California Gold by John Jakes Page B

gotten me excited. Let’s undress. Here, I’ll begin…” She unfastened the long scarf, spilling her hair, billowy and golden, onto her shoulders. The moon was visible now, blazing behind the shredding veil of tule fog.
    He reached for the buttons of her shirt and undid them. Standing close, facing him, she shrugged off the shirt and then the chemise beneath. Her breasts were big and heavy, with dark-brown tips. He bent and kissed them. She threw her head back and exclaimed softly, then hugged him and began kissing his throat, his chest—
    She stopped.
    “What is it, what did I do?” He could barely keep from pulling at her, couldn’t keep his hands still.
    “We ought to make this as pleasant as we can. Wait just a minute.” She walked slowly, seductively, to her picketed horse, and then brought back a second, larger canteen. “Here. Bathe.”
    “What?”
    “Please bathe first. I’m sorry to tell you, but you smell like a barnyard. It isn’t very romantic.”
    He felt stupid, insulted, furious, and went limp, his skin prickling in the chill. He snatched the canteen while she raised her chemise against her breasts with a coquettish false modesty.
    He yanked the cork and inverted the canteen with a snap of his wrist. The water ran out noisily, splattering the ground. She watched it, and him, with disbelief. “What in hell—”
    “Listen, I may be a clod without much schooling, but I’m not some servant to be ordered around. Put your clothes on and go home.”
    He kicked the canteen, and it flew past her leg, generating a startled little cry. Moments later, she was heading east at a gallop, repeatedly quirting her luckless black horse. Mack’s last glimpse was of the bright banner of her hair streaming out behind her.
    Sleepless, he sat with his back against the rough trunk of a eucalyptus. The full moon shed brilliant light over the grove. He wound the gold ribbon of scarf around his left hand, then unwound it and wound it the other way.
    He’d thrown away a chance to make love to a spectacular girl. Well, he couldn’t help it. She was beautiful, and she’d displayed a certain kindness toward him, but there was another side. She was spoiled, accustomed to having her way, like the old German who’d sired her. The willful streak had suddenly asserted itself, and instead of an eager, generous girl, she was suddenly a queen about to grant her favors for the night. He’d have liked to make love to her. But not on her terms.
    With a long sigh, he began to fold the scarf, shortening it until it fit between the pages of T. Fowler Haines, which he put away along with the memory of her hair, eyes, hands, and naked skin. Strange young girl. He didn’t doubt that she’d be trouble, a lot of trouble, for any man who involved himself with her. But why think of that? He’d never see her again.

5
    M ACK’S RECENT TROUBLES MADE it hard for him to appreciate that he was nearing San Francisco. When he arrived in the little town of Wheatville, on the main line to Oakland and San Francisco, his mood didn’t improve. There were scruffy blanket men everywhere, wheat-field workers with all of their worldly goods in blanket rolls tied on their backs.
    When a crashing rainstorm sent him hunting for shelter in an alley behind the main street, he literally stumbled on a ragged man lying unconscious in the mud between two puddles. It was an old Indian, Mack realized, when he rolled him over and saw the narrow dark face, high forehead, and black hair without a strand of gray despite the man’s obvious age. A bloody abrasion marked the Indian’s forehead, but he was breathing.
    Mack dragged him against the rear wall of a hardware store and, in the slashing rain, managed to wake him up. Hobbling, gripping Mack’s arm with an emaciated hand, the old Indian led him back through a warren of packing-case hovels to the one that was his. Solemnly, he gestured Mack in.
    The place smelled of offal and rotting meat, but Mack was glad