Roy Bean's Gold by W R. Garwood Page B

another stack of tortillas. “Lootenant Ord’s hull garrison deserted and went north. and I’d ’a’ been one of ’em but I was in th’ guardhouse at th’ time.”
    Another of the miners lit a clay pipe, puffed out a cloud of smoke, fingered his chin whiskers, and chuckled. “A pard o’ mine named Jake Leese made himself over seventy-five thousand dollars in three months on th’ Yuba with jest a pick and shovel. Another bugger with th’ moniker of Sleepy Bill Daylor dug out fifteen thousand in one week, and when I was at Parks Bar th’ average yield per man was over a hundred dollars a day.”
    â€œYes, sir,” chimed in Yankee Carson, “the boys at Wood Creek cashed more than three hundred dollars each in chunks every evenin’. Guess I should have stayed put instead of leggin’ it down to Frytown and them blamed Mex diggin’s.”
    â€œAnd that was away back in the middle of last year,” snorted the miner with the chin whiskers. “Lord above, just look what’s happenin’ this year of Eighteen and Forty-Nine!”
    â€œ Sí . Death and destruction across the land, and it has only just begun. It is the beginning of the whirlwind,” Salazar butted into the conversation.
    The company turned to look at the sheriff and took in his saucer-sized badge and the conversation dwindled away for a moment, until I signaled the bartender and ordered a round of drinks for everyone. That cheered up the bunch and a corporal began to tell of how he’d been riding up the coast from Santa Barbara and had been pitched from his mount when the sorry brute shied at a wind-tossed bush, leaving him dismounted miles from anywhere at sundown.
    â€œThat was bad enough,” he said, “for I walked along most of the night until I found an empty adobe hut about dawn. I didn’t look around in the dark. just up and rolled over in a corner of the front room and went sound asleep. But when I woke up, I surely wished I’d still been on my feet, and still walking. I’ll say so.”
    He’d roused up to find himself surrounded by dead bodies, all stiff and stark. They seemed to be what was left of an emigrant family that’d taken up squatter’s rights to the adobe and must have had some money or property when they arrived. The dead man, about fifty, had his skull split completely open; a woman, probably his wife, had her head cut nearly in two; while their two children had evidently been struck down by blows from the same axe.
    â€œHorrible!” said Salazar. And I felt his black eyes on my middle, where my money belt bulged. “That is the damnable scourge of gold. It calls up the demons in man.”
    â€œDownright unpleasant to say the leastwise,” said Yankee Carson, who proceeded to liven up the gathering with a song.
    I can’t recall all the foolishness, and only some of the choruses, but they went something like:
    Oh, what a miner, what a miner was I!
All swolled up with the scurvy,
So I thought I would die.
I went to town, got on a drunk,
And in the morning to my surprise
I found I’d got me a pair
Of roaring big black eyes.
And I was strapped. had not one cent . . .
Not even my pick and shovel,
My hair was snarled, my britches torn,
And I looked the very Devil.
Then I took myself a little farm
And got me a señorita ;
Gray-eyed, humpbacked, and black as tar,
Her name was Marguerita.
My pigs all died, hens flew away,
Joaquín he stoled my mules;
My ranch burn ‘down’, my blankets ‘up’,
Likewise my farming tools!
    There was more but I can’t fetch it back. Another song one of the miners tackled, began:
    Oh! Susanna,
Go to hell for all of me;
We’re all a livin’ dead
In Californ-ee!
    They were still hard at it when Salazar elbowed me up and piloted me down the hallway to our room, as I was somewhat befuddled from the rounds of drinks.
    â€œYou hear!”