He chuckled. “Don’t s’pose you are, boy, but some are, some are!”
“My father isn’t.”
He chuckled again. “No, I reckon he ain’t. Your papa shoots mighty good, boy. I’ve seen it. And he takes no nonsense. Hell, if I’d knowed he was along, I’d never wasted time follerin’ you all.”
Doug Farley came in from the dark, a shotgun in his hands. Coolly he poured a cup for himself.
Peg-Leg looked up suddenly. “Verne, don’t be a damn fool! Don’t you go traipsin’ into Los Angeles! They’ll kill you. I’d back you against any three of them, but it won’t be three, it’ll be six or eight. The old man wants you dead.” He held his cup in both hands, his wooden leg stretched out in front of him. He noticed me looking at it. “That there’s the third one, boy. Whittled ‘em out myself! I busted the first one in some rocks, but the second …” He looked up at my father. “Hell, Verne! There was six or seven of them. They come at me in a cantina, aimin’ to stretch my hide. They had knives, and so did I, an old bowie, but when there’s that many…
“Well, I fetched off my wooden leg an’ had at ‘em! I laid out four before they taken out. Like scared rabbits, they was! But they left four all stretched out, two of ‘em with busted skulls.
“Trouble was, I busted my leg an’ had to limp out of there usin’ a chair. I done holed up in one of them canyons where there’s a trail from the San Fernando Valley down toward Rancho La Brea. I set up there until I whittled out a new leg. This’n’s better’n the other was.”
“How’s the trail through Romero’s Pass?”
“Romero’s? Oh, y’mean the one north of San Jacinto Mountain? It ain’t bad. Sandy here an’ there, but you can go through, all right. “Romero … I mind him. He was the Spanish captain who went through there first.
I mean aside from Injuns.”
He filled another cup. “Set down, Verne. I’m peaceful, and them boys out there, they’ll be long gone back to camp.” He sipped his coffee, then glanced slyly at my father. “You’re close to them Injuns at Agua Caliente, so you’ll hear it sooner or later. They be sayin’ that Tahquitz has come back.” My father did not immediately reply. He took his time filling his cup; then he glanced over at me. “Tahquitz is supposed to be an evil spirit. Some say he’s a monster of some kind, even a dragon. Once in a while the mountains rumble and they say Tahquitz is trying to escape.
“Long ago, so the story went, Tahquitz used to come down and steal maidens from the villages. They said he ate them. One day a brave young warrior tracked him into the mountains and found the cave where he lived, and walled it shut with Tahquitz inside.”
My father looked across his cup at Smith. “What do you mean, ‘come back’?” Peg-Leg’s eyes twinkled slyly and he stole a look at my father. “They be sayin’ he’s out of his cave, an’ that he walks the mountains of a night. They’ve found tracks up yonder, even down close to the hot springs. No Cahuilla will leave his lodge after dark. Not now.”
“There are many such beliefs,” Papa said mildly. “This here’s more’n just a belief. Got so no Injun will even hunt in the piney woods. They stay down on the desert. They’re scared, Verne, real scared. I know Injuns, an’ no matter what folks say, they don’t scare easy.” There was a movement behind us, and looking around, I saw it was Miss Nesselrode. She had gotten out of the wagon and was coming up to the fire. Peg-Leg Smith saw her at the moment I did and scrambled up with surprising agility. He swept off his hat. “Ma’am! I heard there was womenfolks along, but wasn’t expectin’ to have the pleasure.”
“Please sit down, Mr. Smith. The coffee smelled so good I just had to have a cup. Besides, I want to see the most notorious horse thief in the country.” Smith looked pained. “Now, ma’am, that ain’t right. Ain’t right nor fair. If you was a man, I’d shoot you for sayin’ that, but I can’t shoot no woman. Especially no lady. It just ain’t fair, you takin’ advantage like that. Anyway, I never stole no horses of yours.” He looked at her suddenly. “I didn’t, did I?” “No, Mr. Smith, you have not. I hope you never will, Mr. Smith, because you have become something of a legend. I would not like to hang a legend.” “What?” He was startled.
“Yes, Mr. Smith. I may go into the horse business, and if ever I do, and if ever you steal any horses from me, I would follow you to wherever you went with however many men it took, and I would hang you, Mr. Smith.” “Now, ma’am, that’s no way to talk! You wouldn’t hang a poor one-legged man, would you? After all, nobody’s ever catched me with stole horses. It’s just one o’ them stories that gets around.
“Anyway, that was all years ago. I’m out here huntin’ a gold mine I lost.” He looked at her, his eyes innocent. “You wouldn’t want to invest in a gold mine, would you, ma’am?”
“No, Mr. Smith, I would not.” She held out a hand for his cup. “May I get you some more coffee, Mr. Smith?”
He watched her cross to the coffeepot and refill his cup. She returned it to him, smiling. “Tell us, Mr. Smith. How did you make three thousand horses disappear in the desert with men chasing you? That should be a most interesting story.”
“Now, now! Ma’am, you shouldn’t ought to believe such stories! Them horses were stole by Injuns, driven off by Injuns. I had noth-“ “Please, Mr. Smith! Who led those Indians?”
Smith turned to look at Zachary Verne. “Zack? How come you got this woman along? Whose woman is she, anyway? If she keeps talkin’ like this, she could get a body into trouble! Why, I’m an old man now, fixin’ to move up to Frisco an’ settle down. I can’t have stories like that gettin’ around. Folks won’t trust me!” Smith was enjoying himself, and my father knew he was. “I d’clare, ma’am, if you was to want to go partners with me, I might just go back into business again!” She smiled at him. “You’re a rascal, Mr. Smith, and a scoundrel, but I like you.
You’re an interesting man.”
She paused. “Tell me the truth, Mr. Smith. Did you really amputate your own leg?”
“Had to. Wasn’t nobody to help except there toward the end. Milt Sublette, he did some cutting. Injun shot me in the leg, shattered the bone right below the knee. Wasn’t no doctor within a thousand miles, prob’ly. It was cut or die, and all the time, them Injuns was around. I’d rather lose a piece of my leg than my hair. So I cut her off.”
“You had no surgical training? I’m astonished.” “Ma’am? What you all mean by surgical trainin’? Of course I had! I’d killed an’ skinned out maybe a hundred buffler, and as many deer, to say noting of all the other game.
“Wasn’t one of us there hadn’t cut arrows out of people or cleaned up bad wounds one kind or another. I’d done more cutting on animals and folks than nine out of ten surgeons. I’d cut meat and I’d cut bone maybe a thousand times since I was a youngster. Cuttin’ on a man offers the same sort of problems. “You civilized city folks live in a world a whole lot different than ours! Why, Ewing Young, him that was our leader a time or two, he was tellin’ us one time how a man named Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood. We thought that was almighty funny, amusin’ I mean, because every Injun on the Plains and in the woods knew all about it. Hunters for thousands of years understood, and those old priests who performed thousands of human sacrifices, do you think they didn’t know? This Harvey feller, he just wrote it up for folks to read. “I hear folks talkin’ about Lewis and Clark and all they ‘discovered.’ Why, I talked with a Frenchman who was guide to David Thompson, the Hudson Bay man. That Frenchman had been all over that ‘discovered’ country ten years before!”
“Mr. Smith,” Miss Nesselrode asked suddenly, “what is it like in California?
Over the mountains, I mean?”
He looked at her, then squatted on his haunches again, nursing the coffee. “It is the best of lands,” he said quietly, “and will someday be among the greatest. Don’t go there unless you can grow. That’s the trouble with the Spanish folks, they’ve lived too easy all these years, nobody to fight, or reason to. Now some of them smart Yankees are there, things will be different. “Me, I’ve been a mountain man and a trapper. Why do you think I left the East to trap for fur? Because that was where the money was! I could make more in a week, if I kept my hair, than I could make in a year back to home! That’s why those other fellers come west, too. Now that folks want silk hats instead of beaver, those smart Yankees are lookin’ about. They’ve seen Los Angeles. “Now, you watch it change! They won’t be content to ride horseback or set in the sun! Look at Wolfskill, now. I hunted and trapped with William Wolfskill. Now he’s out there with grapes and oranges growin’. You see, he’ll make him a fortune. Ben Wilson’s there, too, and Workman, Rowland, and others. “That country is goin’ to grow! Folks who are smart are goin’ to get rich, and a lot of others are goin’ to set by and watch it happen. “Get hold of some land. It will last and be there when all the rest has changed. Everything else fades with time, but the land stays there. Sure, there’s floods, earthquakes, and storms, but by and large, the land stays. “Get land for the long pull, and look about to see what folks need most and get it for them and make them pay for it.