Vallejo laughed and said, “You have heard of him, eh? I was only a child when he held up the stage over near Angel’s Camp. At least, they say he held up that stage. Joaquin was very mysterious, even when he was alive. There are a dozen versions of who he was and what he did. Our people’s stories have him all over the state at the same moment. There are even those who say he never existed.”

  Longarm sipped some coffee and said, “Well, they shot somebody they said was him, down in Kern County. Was that whistle I just heard what I hope it was?”

  Vallejo nodded and said, “Yes. It will be here any minute.”

  Kevin MacLeod came down from the cabin with a Henry rifle cradled in an elbow and wearing a worried smile. As he joined them, Longarm said, “No, they didn’t shoot me and steal this ore I’m sitting on.”

  MacLeod looked relieved and said, “Thank God, I’m riding down the line with you this morning. If this shipment doesn’t get through, I’m going to be in a real fix.”

  He climbed up beside Longarm and explained, “I’ve barely got enough money left to meet my next payroll. I don’t want to sell out to that damned Baxter, but he’s got me by the short hairs and he knows it.”

  Longarm nodded, and asked, “Is he the only one who’s made an offer?”

  “For the mine? Yes. I’ve had a few ridiculous offers for the property, of course. I’ve filed on a full section of land, and apparently some of the local rancheros feel I’m sitting on enough grass to matter.”

  Longarm swept a thoughtful eye over the surrounding country. The mining claim was in rolling parkland. Most of the bigger trees had been cut long ago for pit props and lumber. The grazing looked like tolerable grass, but nothing to get excited about. He asked, “Do you pump your water, or is there a running spring on the spread?”

  MacLeod said, “I thought of the water rights. I doubt if anyone’s that serious about the brook cutting across one corner of the place, over beyond our cabin. These hills are well watered all around. Besides, the only serious offer was from Baxter’s syndicate.”

  Before they could go into it at length, the narrow-gauge locomotive backed into view, the fireman waving to them from the cab. Longarm watched with interest as the little engine eased into the ore cars with a bump and they coupled up. The engineer called back, “Are you boys riding shotgun?” When Longarm nodded, he said, “Let’s get cracking, then. I got a timetable to think about.” He tooted his whistle and they started up with a jerk as Vallejo and another Mexican who’d just come down from the quarters waved goodbye.

  Longarm saw MacLeod’s wife waving at them from the cabin door and put a finger to his hat brim as her husband waved back. And then the ore train was in the trees around the bend and picking up speed.

  The trip down the line was uneventful. The narrow-gauge tracks wound down the slopes in a series of hairpin curves. The train ducked through a few cuts and over a dozen bridges. Longarm and MacLeod sat back to back, rifles at the ready. But nothing seemed interested in them this morning. Longarm watched for an unmapped rail siding. He couldn’t spot any. They crossed wagon traces where a Conestoga could move off with maybe a ton or so of ore, but there was no traffic on the dusty roads at this hour. They passed farms where kids ran over to the fence line to wave at them, and they chuffed through a couple of sleepy mountain towns where nobody paid any attention at all. Had he been asked to drive the train, Longarm would not have held the throttle as wide as the engineer did. But while the speed around a few drop-off curves was a bit hair-raising, it eliminated some possibilities from his mind. If they didn’t get through this time, he was going to have to consider Joaquin Murietta’s ghost as a suspect.

  They got through. The train reached the flats of the Big Valley and tore out across it at thirty miles an hour. In what seemed no time at all they pulled into the yards behind a string of big wooden buildings. Even before the wheels stopped clicking under him, Longarm could feel the pulsing of the earth being pounded by the machinery of the stamping mills. They’d stopped near a tall chimney belching black smoke into the blue sky, and the sounds made by tortured rock set his teeth on edge.

  A man came out on the platform with a sheaf of papers and waved up at them, shouting, “You from Lost Chinaman?”

  When MacLeod nodded, the mill supervisor yelled, “Got to assay you before you unload. The boss is sore as hell about the worthless stuff you’ve been gumming up our machinery with!”

  As he and Longarm climbed down, MacLeod explained that they’d come through with real ore this time. But the mill operator took random samples anyway and they followed him inside.

  The noise wasn’t quite as bad in there, but they still had to shout at one another to be heard, and Longarm wondered how the workers here could stand it day after day. Another man took the ore samples to a workbench and fed them into what looked like a big coffee grinder, operated by a leather belt feeding through the wall. The little crusher started chewing gritty quartz with a noise that made the boards tingle under their feet. The lab worker didn’t seem to mind. He slid a tray filled with fine powder out from under the assay mill and put some in a glass jar. He poured aqua regia in as Longarm and the others watched. He seemed to follow the same routine Baxter had, but on a bigger scale.

  After a time he shook his head and shouted above the general din, “Nothing! Not a sign of color! What the hell are you digging up there, MacLeod, a well?”

  Kevin MacLeod paled and gasped, “Oh, shit! Not again!” He whirled on Longarm and added, “God damn you! You were supposed to be watching!”

  At the assayer’s words, Longarm had nearly bitten through the cheroot he was smoking. “I was watching!” he told MacLeod. “The stuff never left my sight!”

  “But God damn it, it was gold ore when we loaded it!”

  Longarm said, “I know. I saw the color myself.” He scratched the back of his neck vigorously, then headed for the door. MacLeod followed him outside, bleating, “Where are you going? We have to figure this out!”

  Longarm crossed the platform, picked out a few random samples of ore, and put them in his pocket, saying, “I’ve got to get on into town. I figure it’s a half hour’s walk if I don’t shilly-shally.”

  “Can I come with you? Where are you going?”

  “U.S. assay office. It’s near the state house about two miles from here. You can come if you’ve a mind to.”

  “What about my ore?”

  “Yeah, what about it?” Longarm asked rhetorically. “If I were you I’d sit tight right here and make sure it’s all there when I come back.”

  “But they just told us it’s worthless rock!” MacLeod protested.

  “I know. I heard them. I’m aiming to get an opinion from somebody else.”

  MacLeod opened his mouth to ask something, then blinked and lowered his voice to say, “Jesus! I never thought of that! I’ve delivered these people fourteen loads and never gotten paid for one of them!”

  Longarm nodded grimly and said, “That’s as good a reason as I can think of for asking Uncle Sam, personal, who’s been lying. Because someone has been lying like a rug!”

  * * *

  It proved to be a long, dusty walk to a dead end. The men at the government assay office tested the samples Longarm brought them and came up with the same results. The federal assayer held his test tube up to the light and said, “It’s the Mother Lode formation all right, but there’s not enough gold in it to matter.”

  Longarm asked, “Is there any gold at all?” and the lab worker explained, “There’s some gold in seawater. Probably in you and me. But you don’t get rich processing anything but ore. It’s simple economics. You have to spend less getting gold out of something than the gold is worth. Every few weeks some idiot comes running in here with a rock he’s found somewhere and I have to go over it all again. There’s still plenty of gold in the Mother Lode, but it’s spread out between hell and breakfast. A pebble with a speck of color in it doesn’t mean you have a strike. The metal has to be in one place before you can spend it. If you spend a thousand dollars refining a hundred dollars worth of gold, you’re going to wind up busted. Folks keep finding that out the hard way, all over the West. Go down to skid row and you’ll find a hundred old prospectors mumbling in their beards about a claim they have out in some neck of the woods, if only someone would grubstake them. The samples they’ll show you have real color, too. A dollar’s worth of color in a fist-sized rock makes a pretty paperweight.”

  Longarm nodded and asked, “Couldn’t you show a profit by busting up the rock and panning it?”

  “Sure,” the assayer said, “but men don’t crush their dreams. A few hand-picked samples from an otherwise worthless outcropping can make any man dream big. Over in the desert on the other side of the Sierra there are places where a man can pick up a burroload of fairly decent gold quartz in a couple of days. By the time they haul it out of the dry country, figuring a dollar a day for their time, they might break even. You have to have water, supplies, and plenty of money to make a profit even on a real strike.”

  Longarm said, “I understand that part. Let’s stick to this shit I brought in here today. You say it’s worthless and I’ll take your word for it. But just last night I saw it tested the same damned way, and there was maybe ten dollars’ worth of color in the test tube.”

  The assayer shrugged. “Then someone switched samples on you.”

  “No. They couldn’t have. I picked them myself, at random. If someone had salted two freight cars with enough real ore to fool me, there’d be enough aboard to be worth milling. Is there any way to fake that test?”

  The government man thought and shook his head. He said, “Nothing but aqua regia, mercury, or cyanide will dissolve pure gold. What did the other chemist use?”

  “He said aqua regia.”

  “I’d say he had no reason to lie. Cyanide’s dangerous to carry around and you’d have known mercury on sight. If he got a real precipitate, the samples you had him test must have been rich.”

  Longarm frowned and asked, “Is there anything else in that rock he could have separated out? Maybe fool’s gold or mica?”

  The assayer said, “No. You don’t find pyrite in quartz. It’s a sulfide of iron you find in shale or slate.”

  “Maybe brass or tin or something like that?”

  The man was growing impatient. “Damn it, Deputy, I just told you there’s not enough metal of any kind in this stuff to matter. Don’t you think I know my own business?”

  Longarm sighed and said, “You likely do, but I can see I don’t know mine as well as I ought to!”

  He went outside and caught a hackney cab back to the mill. He told the driver to wait and went back to the loading platform, where he called to MacLeod and explained, “I got us a ride to the stage line. We may as well get on back to Manzanita.”

  “You mean they did it again? God damn it! I owe the railroad for hauling it and the mill supervisor just told me there’d be a charge for unloading it on their tailings dump!”

  “You have a hard row to hoe and that’s the truth, MacLeod. But we surely won’t catch any rascals hereabouts. The U.S. government backs what they said. There ain’t enough color aboard those cars to pay for our ride and breakfast, but that’s all right. I’m on an expense account and I’m feeding you as a material witness.”

  As they left the mill in the hackney, MacLeod said, “I’m too sick at heart even to think of breakfast. I’d like to go straight home.”

  But Longarm insisted, “We can’t help matters by neglecting our innards. Besides, we’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Well, just a quick bite. What’s our first move, once we get home?”

  Longarm had been afraid MacLeod was going to ask that.

  He had no answer.

  Chapter 5

  Longarm rode up to the ranch house and tethered his gelding to the hitching post. As he climbed the steps, a suspicious-looking Mexican with a shotgun opened the door and snapped, “Que pasa, señor?”

  Longarm said, “I’m looking for Señorita Felicidad, amigo. Is she at home?”

  “For why do you wish to see La Doña Felicidad? She has no business with your kind, Americano!”

  Longarm didn’t think it would please the lady to have her employee shot on her doorstep, so he tried to figure out some politer way to get past him.

  Then Felicidad herself appeared in the doorway behind the man with the gun and murmured something softly in Spanish. The man shrugged and went off.

  The girl led him into a baronial living room and indicated a chair by the fireplace. Longarm sat down. He saw she had no intention of offering him any of the coffee she’d been drinking from a cup that sat on a little table beside her chair, so he took out a cheroot and asked permission to smoke. She nodded a bit sullenly, and he lit up, placing his hat beside him on another table.

  She asked what he wanted and he said, “I understand you offered Kevin MacLeod a thousand dollars for his mining claim, ma’am.”

  The girl shrugged and said, “It was Vallejo land in the first place, but I see no other way to get it back.”

  “Ain’t that a sort of miserly offer for a gold mine?”

  Her smile was bitter as she answered, “Who cares about the gold? It is the land, Vallejo land, I want.” Then she added, “I would offer more, if I had it. My late husband did not leave me enough to be imprudent.”

  “I didn’t know you were a widow, ma’am. I’m purely sorry to hear it. Is Vallejo your married name?”

  “Both my married name and my maiden name. We of the old aristocracy tend to marry cousins.”

  “Well, I never came to jaw about religion. MacLeod has another cousin of yours working for him. Do you know Tico Vallejo, ma’am?”

  “I do not speak to him. He has become an Americano.”

  “Forgive me, ma’am, but since you’re both American citizens and have been for a good long time, it doesn’t strike me as such a foolish notion on his part.” He smiled and added, “You couldn’t have been born yet when California changed hands back in ’48.”

  “Just the same,” she said, “I shall never be an Americana. But we are wasting time discussing such matters. You still have not told me what you want.”

  Longarm smiled self-effacingly. “Well, you might say I’m sort of fishing. I know us lawmen can be a bother asking all sorts of fool questions, but it’s the only way we can work things out. You heard the MacLeods got robbed again?”

  She smiled the sort of smile he had seen on the faces of Apaches. It chilled him slightly. She said, “Yes. My vaqueros were laughing about it just before you came.”

  “I believe you. How many hands have you got working for you, ma’am?”

  “Eight vaqueros, the house servant you just met, and a stable boy. I take it you don’t suspect the chicas I have for cooking and cleaning?”

  “I didn’t see a man or a woman of any kind anywhere near that last shipment of ore they somehow got away with from under my . . . whatever. Let’s get back to your real estate notions. A thousand is way low for a gold mine, but a mite high for a section of rough grazing. Half the spread is all torn up from the mining. What’s left under the sod ain’t worth a thousand dollars.”

  She shrugged again and said, “Once I have reclaimed what is rightfully mine I intend to have the men fill in the pits with the spoil and plant alfalfa. In time, the scars will heal.”

  He took a long drag on the cheroot, examined the lit end thoughtfully, then said, “I can see you’re more interested in just owning it again than in any profit you might ever show.”

  “We may seem quixotic to you pragmatic Anglos. But what of it? I made an honest offer. Does this make me a suspect? How do you think I stole the gold?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  She laughed a trifle wildly, and said, “We have the ghost of Murietta riding for us, didn’t you know? I have the gold hidden under the house. Would you like to have me show you through the wine cellar?”

  Longarm nodded and said, “Sure.”

  “You are joking, of course?”

  “Maybe. Don’t you have a wine cellar?”

  “Certainly I have a wine cellar, but what do you think I have hidden down there?”

  “You’re the one who mentioned it. If you don’t want to show it to me, well, I don’t have a search warrant.”

  She rose to her feet and snapped, “Come. I insist you see it, now.”

  “Hell, honey, I was just running you. You’re acting like you’ve got red ants in your never-mind. I just rode over to ask some routine questions.”

  “You suspect me of being a thief and I won’t have it!” she said angrily. “I insist that you search the whole house!”

  He got up and said, “All right, I’ll take you up on it. I can play stiff-necked stubborn, too.”

  She led him through an arched passage and into a hallway. There she opened a thick door under a staircase and said, “Be careful. The steps are steep.”

  She struck a match as he followed her down into the musty, cobwebbed darkness. Felicidad lit a candle stub on an empty barrel and waved expansively, saying, “Behold the vaults of Monte Cristo! You can see they are a maze of treasure-filled caverns!”

  He looked around the tiny hole and observed, “Looks more like a root cellar to me. Do you make your own wine, or are those barrels empty?”

  “They are empty. We’ve made no wine since my grandfather passed away.” She chuckled theatrically before adding, “It is just as well for you, señor. We sinister Spaniards are well known as poisoners.”

  He mulled that over as he followed her back upstairs. She was touchy as hell about being a Mexican, he thought.