California Woman (Daughters of the Whirlwind Book 1) (33 page)

Murietta's punishment completed, Claussen
approached the other
Californio.

Suddenly, the prisoner pulled his hand
free, whipped a short knife out of a pocket, and held it to his own throat.
"Hang me," he said to Claussen. "Hang me, but do not whip me
like a dog! If you do, I will kill myself!"

Claussen eyed him. "He's bluffin'.
Greaser's bluffin' to get outta it." He snapped the whip he was holding
suddenly, coming up from the ground with it and curling the tip around the
prisoner's free forearm. The man screamed. Claussen jerked at the whip. It
pulled free, but the knife was still in the Californio's hand.

"God knows it is
you
who do
this," he said to Claussen. "Only you."

Murietta pulled himself upright and stood
swaying on buckling knees. He had never seen the man before this morning and
had not particularly liked him, but that did not lessen his sense of horror as
the
Californio
dug
the blade of his knife deep under his own Adam's apple and slashed quickly to
the right. Blood flooded down over his dirty frilled shirt and short,
embroidered
vaquero
jacket.
He dropped the knife and stared vacantly at Claussen just before his head
lolled to one side and he crumpled to his knees.

Claussen turned to the crowd uncertainly.
"Son 'bitch was crazy!"

Uneasy, some of the silent miners started
to move off.

"Anybody do that rather'n be whipped
got to be crazy," Claussen bellowed as more miners moved away. He turned
to a few who stood gaping at the raw slash and the pulsing blood. "
He
deserved it,
" Claussen shouted. "He knew he shot…"

"Enough, Isaac," Coleman said.

Claussen's eyes were wild now. He was not
prepared for this. "The other one here, I seen him before. He's no-count.
Tried to rig a bull-and-bear fight."

They had all turned and were heading back
to their tents.

"I would advise you to leave,"
Coleman said.

"I didn't lift a finger,"
Claussen whined, his eyes shifting back and forth from Coleman to Barnett. He
turned to Murietta. "
He did it to himself, didn't he?
"

Half-turned, Murietta spat in his face.
"One day
i
will kill you for
this, Claussen."

Claussen raised a fist and spun Murietta
around.

"
Don't do that!
" Esther
shouted, standing in the doorway of the saloon. She pointed the dead
saloon-owner's pistol at Claussen's face. "Step a little closer to me… I
don't want to miss."

Barnett stepped in front of Claussen.

"Esther," he said, softly.
"Don't lower yourself to the likes of this man."

Claussen opened his mouth and started to
say something, then checked himself.

"He'll be punished, Esther. Please…
for me… for yourself… God will punish him sooner or later." Barnett walked
toward her slowly. "You must not throw away your own life for such scum.
Listen to me…" He kept talking until he had the pistol and Esther slumped
dead away in his arms.

Murietta lay on his stomach.
She reached out and traced a finger, barely touching him, along one of twelve
purple, healing scars running diagonally across his back. She stopped, leaning
over as she sat on the edge of the hide bed to see if he had awakened. He did
not stir. She bent over and let her hair fall onto his shoulders, swaying her
head gently, letting the mass of it brush down to his waist.

He turned over, eyes still
closed, and whispered something in his sleep. He reminded her of a baby. She
pulled the patchwork quilt down slowly and looked at him. He w
as
not a baby. He was not as
large as Mosby, nor was he small. Nor was he as perfectly shaped as Miwokan, or
as compelling to look at as her husband. She thought about Alex for a moment
and a wave of remembered love washed over her. It passed and she wanted to touch
Murietta. Then she did not want to touch him. She touched him. She watched,
fascinated, as her hand and his penis somehow remained attached to each of
them, but were unattached at the same time, moving independently, taking on
lives of their own.

She heard a faint murmuring
of voices. She turned from Murietta and noticed that the bed was made of slowly
melting metal. She looked back and saw Murietta's eyes were open. He wore an
expression of hatred and—what was it in his eyes?—fear, behind the hatred, barely
discernible. The murmuring grew louder until it hurt her eyes, and she saw the
miners surrounding them…

It was no longer a bed but a
heavy platform suspended beneath enormous, solid-metal cylinders. They were
flat on one end, and there were more than she could count. Somehow they were
melting and solid at the same time. Several of them began descending toward
Murietta's legs and waist. His hands and feet were tied to the metal platform
with mule whips. When she reached out to free him, rough hands pulled her back,
and someone shouted, "What the hell you think you're doin', lady?"
Then she saw him dragged along the ground and tied motionless on the platform
simultaneously. He was surrounded by chunks of gleaming stone waiting to be
crushed by the descending stamps of the mill. Horrified, she watched her own
arm and hand reach out and pull the starting lever of the machine. She screamed
but no sound came from her throat.

The
crowd of miners watched, then applauded, as the stamps reached Murietta's legs
and genitals first and began grinding them into pulp. He groaned through
gritted teeth, screamed, and jerked one arm free. She shrieked continuously and
the sound shut out all others. In his agony, Murietta flipped over and she saw
the blood being squeezed out of him through a dozen open cuts across his back.
Beyond him, Mosby laughed, Barnett strained to free himself from the grip of
Coleman and Claussen, Miwokan wept helplessly, and Alexander Todd glared at her
just before he turned and walked away. Suddenly, a wall of water as high as a
house washed everything from view…

Esther awoke from the dream full of fear,
her breath coming in short gasps, her heart pounding. She sat up, and for a
full minute she stared at the oak beams above her, not fully believing she was
in her own bedroom. The details of the dream were still so palpable, the
beginning of it so like that first night after she and Barnett had brought
Murietta to the ranch two months earlier, that she expected at any moment to
find that what she saw now was a dream and the dream reality. She was certain
that in the blink of an eye she would be standing beside the maw of Fremont's
stamp mill again.
God, I own part of it!
Strangely, it did not look
exactly the same as it had the first time Jessie
Frémont
took her to see it. She felt the wooden
frame of the bed, the fur quilt, the fabric of her nightdress. She pinched the
flesh under her biceps, touched at her cheeks and breasts.

When she was certain she was not
dreaming, that she was in her own bed in her own house, where Murietta slept in
the unfinished room next door, she lay back again and waited for the sick,
hollow feeling to pass. She tried to sort out the unreal elements of the dream.
And something else. She touched absently between her legs and recalled how
conflicting emotions had pulled at her as she spread butter across Murietta's
wounds that first night back at the ranch. Barnett had retired and she had
stayed with Murietta for hours, sitting on the edge of her bed after the
whiskey and fatigue had pulled him down into a deep sleep. She remembered
easing the cover and the quilt back, at first curious and then aroused as she
had not been since the night in the sweathouse with Miwokan. She had reached
out to touch him, it, then pulled her hand back, overruled by the part of her
that still loved Alex. She loved Murietta as well, more than she had ever
realized, but not enough to make sexual contact permissible.

During the two months he was healing,
growing strong again, she had examined her feelings with greater scrutiny. She
rationalized, concluded that her love for him was essentially that of a sister,
and that her arousal was simply a physical phenomenon she would have to guard
against. When she found herself stirred again one morning in late February as
she watched him feebly chopping wood behind the long kitchen and dining room
wing of the
rancho,
she
redoubled her efforts to will away such thoughts. And then his silent,
preoccupied unawareness of even her presence much of the time had begun to annoy
her. Each time she thought it through, ridding herself of anger and
irritability, she found that arousal and desire invariably took their place.

He had grown restless, more silent and
moody with each predominantly idle day, and she was certain that he, too, felt
the strain of living under the same roof in separate beds. At dinner the night
before the dream, she had finally drawn him into the first semblance of a full
conversation since the whipping.

"I am curious about something,"
she said. "When… it happened… you said that Claussen had a grudge against
you. And then, as I was coming through the door of the saloon, I heard him say
something about seeing you before. Something about a bull and a bear fight. Had
you known Claussen?"

As Murietta explained what had taken
place at Claussen's ranch, Esther realized with growing astonishment that the
bear he was talking about had to be the same one that had burst through the
door of her cabin. She was still recovering from the shock of that
extraordinary coincidence, when Murietta used a brief descriptive phrase
recalling what Claussen's friend had done to him following the bear's escape.

"Would you please repeat what you
said when you described the man who made the bet with the other
Californio?"

"Tall, with the nose of a hawk. I
will never forget that face."

"Did he have a moustache?"
Esther asked, an electric sensation spreading across the skin of her arms and
the back of her neck.

"Yes," Murietta said, almost
lost in memory and revived hatred. "And now he has also a scar where the
bear clawed him open, from here to here." Murietta smiled sardonically as
he drew a curving line down the back of one arm with his fingertip.

Trying to control her emotions, Esther
spread her hands on the table on either side of her plate. She felt a numbness
in her fingers as she pressed down, a pulsing in the stubs where two were
missing. "What was his name? The tall man with the moustache?"

"Mosby. Luther Mosby. That name I
will never forget either."

Involuntarily, Esther's hands jerked
outward, one of them knocking over her coffee. She stared at the spilled liquid
on the table, and for a moment it seemed as dark as blood.

"Why do you ask?" Murietta
said, getting up and sponging up the spilled coffee with his napkin.

"Just curious." She wanted to
change the subject. "I'll never get the stain out of that napkin."

"Let me soak it in cold water,"
Murietta said, cupping the cloth in his hands and walking out to the kitchen.

While he was gone, Esther gripped the
edge of the table until her knuckles whitened. Thoughts came spinning through
her head.
Oh, God, the same man. Murietta would recognize him. He bears
Mosby almost as much hatred as I do.

Murietta came back in and sat down,
silent and totally absorbed by his own thoughts again. Esther released her grip
on the table and tried to relax herself. She realized it was impossible to work
with this new information, form something with it, in the state she was in.
When her mind was cool, after she had slept on it, she thought, she would go over
the possibilities. A tremor of guilt rippled through her.
It is unfair of me
e
ven
to
think of drawing Joaquin into this. I might be risking his life. Perhaps there
is a way he could simply locate Mosby for me… and then…

"I have been thinking of riding south
to spend some time in the high place above the desert," Murietta said,
recalling Esther from her thoughts.

"
I don't want you to
go!
"
she shouted, not realizing how loud her
voice was until she had finished the sentence. Quickly regaining control, forcing
herself to speak softly, sweetly, she added: "You are not completely
healed."

"The cuts are closed."

"But you're still weak. It would be
better if you stayed. I know it would be… and I need you," she added,
ashamed but determined.

Murietta smiled. "You can do without
me… for a while." His eyes drifted away from her and the line of his mouth
hardened, almost imperceptibly.

"You'd come back soon?"

"In time," he said
unconvincingly.

"
I don't want you to go!
"
She lowered her voice again. "I… I'm concerned for your safety,
your…"

"All right," he said, sighing.
"I will think about it for a while longer." He got up. "I wish
to sleep now. Will you excuse me?"

After
he left the dining room, Esther tried to devise a way to bring him into her
plans without endangering him. Distracted by the possibility that he might
leave and not come back, she found it impossible to think straight. Suddenly,
she was exhausted. The weight of Murietta's revelation and her own emotions had
drained her.
Sleep on it
, she advised herself. Getting up, she walked
down the long hallway and undressed for bed. I must keep him here, she thought.
And find a way… She couldn't even finish the sentence in her mind. "In the
morning," she said out loud as she got into bed. "In the morning, it
will all become clear."

The terror, disorientation, and lingering
disquiet that followed the dream were almost gone now as she closed her eyes
again. When she thought she heard the faint metallic sound of a spur clinking
outside, she went to a window and opened the wooden shutters a crack. The sky
to the west was still dark, but beneath the stars the pines were emerging
slowly as visible black forms. She was about to close the shutters when she
caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. Down at the corral Murietta had
thrown his saddle up on his horse and was fastening the cinch. The sight of it
stunned her.

When he had finished, he led the horse
quietly back toward the house and stopped. He stared straight at the window,
not seeing her. There was a look of infinite sadness in his eyes. He pulled the
pistol out of the holster hanging from his bullet-laden belt and checked it.
Then, after a last look at the ranch, he took hold of the pommel, swung up on
the horse, and turned it north instead of south. She suddenly realized he was
leaving
,
that this was not a dream. And that his preoccupation, his distance, his
growing restlessness had had nothing to do with her.

He was already walking the horse slowly
away from the house when she threw open the shutters and whispered, "
Wait!
"
He didn't hear her.

He was trotting when she reached the
front door and cried, "
Joaquin!
" He didn't stop or turn.
Frantic, she pulled up the skirts of her nightdress and began running barefoot
through the shallow layer of snow between the house and the corral. She climbed
through the split-rail fence and pulled herself, up, bareback, onto her horse.
Gripping the mare's mane, she leaned down and opened the gate. Then, riding as
hard as she could without falling, she pointed the horse with her knees until
it was headed for the opening in the line of trees through which Murietta had
disappeared.

She caught up with him a quarter mile
into the pine forest.

"You're going after Claussen,"
she said, out of breath, not feeling the cold, grateful that he had slowed his
horse to a walk. The mounts snorted simultaneously and stopped.

"It would have been better if
you…"

"You're going to kill Claussen,
aren't you?"

He leaned on his pommel and sighed.
"Yes. I have thought about it, and that is what I must do. Please go
back."

Her body felt twice its weight. "
They
will kill you,
" she said, biting at a knuckle. "Claussen is
drawing you into the filthy, childish game men play with guns."

"I will wait until it is just the
two of us, alone."