“There, you see?” she exploded. “‘His constitutional rights’—it’s even in the language.”

  “Afraid I can’t take responsibility for that,” he said. “I only talk it—I didn’t make it up.”

  “What about the right to vote?” she pressed on, leaning closer to him and jabbing a finger into the thatch of hair on his solid chest.

  Longarm was beginning to wonder seriously what her game was, and he decided to feed her some more rope. “I’ll allow that most men don’t have the sense to pour piss out of their boots—excuse me, ma’am—much less vote. I doubt that women would do much worse, and maybe someday, when the country simmers down and gets less hectic around the polls—”

  He noticed that her face was growing flushed and little beads of perspiration had appeared on her upper lip as she asked, “Does the Constitution say only you men have the right to sow wild oats? There’s a parlor house in every town across the country, and you know very well that no man sniggering with the others at the pool hall would ever admit that he was a virgin.”

  “Would you admit it?” he asked pointedly.

  There was an unmistakable sparkle in her eyes as she replied, “It’s hardly a problem. I told you I’ve been married.”

  “And since I don’t visit parlor houses,” he said, “I guess that more or less cancels out the entire issue.”

  Longarm felt now as if he were floating in the air a little distance above the bed. He knew he needed to lie down, with her or without her. As usual, his amorous parts were behaving as though they had a life of their own, and he could feel himself swelling beneath the blanket across his lap. Longarm decided, with fireflies glittering before his eyes, that it was time to call her play. He placed a hand on her knee. She glanced down at his hand without moving away, then shifted her gaze to the prominent bulge at his crotch. Her eyes rose to meet his, and she asked, “Am I to take that as a challenge or a compliment, Mr. Long?”

  He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. Suddenly the room was spinning around and he felt as if he were about to puke all over them both. So he decided to lie down and die instead.

  * * *

  He was in this funny big room with red velvet drapes. A bunch of naked women were coming at him from all directions. They had painted faces and high-heeled shoes and they were all grinning from ear to ear. But their grins were evil and they had guns in their hands.

  He reached for his own gun, but he wasn’t wearing his cross-draw rig. He wasn’t wearing anything at all. He was naked and had a monstrous erection, and the painted women were laughing at it. A big blonde with a mouthful of gold teeth and a Mexican gunbelt riding low on her naked hips grabbed at him as if she intended to milk him like a cow. He stepped back and discovered that another naked woman had knelt behind him on her hands and knees. He fell backward to the thick red carpet and the big blonde jumped over the girl who’d tripped him, placed her French heels to either side of his chest, and squatted. Her aim was perfect and he felt his shaft going deeply into her as she shouted, “Powder River and let ’er buck!!”

  It felt too good to be real. He decided he was having a wet dream. He wondered if he’d get to come this time, before he awoke all the way. The trouble with wet dreams was that he always seemed to wake up just as they were getting interesting. He started pumping back, but he couldn’t quite make it and he knew he’d open his eyes in the little furnished room by Cherry Creek and discover that he had to take a leak. It was purely frustrating to wake up with a hard-on and nobody there to share it with.

  * * *

  He opened his eyes. For a long moment he wondered where he was. Then he remembered that he was on a steamboat. The stateroom lamp was lit. Sylvia Baxter was beside him, sitting up in bed and doing something funny to his eyelids. She was stark naked. Built better than he’d expected, too. Those starched lace dickies that women wore down the front of their dresses sort of flattened things out. Her pink nipples were turned up like her nose.

  He said, “What happened? The last time we met, you had all your duds on. Then I must have passed out. I had the damnedest dream.”

  “It was a dream for me, too!” she said. “I didn’t know you were unconscious until a moment ago.”

  “You mean we—?”

  She smiled languidly. “Yes, darling, and I must say, you’re better by reflex action than my silly husband ever was wide awake. I think you’ve got a concussion. Has anyone hit you on the head recently?”

  He grinned wanly, and said, “Now that you mention it, doc, I did have a tussle with a big Irish wharf rat last night. He hit me with the wall of a whorehouse.”

  She nodded and said, “That explains a lot. I didn’t think you could be as crazy as you’ve been acting. Have you had sudden mood changes? Any nausea?”

  “I threw up a while back. What do you reckon I should take for this concussion, doc?”

  “There’s nothing you can take. What you really need is a few nights of bed rest. If I’d known you were ill, I’d have . . . well, what’s done is done.”

  He grinned and said, “The hell you say! If I really did what I dreamed I did, I’ve got some catching up to do in the real world.”

  As he put an arm around her, Sylvia drew back and insisted, “Not in your condition. Maybe later.”

  He said, “My condition right now is hard as a poker and, what the hell, it ain’t like we’re strangers!”

  She was still insisting that he was too weak as he rolled her to the mattress and started to mount her. Then, as he got his hips between her smooth ivory thighs, she went limp and breathed, “Do be careful, dear heart. I don’t know what I’d do if you killed yourself with this foolishness!”

  He got a hand between them and guided his shaft into her moist warmth, saying, “Yeah, it’d be a tough thrill to follow, wouldn’t it? A gal who’d once come with a dead man in her would never be able to top it for an interesting experience!”

  As he slid all the way into her, she gasped in mingled pleasure and annoyance. “I think I liked you better unconscious! Must you be so vulgar about it?”

  He laughed and started moving. “Hell, lady, if you didn’t want it he-man style, you never should have started it.”

  “I didn’t start it. Oh, stop talking like a fool and do it!”

  The fireflies were back again and the room was spinning like a merry-go-round, but he knew he wasn’t going to black out. He gritted his teeth and muttered to himself, Listen, God. I’m likely to take it personal if you don’t let me do it right this time.

  This time, God listened.

  * * *

  Sylvia couldn’t ride to Manzanita in the stage with him because her brother was meeting her at trackside in the mountains. So they kissed goodbye as the boat docked in Sacramento the next morning, and Longarm promised to look her up when he arrived in Manzanita.

  He went to the Wells Fargo office and bought a ride to Manzanita. The agent told him he had a couple of hours to kill before the stage hauled out for the High Sierra. He had most of the background material he needed, but Marshal Vail and the treasury boys might have missed a thing or two, so he moseyed over to the land office to refresh his memory.

  Longarm introduced himself to an elderly clerk as a deputy U.S. marshal, without mentioning what district court he worked for. The clerk was a friendly sort who didn’t even ask to see his badge, which was just as well, since some son of a bitch had it up in the hills somewhere.

  As he started pawing through the files, the clerk said, “I can tell you just about anything you’ll find in there, Deputy. I came out here in ’49.”

  “I’m interested in the Lost Chinaman claim, up in Calaveras County.”

  “Hell, son, I was washing color in the headwaters of the Stanislaus when Mark Twain wrote that fool story about the frog.”

  “You ever meet the frog?”

  “Nope, but I met Mark Twain and Bret Harte when they was just starting to tell all them lies about us. You see, the gold rush started down here in the low country, when they found color washed down off the Sierra in the creek beds.”

  “I know about the gold rush, old son,” Longarm told the man.

  “No, you don’t,” the old clerk contradicted him. “Not if you been reading Harte and Twain. Like I said, we started washing color in the low country. By the fifties, we’d followed the gold up the streams and found the Mother Lode—a big, wide belt of gold quartz running a couple hundred miles up there. The color we’d found in the creeks was just what had washed out of the real lode. It was the hard-rock miners who had the capital to move mountains to get at the good stuff.”

  “How many mines are still in Bonanza up in Calaveras County, pop?” Longarm asked.

  “Bonanza? Not a one. Most of the veins petered out some time ago. A man named Hearst has a working claim in Calaveras, a mine called Sheep Ranch. But he’s hauling low-grade out these days. Hearst is a big shot who got in on the big Virginia City strike, on the other side of the Sierra. He’s got the capital to crush his own ore. Angel Camp’s about dead. Murphy has a low-grade mine nobody’s interested in these days. They had a copper strike up there a while back, but it never amounted to much. Copper’s too cheap to haul over all them ridges and they just couldn’t compete with Arizona Territory.”

  “So let’s talk about the Lost Chinaman. I understand the owner is a man named MacLeod?”

  “That’s right. Nice young jasper, for an Easterner. Him and his pretty little wife bought the mine for next to nothing. It seemed to bottom out a good six or eight years back, but MacLeod’s some sort of geologist and he hit a vein the others overlooked. They say he’s been shipping tolerable ore.”

  “He may be shipping it,” the deputy agreed. “It’s not getting anywhere, though. You got a railroad map of the county?”

  The clerk nodded and slid open a wide, flat drawer, saying, “I know what you have in mind. Other marshals have been studying the same crazy situation. You won’t find the siding everyone’s looking for. Half of the old narrow-gauge tracks up there have been pulled up for scrap.”

  Longarm spread the map on a nearby table and ran his finger along a red line between Manzanita and the Big Valley. He mused aloud, “If there’s unused track laying around up there to be claimed by any junkman, it wouldn’t be impossible for somebody to build his own siding in some wooded stretch of canyon.”

  The clerk shook his head. “The other lawmen have been all up and down the line. Besides, the train crews say they’ve never stopped or been stopped between the mine tipple and the mills down here.”

  “What about this other fellow, Hearst?”

  “George Hearst? He lives in Frisco. Ain’t heard about him missing any gold. Like I said, they crush their own ore up at Sheep Ranch and ship it almost pure. They send it down in freight wagons, under guard. The way I hear tell, nobody wants to tangle with old Hearst. He’s in politics in the city and thick with the Big Five. This young MacLeod likely don’t have as many friends who’d back his play against high-graders.”

  Longarm smiled thinly. “He has the U.S. government in his corner. He contracted with the treasury to deliver his gold to the mint. Where does this Hearst jasper send his gold?”

  The clerk shrugged. “Same place, of course. Nobody else buys gold in quantity on this coast.” He saw Longarm’s puzzled frown and asked, “Did I say something important, Deputy?”

  “Maybe. These robberies have added up to a mess of gold, no matter what the quality of the stolen ore might have been. But you’re right. You can’t sell a real pile of gold to anyone but Uncle Sam—not without attracting a lot of attention.”

  “Mexico?” the clerk suggested.

  The marshal tugged at a corner of his mustache. “Doubt it. For sure, they couldn’t haul it that far as ore. They have to have a refinery we don’t know about. If MacLeod’s extracting with the cyanide process, it can’t be just some backwoods stamping mill, either, You say the Hearst mine has its own mill?”

  The old man shook his head. “Wrong tree, Deputy. The mill in Sheep Ranch is just a simple crusher that runs the slurry over mercury beds. They boil the mercury out of the results and wind up with rich dust. If the Lost Chinaman’s ore needs cyanide to leach it from the rock, the Hearst mill couldn’t extract it worth mention.”

  “How about those other ghost towns up there, like Angel’s Camp?”

  “They ain’t quite dead, for one thing, so you’d have witnesses. There ain’t no cyanide mills, either, so you’d get no gold.”

  “Try it this way. What if MacLeod’s wrong? The ore might be rich enough to run through an old-fashioned mill and settle for half, letting whatever gold the cyanide might get out stay where it is?”

  The man scratched his wispy-haired pate vigorously. “Well, high-graders is called high-graders ’cause they skim the cream. You could get some gold out of nigh any rock with a pan and running water. They’re going to a lot of effort if that’s their play, though. MacLeod’s ore is marginal. Wouldn’t be worth digging if they hadn’t come up with new methods in the past few years. Hell, if I was up there high-grading, I’d rob George Hearst’s mine. It’s a third richer in color.”

  Longarm thanked the clerk and left. He went next to the offices of the Sacramento Bee, where he found another friendly cuss who was more than willing to jaw about the newspaper’s back files.

  He knew he was wasting time asking about the high-grading. If the case could have been solved by reading old reports on paper, the treasury never would have come bleating to Justice for a helping hand.

  He asked about the Calico Kid and was told, “He got the name and the rep down near Los Angeles. Mining camp called Calico. Nobody knows who he was or where he came from before he started shooting folks as a hobby.”

  Longarm pursed his lips and said, “Hung out in mining country, did he? Now that’s right interesting. You got anything in the morgue about him robbing gold shipments?”

  The reporter shook his head and said, “Nope. The way they tell it, he was just a wild saddle tramp. Rode with some other young owlhoots of the same stripe. They’ve shot up a few towns for the hell of it, and been run out of twice as many. But the kid never had any robbery pinned on him.”

  “What did he do for a living, then? Folks can’t just ride around like something in a Ned Buntline novel with no visible means of support. Bullets cost a nickel apiece and drinks are three cents a shot!”

  The reporter shrugged and said, “He probably let folks grubstake him some. Lots of people sort of like to stay on friendly terms with a mean-eyed jasper with a rep.”

  The deputy pondered this for a moment, then said, “I don’t see him as a man who begged for handouts. If he didn’t work, he must have been stealing for a living.”

  “Could be,” the newspaperman agreed. “If he ever robbed anyone, they never saw fit to press charges, which isn’t hard to understand. They say he had about five sidekicks riding with him, all of them just as mean as he was.”

  Longarm saw that he wasn’t getting anywhere, and left. He found a café and had some chili and a beer. They both stayed down, so he figured he was getting over the set-to with Curly.

  By the time he got to the Wells Fargo office again, the stage was loading up for its run up the slope. The jehu holding the reins was a fierce-looking old man of about seventy. The shotgun rider at his side was a consumptive-looking hunchback with a bullet hole in the brim of his dusty Stetson. Longarm saw that two passengers were already aboard, so be climbed in.

  His fellow passengers were a tall man wearing a business suit and a blond mustache, seated across from a girl of about twenty-five. She wore black Spanish lace and her face was a dusky shade of rose. If she wasn’t at least half Indian, he’d never met one. Her dark eyes smoldered angrily in a way that led Longarm to believe that anger was a natural condition with her, so he just smiled and sat beside her, introducing himself to the man in the opposite seat.

  The man held out a hand and said, “I’m glad to know you, Deputy. I’m Kevin MacLeod.”

  Longarm blinked and asked, “The same Kevin MacLeod who owns the Lost Chinaman? I was beginning to think I’d never find you. This must be your pretty little wife I’ve heard so much about, right?”

  The girl gasped in dismay and MacLeod said, “Not hardly. Allow me to present Señorita Felicidad Vallejo. One of the Vallejos of Old California.”

  The girl looked away, trying to ignore them both. MacLeod shrugged and said, “She doesn’t like gringos very much.”

  Longarm refused to be snubbed, and he said, “It’s an honor, ma’am. I read about your kinsman, General Vallejo. He sort of chased our army through a few canyons before they called the war off, didn’t he?”

  She didn’t answer. So he shrugged and turned back to MacLeod as the jehu atop the stage cracked his whip and shouted, “Move, you oat-wastin’ sons of bitches!”

  The stage lurched into motion and took off in a cloud of dust, swaying on the rawhide thoroughbraces as if it were a small craft plunging through choppy water. MacLeod grinned and said, “It gets worse when we reach the high country. I think old Logan, up there, has been trying to die young. You can see he never made it, but it’s not for lack of trying.”

  Longarm turned toward Señorita Vallejo, touched the brim of his Stetson, and asked, “Mind if I smoke, ma’am?” She kept her face averted, gazing out the window, and made no answer. The deputy shrugged and, taking her silence for consent, produced a cheroot from an inside coat pocket and planted it between his front teeth. He turned back to MacLeod and said, “Let’s talk about rocks. Just how many shipments have we lost track of, so far?”