Page 41 of Working the Lode

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Valenzuela

When Zelnora awoke, Valenzuela 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 Bowmaker 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 Bowmaker to know he’d intentionally shot the gambler’s foot clean off in his zeal to find out who had robbed his friends. Valenzuela was making a sincere effort to refrain from activities such as shooting off gamblers’ feet, and he wanted to impress Bowmaker with his attempts to change his ways. So he had made light of the shooting, to Bowmaker’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. Valenzuela 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, lately Jack and Feliz just randomly lifted the hair of any passer-by, particularly Indians for the sport of it, as it was as yet no crime to shoot Indians. Indians had never harmed Valenzuela, 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, Valenzuela 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,” Valenzuela affirmed.

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

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

Valenzuela briefly described the robbing of Bowmaker 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,’” Valenzuela 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?”

Valenzuela 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.”

Valenzuela 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!”

Valenzuela 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, Valenzuela 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 Bowmaker, if such an eventuality were to come down the pike. Brannagh would not be overly grieved if Bowmaker were to die or lose a limb. Valenzuela had at first hesitantly agreed, but had quickly been stampeded by his emotional attachment to the couple. The next time Brannagh had propositioned him, Valenzuela 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 Valenzuela had stayed behind…at Bowmaker’s cabin…when Bowmaker 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 Bowmaker, 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 Bowmaker’s good upstanding name, Brannagh had spread the Sing Sing story around, tried to get Valenzuela to propagate it. Even if the story was true, what was wrong with doing a stretch for something so honorable?

No. Bowmaker was an honest man, a superior doctor, the most intelligent and hardest worker Valenzuela 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.

~~~

Zelnora

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