Page 17 of A Good Prospect

Ophir was bursting with questions, but he didn’t want to be too blunt. Tamasin seemed very straightforward and candid, perfectly willing to be direct in revealing details of her past, with no emotion imbuing the facts. She had exhibited none or very little emotion other than an unstructured, vague image of lightheartedness. She had not once mentioned anything relating to her husband Niall. Although she was a little less open toward Salvador, apparently seeing him as more of a jefe than a friend, as she seemed to view Ophir, she evidently didn’t bear him the tiniest shred of annoyance for having shot her husband clean through the heart. She had abandoned his body with as much concern—less concern, actually—than she now took in hanging Knut’s underwear on the tree branch.

Not that Ophir could fault her. Niall Norris was not one to mourn and sob over. Bearing a baby to a brute like that, the misbegotten infant wouldn’t have had much of a chance. The whole turn of events, in actuality, had been a huge relief, a massive burden off the young woman’s shoulders. “You came to America alone? With no relatives?”

Her reply was not so immediate this time. She turned from the tree and continued to the next garment, a striped waistcoat. She swished it in the stream’s current using the long stick. “I had a brother, we came together. He was run over by a carriage in Philadelphia.”

“Oh,” said Ophir. “I’m so sorry about that.” Everyone in California had tales of woe, and it was simple to become immune to them. Sal had his dead brother and father. Ophir was still struggling to free his children in North Carolina. He didn’t want to be an immune, numb, and heartless person. “But you want to be something more than a laundress in your life…right?”

She turned her open, clear face to him, looking mildly surprised at the question. “Why…I’d never thought about it. What else could I do?”

Ophir chuckled. “I’ve seen many laundresses, where I grew up, turn into broken down old hags when they weren’t even yet forty. You’re a very pretty girl. You deserve better than that. What about your plant paintings? You’re a talented artist.”

Tamasin dragged the waistcoat from the water and plopped it on the scrubbing rock. “What can you do with plant paintings? They’re not very useful.”

“Sell them. There are plenty of textbooks that need illustrations. ‘Wildflowers of California.’ Or your landscape paintings. When I’ve been in San Francisco and San José, there are always enormous landscape paintings hanging in the better saloons and hotels. People are clamoring to learn about the Far West.”

She shrugged carelessly, but Ophir could tell she was piqued by these ideas. In her humbleness, and how little she thought of herself, she could not imagine any of them actually coming true, but she seemed to like the ideas. “It seems impossible to find any new paints, anyway. That Savage fellow didn’t have any paper, much less any paints.”

The next idea was immediate. “We’ll send Knut on a new mission, when he goes to San José. To repay you for the laundry. He can find you some paints.”

Tamasin very nearly “pshawed” Ophir. “One day’s laundering is hardly worth a whole set of paints.”

“Miners pay six dollars to have a dozen garments washed! Some send their laundry to San Francisco just to avoid having to do it. Six dollars can buy you a darned good lot of paints.”

Tamasin smiled, abashed, but wordlessly squatted to begin scrubbing the waistcoat. “If I’m to do more landscapes,” she said quietly, “I’d like to begin trying my hand at oils.”

Ophir clapped his hands. “There you go! There was another slave where I lived in North Carolina, he did oil paintings. I always loved the smell of the linseed oil he mixed into the paints. One time, he—” He perked his head up, intently listening. There seemed to be some distant whoops and hollers coming from the valley on the other side of the hacienda. “Do you hear that?”

Tamasin slowly rose to her feet, ears alert like a rabbit. “Yes,” she said slowly. “Yelling.”

They both stood stock still, and soon Ophir could distinctly hear one of their Californio vaqueros shouting, “¡La cerca! La cerca está rota!”The fence is broken!

“The fence is broken?” Ophir translated uncertainly for Tamasin, who knew almost no Spanish.

“Well, that doesn’t sound like such a disaster,” Tamasin ventured.

But Ophir had already broken into a run. “I’ll find out what the uproar is. You stay here. And don’t hurt yourself washing!”

At the stables, he mounted the horse he’d been favoring. The stable hand, Roberto, told Ophir, “Los Yanquis destruyeron la cerca.”Yankees tore down the fence. Roberto said it was not the first time that had happened.

It was well-nigh two miles to the other side of the fenced corral, and Ophir galloped in fine, high Californio style. It occurred to Ophir’s rattled brain as he pounded across the valley that he possessed no weapon. He had not thought one necessary, to bring Tamasin her lunch.

The break in the fence was obvious, two sections of posts and rails split and shattered to the soil. Prospero and Román, somewhat calmed down by now, were on horseback preventing more cattle from escaping by that route, and their dogs skittered and nipped at the hooves of those who dared.

“What happened?” Ophir asked Prospero. “Did some cows break the fence?”

“No, señor!” Prospero shouted over some six head of cattle. “Men, people, Yankees! Look at the rails, see how they are split? With an axe!”

Ophir inspected the fallen rails and indeed, it was evident they’d been hacked away. “Roberto said this has happened before. Are they stealing cattle?”

“Sí! They break the fence, take as many head as they can, and let the rest follow, just wander about the hills. Alonzo and Esteban have gone out, to see if they can find out who is doing it.”

Ophir had his suspicions who was doing it. They had not left the Australian’s hilltop hideaway on very genteel terms, and Ophir had already seen some of the Palomares cattle trundling about the streets of Hornitos. “What you need now is more rails to repair this fence. Now, what in the name of…?”

Tamasin came bounding across the valley on that broken-down mount of her dead husband’s. The creature’s bones had been robbed of fat and flesh, his flank was tucked up and his neck was bowed, but Ophir supposed he had a clear cheerful eye and hearty appetite.

“Girl!” Ophir scolded. He didn’t like calling anyone “girl,” but the circumstances warranted it. “You ought not to have followed me out here. What if there were armed bandits?”

Smiling in her mysterious way, Tamasin withdrew a forty-four caliber pistol tucked into the waistband of her skirt. It looked enormous in her little fist, but she was proud of it.