23. June 2015 · Comments Off on After a Long Hiatus – Another Chapter of “The Golden Road” · Categories: Chapters From the Latest Book · Tags: , , ,

So – I have the time and inclination to work on the picaresque Gold Rush adventure – about the teen-aged and wide-eyed young Fredi Steinmetz’ experiences in the California Gold Rush — which so far in first draft has him encountering Sally Skull,

Not the final for-real cover, but a place-holder for now

Not the final for-real cover, but a place-holder for now

Charlie Goodnight, Jack Slade, and Leroy Bean … and then a bandit who may be Joaquin Murrieta … or not.

Chapter 10 – O’Malley’s Grand Party

Not daring to venture far from the wagon in search of the mules for fear of becoming lost in the dark, Fredi eventually settled on his bedroll underneath it, holding Nipper still firmly bundled in O’Malley’s heavy coachman’s overcoat. Much to his surprise, he fell almost at once into a very sound sleep, and remained in that condition until wakened just before sunrise by the lightening sky, the cooing of doves in nearby bushes, and the pattering of fat little quail searching for bugs in the leaf-mast under them. The night had been chill enough – and Nipper had not been tempted until then to unravel himself from the toils of O’Malley’s coat. He shook them off, trotted over to the nearest bush and cocked a leg to piss against it. Groaning, Fredi followed suit, and wondered now what he was to do – penniless and alone save for a small black terrier dog, without mules to pull the wagon. The wagon itself now represented the larger part of his and O’Malley’s fortune, and he was loath to abandon it.

Might as well go and search for the mules, first. Perhaps he would strike it lucky – and it would be about time, for there was nothing but bad luck in the last few days. And he had no appetite for breakfast, for worrying about O’Malley and the mules. He rolled up his bed-roll and blankets, pitched them into the wagon, shrugged the overcoat over his shoulders – for he felt the chill – and whistled to Nipper.

“Let’s go find those mules, hey, Nip? There’s a good dog. I know of sheep-herding dogs,” he mused aloud. “Why can’t you be a mule-herding dog?”

He examined the hoof-prints of shod beasts, trodden into the road, and into the grass to either side, but the prints of the mules were indistinguishable from those of the horses ridden by the bandits to his relatively unskilled eye, and all in a muddle anyway, on either side of and ahead of the wagon, sitting forlorn by the side of the road. He wasn’t anything like the tracker that Carl was, although he was good enough at straying cows. Fredi took his lariat from the wagon, and strode off in the direction most heavily marked by disturbance of the mud, crushed grass and small broken branches, in hopes that fortune would favor him and that three mules had not wandered very far from water. From the darker line of green at some distance, it appeared likely that they had gone in that general direction. Fredi gloomily wished that he had kept shrewd Paint, sold at Warner’s for a price in gold now gone to a bandit’s purse. It would be a damned long walk to the water, and a hard chase on foot if the mules weren’t cooperative.

Before he had ventured very far, though – he heard O’Malley’s distant voice, raised in song. Nipper, trotting at Fredi’s side one moment, made like a small black lightening-bolt in the next, soon lost in the low brush.

“You took your time about it,” Fredi gasped, when he emerged onto the track again, to see Nipper capering happily alongside the mule that O’Malley rode bare-back. Now and again the small dog leaped up, clear of the ground. “They must have showed you a grand time.”

“Oh, Freddy-boyo, they did indeed,” O’Malley groaned, even though his countenance seemed reasonably cheerful – especially considering that the bandits had deprived them of nearly all their stake. “Although ‘tis a matter of me, showing them a good time … the poor lads wanted to see someone playing a piano properly, y’see. I thought of it as a command performance, boyo. They heard all about the piano at the Headquarters Saloon an’ the wonders of m’ performances there – but bein’ in the outlaw trade, they could no’ partake of them in person.”

“Where did they take you to?” Fredi demanded, but O’Malley only shook his head.

“It was dark, an’ they tied a blindfold around me eyes, and again this morning when they led me away. It was a room in a house like Dona Vincenta’s, of that I am certain although it was only the one room that I saw – only sore neglected, an’ all covered with dust. The piano was in abominable tune an’ a torment to my own ears … but it pleased the audience well.”

“Glad that it pleased someone,” Fredi observed sourly, resenting O’Malley’s good cheer on this disastrous morning. “They stole our stake from us, O’Malley – and unless we can recover the other three mules, no chance of earning another one before spring.”

“Our stake? Pish-tush, boyo – all they took from us last night was some small coin, your revolver and my timepiece,” O’Malley’s countenance reflected such smug satisfaction that Fredi almost wanted to hit him, hit him again and again. “I took the precaution – well-justified you must admit now – of sewing the most of it, including the gold coins – into the hems of my coat, that very coat you are wearing now, leaving the lesser coin and notes as a decoy. You and Nipper between you, it was guarded well. I could not say anything to you last night. It was in my mind that Murrieta – I am certain that was him, being not dead but as alive as you or I – understood English better than he let on. Two may keep a secret if one of them is dead, you apprehend, Freddy-boyo; or one of them being a poor little doggie with no human speech at all.”

Astonished and overjoyed at this news, Fredi felt along the first hem of O’Malley’s heavy and many-caped woolen overcoat; yes, along that hem there were many small hard discs, buried in the doubled fabric. Only if you had thought to press the edge of that cape would one have detected their presence, and Fredi would have assumed them to be leaden dressmaker weights, inserted to make the ancient garment drape favorably.

“You could have told me,” he accused, and O’Malley sighed, a great and gusty sigh.

“Ah, boyo – there was not the time, and you are no actor, experienced in the intrigues among the wicked and lawless. It is indade a sadly wicked world that we live in … and the result of a bad performance is not a matter of rotten vegetables thrown upon the stage in disapproval – but a bullet aimed true at the heart or head.”

“Let’s go find those silly mules,” Fredi suggested, his heart already lightened considerably by the intelligence that O’Malley did retain a degree of low cunning about him. He set aside, with an effort, his previous conviction that O’Malley might have to be looked after as did Vati, who was dreamy and bookish, and lived life on such a high intellectual plane that realities such as Mexican bandits never impinged upon it.

 

 

 

 

It was said of Texas that it was a splendid place for men and dogs, but hell for women and horses. Every now and again though, there were women who embraced the adventure with the same verve and energy that their menfolk did; and one of them was a rancher, freight-boss and horse trader in the years before the Civil War. She is still popularly known as Sally Skull to local historians. There were many legends attached to her life, some of them even backed up by public records. Her full given name was actually Sarah Jane Newman Robinson Scull Doyle Wadkins Horsdorff. She married – or at least co-habited – five times. Apparently, she was more a woman than any one of her husbands could handle for long.

Sarah Jane, later to be called Sally was the daughter of Rachel Rabb Newman – the only daughter of William Rabb, who brought his extended family to take up a land grant in Stephen F. Austin’s colony in 1823; an original ‘Old 300’ settler. (In Texas, this is the equivalent of having come on the Mayflower to New England, or with William the Conqueror to England.) Rabb and his sons and daughter, with their spouses and children – including the six-year old Sally – settled onto properties on the Colorado River near present-day La Grange. Texas was even then a wild and woolly place, and several stories about those years hint at how the frontier formed Sally the legend – well, that and the example of her mother, a formidable woman in her own right. One story tells that Rachael and her children were safely forted up in their cabin, with hostile Indians trying to break in through the only opening … the chimney. Rachel threw one of her feather pillows onto the hearth and set fire to it, setting a cloud of choking smoke up the chimney. Another time – or possibly the same occasion – an Indian raider was trying gain entry by lifting the loose-fitting plank door off it’s hinges. When the Indian wedged his foot into the opening underneath the door, Rachel deftly whacked off his toes with one swipe of an ax.

Sally first married in 1831, two years following the death of her father. She was only 16; not all that early in a country where women of marriageable were vastly outnumbered by men. Her husband, Jesse Robinson was twice her age, also an early settler, and had a grant on in the DeWitt colony near Gonzales. At about that time, Sally registered a stock brand in her own name; she did not go undowered into the wedding, which turned out to be a bitterly contentious one. She had inherited a share of her father’s herd – but signed the registry with an ‘x’ indicating that she was most likely illiterate. But if Sally had been shorted in the matter of book-learning, she had not been when it came to making a living in frontier Texas. Sally rode spirited horses, and astride – not with a lady-like side-saddle. She tamed horses, raised cattle, managed a bullwhip and a lariat, spoke Spanish fluently and was a dead shot with the pair of revolvers which customarily hung from a belt strapped around her waist. There are no daguerreotypes or any sketches from life of Sally, only brief descriptions by those who met her and took note now and again.  “…Superbly mounted, wearing a black dress and sunbonnet, sitting as erect as a cavalry officer, with a six shooter hanging at her belt, complexion once fair but now swarthy from exposure to the sun and weather, with steel-blue eyes that seemed to penetrate the innermost recesses of the soul…”  was the testimony of one obviously shaken individual. More »