The Dead Spend No Gold Page 5

  It would be so much easier if Patrick was the eldest son, Frank thought. Then Patrick could take over the ranch and marry Patsy Newton.

  Well, why not?

  What if Frank renounced his inheritance?

  It might break the old man’s heart at first, but he’d see the wisdom of it eventually.

  Patrick got off his horse and opened the gate for the wagon.

  “Don’t wait too long to send a search party,” Newton said to Thomas. “If my boy is in enemy territory, he needs our help.”

  Newton urged his horse around the wagon and galloped away. Hugh, with a silent Thomas Whitford beside him, drove the wagon through the gate, continuing toward the homestead. The strained silence remained until they reached the veranda of the ranch house an hour later. The moment the horses were put to pasture, Patrick started up again.

  “Henry…Mr. Newton says we should follow the rustlers. Teach them a lesson, once and for all. Most of the neighboring ranchers will want to join in, and will send a couple cowhands each. Henry says we should finish this.”

  “What else does Henry suggest?” Frank asked. “That we slaughter the entire tribe?”

  “If needs be,” Patrick sneered.

  “Enough,” Thomas warned, following them slowly up the steps.

  Frank kept his tone calm and reasonable. “If you take our ranch hands that close to the gold fields, half won’t come back. We’ve a hard enough time keeping them as it is.”

  “Maybe they’re more loyal than y…”

  “I said enough!” Thomas’s voice broke through their argument again, this time sounding tired and resigned instead of angry. But there was no mistaking the finality of the tone. He trudged through the entryway and into his study, his sons trailing behind him. Thomas sat down heavily behind the desk and looked up at them tiredly.

  “When James returns, I want you all in the study. We need to treat with Chief Honon and resolve this rustling problem once and for all. See if we can’t find some solution. Frank is right; we don’t want a war. But Patrick is right too. This can’t go unanswered.”

  Thomas Whitford stared at his two sons until he was sure he had their attention. “No more of this bickering, hear?”

  “Yes, Father,” Patrick said.

  Frank nodded in agreement.

  “Good. Now go see Cookie about supper.”

  * * *

  Henry Newton rode home shaking his head. He’d heard tell that the younger Thomas Whitford had been a man to be reckoned with, but all Newton saw now was a withered old fellow, grieving for his wife, letting his weak-minded son run his ranch into the ground.

  He was still taking the measure of Frank Whitford, to whom he’d paid little attention when he was younger. Frank had returned from school a grown man; worse, his own man. And he was getting in the way, distracting Patrick just as Newton began to play him.

  All might still be well if Frank married Patsy. If I could make that happen, Newton mused, then I’d get the Whitford spread without a fight.

  Newton had arrived in the valley several years before, but he was still an outsider to the other ranchers. His inheritance, which had been a modest legacy back East, turned out to be a substantial amount of money in the West. But his ranch could only grow by absorbing other ranches, and for that to happen, the other ranchers had to be willing to sell. So Newton had set out to systematically weaken them, by whatever means possible. His biggest obstacle was the Whitfords; no matter how many ranchers Newton bought out, his ranch was still never going to be as big as the Whitfords’.

  The other possibility was…

  “This is your chance, Boss,” said his foreman, Martin, interrupting his thoughts. “You play this right and you can get rid of the Indians, expand your ranch even further.”

  Newton’s thoughts exactly.

  One night, Martin had told him about how he and his two friends had been part of “regulator” troops in the south of California, and how the civilized folk were taking care of the Indian problem down in those parts by killing the savages wherever they found them.

  It hadn’t all gone smoothly. Martin had a price on his head. But no one had come searching for him.

  Bud Carpenter and George Banks had an aura of lawlessness about them, but Martin was forceful enough to handle the unruly ranch hands, freeing Newton for other things. It made Martin an ideal foreman.

  So far, the other ranchers in the valley were unwilling to wipe out the Indians, and so Newton’s hands were tied. His relations were rocky enough with his neighbors, some of whom, especially the Whitfords, inexplicably liked the savages.

  “Let me think on it,” Newton said, putting Martin off again.

  * * *

  The frigid silence between Patrick and Frank lasted through dinner. They went to their rooms without exchanging another word. Frank tried to read for a while, but gave up and turned out the light. He lay in the dark, his thoughts swirling about Virginia Reed and his brother James and his father’s strange behavior.

  Frank finally gave up trying to sleep and slipped quietly out the back door. Between the main house and the bunkhouse where most of their employees slept, there was a small shack. Frank knocked softly on the door, and it immediately opened.

  Hugh seemed unsurprised to see him. He motioned Frank inside and pulled out a chair at the little table where a single candle flickered. The room was otherwise bare except for a small bed in the corner.

  "I expected you hours ago," Hugh said, sitting down across from Frank. He folded his arms and waited for Frank to ask his questions.

  His eyes were deep set, and all Frank could see were the shadows across his face. "What's happened here? Why is Father acting this way?"

  Hugh didn’t need to ask what Frank meant, although he sat in silence for a long moment before answering. "Mr. Whitford ran out of money..." he began.

  "How is that possible?" Frank exclaimed before the Indian could finish.

  Hugh didn’t react, allowing Frank’s impatience to grow in the silence that followed. Finally, he said, "We have been having troubles with rustlers."

  This time Frank stayed silent, realizing that Hugh would reveal the details in his own way and at his own pace.

  "They blame the Miwok," Hugh continued.

  "They?"

  "Mr. Newton and the other ranchers," Hugh said.

  "But you don't think it’s them, do you?" Frank said. Hugh was not a Miwok, but from a friendly tribe farther south.

  "The rustling began soon after Henry Newton arrived," Hugh whispered. He let his words hang in the air.

  Frank let that sink in. Was that possible? That Newton would steal? "Doesn’t Father see that?"

  Hugh shook his head. "He can’t conceive that a neighbor could do such a thing. But he also resists blaming the Miwok. So when he ran out of money, he was forced to sell the Bottoms to Mr. Newton."

  "Why does he need the money?" Frank asked.

  "You don't know?"

  Frank shook his head, frustrated.

  "Your college education was far more expensive than expected."

  Frank was stunned. He sat unmoving, watching the flickering candle, trying to absorb what he hadn’t wanted to know. "I thought there was a fund for that. From my mother's family."

  “It is true your mother requested that you go to school,” Hugh acknowledged. “But there was no fund. Mr. Whitford promised to send you to Harvard.”

  “I didn’t even want to go!” Frank objected. “If he was going to send anyone back East, it should have been James. He wanted to go so badly.”

  Hugh shook his head sadly. "Your mother wanted you to have an education, Frank, and your stepfather is a man of his word."

  It explained a lot: why James was so aloof toward him, and why Patrick was out and out hostile. While Frank had been back East rowing sculls and only half applying himself to his studies, his adopted family had been struggling to keep him there.

  Hugh seemed to know what he was thinking. “Patrick has fallen
under the sway of Mr. Newton,” he said. “He resents you, Frank.”

  “I heard what he said about Chief Honon,” Frank said. “That’s not the way I remember Patrick talking.”

  “Mr. Newton's hate is strong and simple. It explains everything...while it explains nothing."

  Frank bowed his head, wondering how his old friend could make so much sense and at the same time make none at all.

  * * *

  It made James nervous, how Oliver kept talking, and how loudly, no matter how far they ventured into Indian Territory. There had been a time when the Miwok and the Whitford family had been peaceable neighbors. Their father had allowed the Indians to hunt on his land, and Chief Honon had allowed them to graze their cattle on Indian land. But that had been years ago. With miners searching for gold on both their lands, things were a mite tense between them. The interlopers killed off wildlife, and food was scarce in the mountains.

  James suspected the rustlers were miners, who seemed to respect nothing but their feverish desire for gold. Whoever it was, they’d left the strangest trail he’d ever seen. It took time to notice the pattern; it meandered pointlessly, sometimes even backtracking, sometimes climbing into the mountains, and consistently went through thick undergrowth. If there was a choice between a straight dirt trail and a winding sideways route over stone and gravel, the rustlers, whoever they were, always took the roundabout way.

  But there was no point to it. The rustled cattle couldn’t help but leave a trail, blundering along, breaking branches, stomping on bushes, leaving their excrement everywhere. Still, even past the foothills and into the bracingly cold air of the ridgeline, it was unclear whom they were tracking.

  “What we ought to do is join the miners,” Oliver was saying. “Just for a day or two. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “What’s the point?” James answered, almost under his breath. “All the good sites have been taken.”

  “Not all of them,” Oliver said. He reined in his horse, turned around, and grinned.

  “What do you mean?” James asked, uneasily recognizing the mischievous look.

  “Well, the way I see it, the Miwok owe us for our cattle…” Oliver began.

  James started shaking his head. “No, no, no.”

  “I bet there’s gold there, just waiting to be picked up. And no one knows about it but us.”

  “We promised,” James said. “Chief Honon and my father shook hands on it, on our sacred honor.”

  “What do Indians know about honor?” Oliver scoffed. “Stealing cattle ain’t exactly part of the deal.”

  “We don’t know it was them.”

  “Hell we don’t. It’s only fair they pay us back.”

  James pulled up his horse while his friend rode on. “They’re expecting us back, Oliver. We don’t want them to send out a search party. How would that look?”

  Oliver only scowled and set his spurs to his mount, urging it up a ravine.

  It was perhaps not the best thing to say to Oliver. Not long after the Newtons had arrived in California, Oliver had disappeared, and the whole valley had hunted for him for days. They’d found him playing with the Indian children, as brown and dirty as they were. They’d accepted him so completely into their tribe that they had tattooed a mark on the back of his hand. It looked like two lightning bolts crossing in the middle.

  Henry Newton’s face had been dark with fury when he’d found his son.

  Oliver had never lived it down, and wore gloves whenever possible.

  “We don’t need to go back right away,” Oliver insisted. “Frank can do your chores. He’ll jump at the chance to cozy up to your old man.”

  James frowned. For some reason, both Oliver and Patrick disliked Frank. He had to admit, he resented Frank too: not because his oldest brother had it easy, as Oliver and Patrick seemed to think, but because James envied his education. Books and learning had held little interest for Frank, at least before he went East, but at night, James invariably curled up with a book while his brothers fooled around.

  They kept riding, despite James’s misgivings.

  Despite the warmth of the sun, the boys bundled up against the insects and wore their hats low. The horses suffered even more, quivering and twitching, and giving an occasional whinny at the sheer relentlessness of the attack. The horses dropped their manure while walking, as if the piles of dung were offerings to the insects, as if they were trying to placate them. If so, it failed, for it only attracted more of the pests.

  The path was covered with white pumice, shining brightly in the sun, causing the boys to squint as they peered into the bright day.

  The mountain above was spotted with snow, beautiful from a distance, and as they drew closer, it loomed over them, a world of its own. The path wound along the base of high cliffs, their walls growing ever higher, the boulders at their base ever bigger; the tops of the cliffs bent over the riders, rock falls tumbling downward. Even in this landscape of broken stone, sumac and pine seedlings were growing.

  The cattle tracks continued to meander back and forth across the hillside, but always climbed upward. At the top of the final tree-lined wave of hills was a massive tree fall, all the toppled trees pointing downward, the stripped logs looking like fortifications protecting the crest of the hill. Stay back! they seemed to be saying. Go no farther!

  “These trees were stripped and placed here intentionally. Who would do this?” James wondered aloud.

  “Indians,” Oliver sneered, guiding his horse past the fortifications. “Obviously.”

  But James remained, gazing in wonder at the stockade. “I’ve never known them to do such a thing.”

  Oliver snorted. “Who knows what the savages might do?”

  The two boys were close to the tree line, higher up than any miner or Indian would want go. The temperature dropped with every few hundred feet. As James noticed where the trail was heading, he stayed silent, remembering all the times they’d turned back at this point. Now he regretted ever showing his friend the secret canyon.

  As the horses clambered up onto the shale shelf that was the highest they could be ridden, Oliver slid from his saddle, grinning at James. “Well, I guess we’re heading for El Dorado after all!”

  James had peeked into the narrow canyon once, and it indeed seemed like El Dorado; a magical place, with waterfalls and sylvan glades. The Indians called it the Sacred Place, and it was absolutely forbidden for any white man to enter. The trail led into the narrow opening, a still-steaming cow pie right at the entrance.

  James chewed on his lower lip, knowing he wasn’t going to be able to stop Oliver from pursuing the rustlers, but he had to try. “Oliver,” he said. “Let’s go back. We know where the trail leads. What if there is a whole band of them?”

  Oliver didn’t answer. He pulled his rifle from its saddle holster and cocked it. The metallic snap echoed eerily, bouncing off the hard shale of the hillside.

  James tried again. “We should turn back, Oliver!”

  Oliver hesitated, but didn’t even look back to see if his friend was following as he disappeared into the canyon.

  James sighed and dismounted. He was biting his lip so hard, he feared he might draw blood. He forced himself to relax. He tied his horse’s reins to a withered juniper tree, pulled out his own rifle, and followed Oliver.

  James could touch the boulders on either side of the entrance. They were worn so smooth that he suspected generations of Indians had done exactly that. Their most sacred ceremonies had been held in this place, out of sight of prying eyes, for as long as anyone could remember. They left offerings to one of their gods here.

  It was lush and warm, and James had to remind himself that a moment before, he’d been shivering. The bright valley opened up just past the entrance and descended in a gentle slope to a small pond. From the tallest cliff poured a small waterfall, splashing into a pool that overflowed into a creek, which disappeared into a crevice on the downhill side of the valley.

  With steep cliffs su
rrounding the pond on the valley floor, there should have been little light, especially this late in the day, but a warm glow came from somewhere James couldn’t determine. Pines grew along the edges of the canyon, taller than any James had ever seen, seeming to reach up to the peaks of the mountains, wreathed in clouds.

  James had an overwhelming sense of trespassing.

  But it was more than that. It was as if the stones and trees of the canyon threatened them—which was strange, for it was so beautiful. A neighbor had once showed him drawings of Yosemite Valley, several days’ ride south, and while it was glorious, there was a shimmering and fragile beauty to this canyon that made it even more awe-inspiring.

  This place is not natural, James thought. The brittle splendor here was sharp, dangerous. Blue waters can drown, and deep snows can smother, and the cliffs are filled with boulders. All of it could simply pluck him from existence, leaving its beauty untouched.

  He stared while Oliver hiked down the green meadow toward the pond. Then he gagged at the stench of something dead lying near him, hidden in the underbrush. It couldn’t be the cattle, since they’d been missing for only a few days.

  Oliver seemed oblivious as he strode toward two lumps near the edge of the pond. James hurried after him. The remains of the slaughtered cattle were strewn about in the mud near the water; tufts of fur and broken bone and scraps of red meat. A skull, horns intact, was split in half; another two were smashed to pieces, the brains extracted.

  No human did this, not even Indians, James thought, certainly not in the time they had. They hadn’t been more than an hour behind the rustlers. And where did they go? There was no way to get off the mountainside without being seen, unless there was a back entrance to this canyon. He looked around, but the cliffs were huge and solid. The trees didn’t offer enough cover to hide anyone.

  “Well, I still say they owe us,” Oliver said. He kicked at a bone and it flipped over, the marrow glistening. He turned his back on the carnage and went to the side of the pond. He crouched in the shallows, sifting the gravel with his fingers.