below the
South Fork. As yet it had no name, but Esther heard a young prospecting
Kentuckian named Coleman and his wife were opening a general store. She decided
to add a seventh establishment to her list of wholesale customers, and Murietta
accompanied her the morning she took the short ride to speak to Coleman. The
woods were unusually quiet as they loped southward. They were almost to the
outskirts of the tent-and-shanty village when the sound of angry voices
answered their unspoken questions about the absence of men in the creeks and
canyons south of the river.

Standing on one of the hills overlooking
the small, makeshift town, they watched the movements of a crowd of three dozen
men and a few women in a clearing beyond the tents. The latest in a series of
unseasonably moderate snow flurries had left the ground moist before dawn that
morning. As they stood there trying to figure out what was going on, their
horses picked up their hooves impatiently, making sucking sounds in the mud.
Snow began to fall again, the flakes gradually increasing in number as Esther
and Murietta finally saw the isolated man sitting on a horse beyond the
semicircle of people. The crowd grew quiet. The man on the horse, they suddenly
realized, had a noose around his neck.

"
¡Por Dios!
"
Murietta
said.

They moved closer. A tall, baby-faced,
strapping man in overalls and farmer's boots spoke to the prisoner. "Do
you have anything to say?"

The accused man smirked at him.

"There are no alcaldes here, no
officials, no judges of the ordinary sort," the tall man said, ignoring
the prisoner's contempt. "You are the first to be caught thieving in this
place. You have been found by your equals to be guilty, and although you have a
physical affliction, we find that no excuse for your crime."

The snow began falling more heavily as
the tall man continued.

"We do not have time or the luxury
of a regular court to lavish on the likes of you. And therefore we will now
carry out the judgment and sentence of this miner's court."

Restless, the crowd murmured its
approval. "Let's get on with it, Coleman," one man shouted.

"
You can't do this!
"
Esther screamed, spurring her horse down the slope toward an opening through
the tents that led to the clearing.

From where they stood, forty yards away,
the miners had no idea she was a woman. In addition to the broad hat,
workshirt, pants and boots, the gauzy veil stitched to her hat brim and tied
around her neck gave her the appearance of a bandit. Halfway down the slope the
sling from her small carrying bag slipped from her shoulder. As she grabbed for
it, one of the miners mistook the movement for the unholstering of a weapon and
raised his muzzle-loader. He pointed and fired just as Murietta caught up with
Esther, bowled her out of her saddle, and spun her over him as they fell. The
bullet nicked Esther's horse and thudded into a tree trunk just short of the
rise.

"
Let me go!
" Esther
screamed as Murietta rolled over on top of her. She wrenched one arm free and
struck him a glancing blow on the head, then began pounding his shoulder and
chest with her fist.

Murietta kept her pinned, watching, as
twenty yards to his right several of the miners moved out in front of the
tents. Their weapons were pointed straight at him. "
We do not know the
man!
" he shouted. "My friend hates violence. She cannot tolerate
the sight of such an act. She can't help herself."

"
Let… go… of… me, you beast!
”
Esther screamed, as Murietta grabbed for her free wrist and held it down.
"Let… me…
go
!" Squirming, she bit at him, spat in his face,
flushed with rage. "You have no right to do this!"

The tall, baby-faced man emerged from the
small cluster of miners watching Esther and Murietta from a distance.
"That a woman?" he shouted.

"Yes!" Murietta called back.

"Well, keep her under control—and
stay out of this!"

Murietta nodded, then watched as the tall
man, inaudible from where he stood, gave instructions. One miner stayed behind
when the others went back beyond the tents to the main body of the crowd.
Pointing his gun at Murietta, he called out: "Don't you come no closer.
You try to interfere, Mr. Coleman says I'll have to shoot you."

Murietta moved Esther's wrists together
and held them with one hand. "They would have killed you," he
whispered.

"I don't care."

Murietta moved his weight to ease the
burden on her without losing control of her movement. In doing so, his pelvis
and legs fell between hers. She kicked at his calves as he reached out and
gently stroked her cheek, trying to quiet and soothe her. Esther squirmed again
and felt the warm, hard pressure of Murietta's body on her. The sensation, amid
her fury, was not unlike that caused by a slightly loose tooth; positive and
negative, welcome and discomfiting at the same time. "Get…
off…
me," she shouted, biting at his ear.

Both their heads turned as the tall,
baby-faced man named Coleman walked to the prisoner's horse, slapped the animal
hard on the rump, and shouted, "
Heeeeeeeyaaaah!
" Murietta
gently gripped Esther's chin and tried to prevent her from seeing it. She
struggled, forcing her head back around, staring as the man in the noose
dropped and the sharp snapping of his neck could be heard in the silence of the
falling snow. As the swinging, jerking man's eyes bulged, his bladder and
bowels opened involuntarily, and a deep stain spread across his light-colored
trousers.

Murietta carefully turned Esther's head
away. He lay his temple next to her cheek and, one arm extended over his own
head, kept her from seeing any more.

She struggled a moment longer, then heard
one of the dispersing miners say, "Teach trash to think twice before
robbing an honest working man. This be called Hangtown from now on. And let the
name be a lesson."

It was over. There was nothing she could
do now. Nothing either of them could do. The finality of it dissolved what was
left of Esther's anger. Her shoulders slumped, the rigidity went out of her,
and she stared up at the snowflakes spiraling down onto her face. She turned
her head and buried it in the crook of Murietta's neck, and began to cry
silently.

"I am sorry," Murietta said.

"The man had a right to a
trial," she sobbed. "What they did is savagery."

"I know. But there was nothing you
could do against so many."

Esther's anger flared again. "You
coward
!"

Murietta winced at the momentary hatred
and contempt in Esther's eyes. "I have seen this thief before. He was not
a good man."

"So they have the right to kill
him?" she snapped.

"I did not say that. If there were
more of us, I would have tried to stop them. It was simply a matter of not
being foolish, not attempting the impossible at the sure cost of your own
life."

He let go of her wrists. Slowly, she
brought her arms down and held him until the crying stopped. The faint, not
unpleasant smell of his hair and body began pulling her thoughts in another
direction.

"I am sorry if I hurt you."

She pushed him away gently and wiped at
her nose. "It's all right, Joaquin. I understand. What you did was
sensible. It probably saved my life. I'm grateful to you."

They stood up, and he noticed she was
still holding one of his hands. She looked down at their entwined fingers, then
at him, and finally pulled her hand free.

"Can we go now?" she sobbed.
"I never
…
want to set foot in this place again."

Murietta glanced back once, just before
the woods between the town and the river closed behind them. He stopped and
took one last look at the hanging man's face and the hand that was only a stump
just above the place where the knuckles would have been. He remembered the day
the bear had bitten part of the dead man's hand off in Claussen's high-walled
corral. He shivered and wondered for a moment where the dead man's tall,
hawk-nosed friend, Mosby, was at this moment. Shrugging, he rode on toward the
cabin after Esther.

He caught up with her at the edge of the
clearing, just in time to see Miwokan take note of the stains and mud on
Esther's clothing, the tangled mass of her moistened hair. He didn't understand
the grimace on Miwokan's face, or the abruptness of Miwokan's movement when he
took one jealous look at Murietta's soiled clothing, turned on his heel without
a word, and stomped off toward the river.