More gunfire followed.
Rafe and Helen exchanged wary looks, then rose to rush after Mary and the excited miners. Helen thought about her earlier teasing with Rafe, how she’d hinted that staying in the past might not be such a bad idea. She changed her mind now.
Rafe put an arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. “Maybe we should go home. Maybe I’d be willing to jump off a cliff with a homemade parachute, after all. Maybe it’s time to leave this hellhole of the past.”
Unfortunately, they soon learned that it was too late.
Chapter Seventeen
A high-pitched scream rang in the air, and went on and on and on.
Mary rushed along with them down the crowded street, drawn by the wrenching cry. Even Zeb had awakened from his drunken stupor to lope behind them, remarking woozily, between belches, “Mebbe it’s the haints come ta punish us fer our fornicatin’ ways.”
“Shut up, you old fool,” Mary called back. “You ain’t done no more fornicatin’ than I have in a good spell. If there’s any punishin’ ta be ladled out, it’ll come from the Good Lord’s pitcher and it’ll be fer all the corn likker you bin suckin’ up.”
“Hell’s bells! Do you allus have ta talk so gol-durned loud, Mary? My stummick feels like the bottom of a milk churn.”
“If you weren’t so rip-snortin’ corned all the time — ”
“Oh, my God!” Helen shrieked, stopping short. She couldn’t believe the horror unfolding before her.
Rosalinda, the Mexican prostitute from The Lucky Dollar, was being held back by two men, one of them her boss, Jack Fulton, and the other, Curtis Bancroft, owner of the Empire Hotel. The wild-eyed young woman was covered with blood, although she appeared to have no wounds. She was alternately screaming and crying, then throwing out insults to the angry prospectors. “Ay, Dios mio! You bastards! You killed my husband. Damn you all to hell. Oh, Carlos! Mi esposo1”
On the ground lay her husband, Carlos, Pablo’s brother.
Blood poured from a fatal bullet wound delivered to his chest. Beside him on the ground were two white men, presumably Hiram Flagg and Frank Boilings, their faces and necks and chests covered with multiple stab wounds.
Rosalinda held a bloody knife in her hand.
In the background, near the canvas-roofed hovel where Carlos and Rosalinda had lived, stood a dry-eyed Mexican boy of about eight, holding a wailing, near-naked infant in his small arms.
“Que pasa? What’s going on here?” Rafe said, pushing men aside to step forward. He addressed Rosalinda, who was still restrained by the two men.
Her crazed eyes fixed on Rafe, recognizing a potential lifeline in this mob of bloodthirsty men calling for a lynching. She spewed out a fiery explanation in Spanish, at one point spitting on the two white men at her feet. This caused the miners to edge closer with raised fists. Rafe questioned her in her native tongue, gesticulating with his hands.
Finally, Rafe told the crowd, “She says these two men broke into her home and tried to rape her.”
“Ya cain’t rape a whore. Ever’one knows that,” one man shouted.
Rafe ignored that ludicrous remark. “She says the men were drunk. She was in bed with her husband. Her two children were sleeping on a pallet on the floor when the men barged in.”
Mr. Bancroft spoke up then. “That’s no excuse for killing two men.”
The miners heartily agreed, chanting, “Lynch the harlot.”
“I’d like to remind you, Mr. Bancroft, that there are three dead men here. Not two,” Rafe said coldly.
Mr. Bancroft’s face flushed red and his lips thinned into a surly frown. He did not like being corrected by Rafe. Could it be because he was a Mexican?
“When Carlos asked the men to leave, they refused,” Rafe continued to translate. “Carlos declined to leave his home with his two children so these men could rape his unwilling wife. That’s when they shot him without warning or provocation.”
His words prompted many shouts from the crowd.
“That’s her word.”
“Who sez a whore is ever unwillin’?”
“He wuz jist a dirty Mex. A furriner. Ain’t like he wuz a real American. The Jezebel had no call ta stab Hiram and Frank. They wuz good fellers. Good American fellers.”