Page 39 of A Good Prospect

Chapter Fifteen

Sal was working down in his Black Drift mine overseeing about twenty Sonoran miners when the two crazed Frenchmen came stumbling over the ridge, sliding down the hill in a rush of mill tailings. “Jefe! Jefe! Hombre Francés!” Some of his men cried out and pointed, so Sal went to meet the strangers. By the time the sludgy frog-eaters made it down to Sal’s position they were dyed the color of mud up to their hips, but they were so obsessed with their mission, they didn’t seem to care.

“Don Palomares!” they both cried urgently.

Sal felt like slapping them into submission, they were flailing about so anxiously. It was already hellish standing in the rocky glare of the boulders reflecting one hundred degree sun—“heat” was too mild of a word to use. Sal’s Bear Valley was a basin where the only breezes came like furnace blasts, as though the entire ridge top was on fire. Even in his house which was close to being finished, it was ninety degrees at midnight, and they had to layer their marble-topped dining table with newspaper to prevent their arms from being burned.

“What is the problem?” Sal said in English, knowing only about three words of French. He offered them his skin of river water, but they were too distressed to drink.

“Over in Hornitos,” a Frog tried to explain.

“We have just come from there,” said the other.

Oh, ay dios, not Hornitos again. Sal yelled some instructions to the Sonorans, waved the Frenchmen up the hillside past his mill, and tried to piece together the story.

Jules and Henri, freshly minted in the French Revolution of 1848, had attempted to start a rebellion against the Foreign Miner’s Tax. So they had gone to Hornitos and covered over The League’s posters with posters of their own, denouncing the tax and exhorting victims to “put a bridle in the mouths of that horde who call themselves citizens of the United States.” Just this morning, a surprising crowd of four thousand Spaniards had heeded the call in Hornitos and accosted the tax collector.

“We only asked for the monthly fee to be reduced to three or maybe five dollars, but he stood fast and demanded the full twenty!” Henri moaned.

So most of the “foreigners” had fled, but one Sonoran threatened “the sheriff,” a fellow who sounded a lot like none other than Tyke McCarthy, and a bystander had killed the Sonoran with a bowie knife. Merchants had insisted that no one sell any supplies to foreigners, and the Frenchmen assumed that soon an alarm would be coming to Sal’s camp, calling for reinforcements for Hornitos’s impending war.

“We have heard you are sympathetic to our cause, Don Salvador,” Jules said stoically.

Before Sal had reached the office building where his engineers worked, Knut emerged, also flailing his limbs. Sal supposed that was the European call to rebellion, to run about with thrashing arms like a stuffed doll. There was also a crowd of maybe two hundred Spanish prospectors Sal had never seen in his life milling about the office building, presumably fellows who had been kicked out of Hornitos. Ay dios, he didn’t have enough work yet for two hundred more miners! And if he didn’t feed them, they would soon start croaking.

“The League will get no reinforcements from my camp,” Sal assured the Frenchmen, and turned to greet the agitated Knut.

“Mein Gott, compañero!” Knut wailed. “I knew that Tom Jeff’s evil, sinful, and reprobate Miner’s Tax bill passed in the State Legislature—with my amigo Robert Loblaw being one of the sole dissenters, jah!—but I never thought it would come to this!” Knut whipped a kerchief from his waistcoat pocket and mopped his sweaty red face with it, even wringing it of a few drops of fluid while he sobbed. “And mein Gott im Himmel, one of these fine upstanding miners who has just come from San José has brought me a letter from none other than Bob Loblaw himself informing me that the chief Judge is openly in sympathy with The League! Yes, I tell you, compañero, this horrifying decision of the State Court will keep every mine owner in the position of a constant sentinel! Whatever will we do?”

“First of all,” said Sal, “calm down. I doubt that The League will have the grit to send anyone into Bear Valley or Hell Hollow.” His father had always said “grit,” and it felt right to use it now. “I will not pay a tax for men who are working on my property, but this whole issue seems to be boiling over with violence, so we should make some preparations.”

He sent a messenger boy down to fetch Ophir and the head miner Hector from the mill, and took the Frenchmen and a blubbering Knut up to the relative coolness of the offices. It angered his heart to see the forsaken prospectors standing about looking at him questioningly as though he were their savior, all their worldly possessions in their mule’s saddlebags and their rickety ox-carts, their gold dust tied up in rags or poured into eagle’s quills. These men were the finest miners in the Far West, one of the reasons McCarthy and his ilk wanted them ejected from the mines, so Sal shouted at them, “¡Cada minero está seguro en mi tierra!” Every miner is safe on my land!

The dusty prospectors huzzahed, but Sal had a feeling that by twilight, the crowd of fugitive miners would double. And he’d need Tamasin’s help as well.

In the office, he scribbled a note and sent it by courier the three miles to Bear Valley proper, to be delivered to Savage at his trading post. Then he proceeded upriver to their roomy, two-story cottage where men were still working on fencing in a few acres, and Tamasin had put to work a few more men on constructing pathways leading to and from the carriage house, her vegetable garden, the barn and stables. She told Sal she wanted at least two dogs, to have something fluffy and affectionate to pet, but didn’t want them eaten by bears. He now found her in their kitchen, opening cans of peaches and peeling some oranges she had brought from the orchards at Las Oliveras. On the big wooden table in the center of the commodious room lay the evidence she had also been grinding coffee in a mortar and peeling onions. Wafting from the stove was the aroma of fragrant salmon, always in abundance on these rivers, spiced with cedar.

She looked up from her preoccupation with the fruit and gave him a sincere enigmatic smile. Before, she had been blandly happy, as though she didn’t know what “happy” was supposed to look like on a face. Lately, it seemed she was gaining more knowledge of just what this entailed, and her face was imbued with real, lively feelings.

“Tamasin. It seems there’s been some commotion down Hornitos way—”

“I know,” she said simply. The large opal between her breasts glinted in the rays of sun that poured in the many windows Sal had instructed to be installed. Glass windows were a great expense, but he wanted Tamasin to be happy. “I’ve been studying my Spanish, and couldn’t miss the crowds of miners suddenly pouring up the mountains. They told me how Tyke killed one of them for daring to question the miner’s tax, and ejected them all from Hornitos area.”

“Yes,” Sal admitted, toying with a segment of orange on the table. “Oh, was it Tyke himself who killed the miner? Well, we have to prepare for the possibility that there might be some more commotion tomorrow, maybe even tonight. Do you have a pistol?”

This question seemed to please her very much. Stepping away from the table, she lifted her skirts and displayed a leg. Sal was surprised to see a tiny pocket pistol of the “pepperbox” variety tucked into the top of her cotton stocking. Tamasin said, “I also have a pistol of Niall’s, but it’s too big to carry around. I have enough implements about my person without adding a holster around my waist, such as you men like to wear. You must be weighted down with twenty pounds of leather and metal!”

It was true, Tamasin’s hard-working credo meant she always wore an apron with pockets that bulged with small shovels, hammers, spatulas, and knives. She seemed to cherish being in the kitchen and cooking for anyone who should be around, but Sal felt remorse that she had to work so hard. That hadn’t been his intention in inviting her to the Hell Hollow mine. They had also brought a couple of younger helpmates from Las Oliveras, but this wasn’t the hacienda life of a Doña he’d imagined for her. She had been endlessly running about from the outdoor horno oven where she baked beef in the Spanish fashion, strung onto a skewer and roasted on the coals. Fashioning and slapping tortillas onto the griddle, stewing jerked beef with chile seasoning, making quesadilla cheesecakes—she had even ventured into cheese-making. Tending her new vegetable garden, brewing countless pots of coffee, and the backbreaking work of dipping enough water from the springs was not the worst of the work a woman at Hell Hollow had to look forward to every day. The laundry work was still her most pressing chore, the broiling heat and hardship of lugging water creating a devilish task that Sal would not wish upon—well, upon Tyke McCarthy even. All right, maybe it was a fitting punishment for someone so heinous.

Doña Carmen had screamed almost to the point of tears, protesting that she wouldn’t notice the absence of Tamasin, how she preferred to be alone, and the less people, the better. The stridency of her protestations led everyone to believe that the opposite was the real truth, that she would miss Tamasin, and sowed the seeds of more questions in Sal’s mind. When he was as old as Doña Carmen, would he start shrieking the opposite of what he truly felt? Or would he sincerely prefer to be alone? That was impossible to believe now—he found himself lonely if he had to go check the herd without Ophir by his side.

“Do you have enough ammunition for that little pistol? You know, those things are notoriously inaccurate.”

“Yes. I purchased some from Savage not long ago, and where do you think your most recent beefsteaks have been coming from?” Her lower lip jutted out proudly. “I was the one who shot that beef! I only needed two shots to fell it.”

“Yes, and how far away were you standing? At point-blank distance, I imagine.” When her proud face fell, Sal realized he’d made an error in speech. However, one could not be too careful when it came to protecting one’s self, so he said, “Look. Go and fetch Niall’s pistol, and I’ll have one of these desperado bandits practice shooting with you. What sort is it?”

“It’s a six-shot Colt’s, like yours.”