El Lazo - The Clint Ryan Series



  El Lazo

  (the lasso)

  by

  L. J. Martin

  Copyright 2013 L. J. Martin

  Wolfpack Publishing

  PMB 414

  1001 E. Broadway, #2

  Missoula, Montana 59802

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Other Works by L. J. Martin

  in print and eBook

  Shadow of the Mast

  Tenkiller

  Mojave Showdown

  El Lazo

  Against the 7th Flag

  The Devil’s Bounty

  The Benicia Belle

  Shadow of the Grizzly

  Rush to Destiny

  Windfall

  Condor Canyon

  Blood Mountain

  Stranahan

  McKeag’s Mountain

  McCreed’s Law

  O’Rourke’s Revenge

  Wolf Mountain

  Nemesis

  Venomous (Fourplay)

  Sounding Drum (Last Stand)

  From The Pea Patch

  Write Compelling Fiction

  Killing Cancer

  Internet Rich (with Mike Bray)

  Against the Grain

  Tin Angel (with Kat Martin)

  Crimson Hit (with Bob Burton)

  Bullet Blues (with Bob Burton)

  Quiet Ops (with Bob Burton)

  Myrtle Mae (cartoons)

  Cooking Wild & Wonderful

  Mr. Pettigrew

  Unchained

  Short Story Collection & More

  Slopes of the Sierra (short stories)

  Who's The Boss?

  The Write Stuff

  Buckshot (formerly Tenkiller)

  Blood Mountain

  California Cocina

  Mojave Showdown

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Epilogue

  Historical Notes & Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  One

  John Clinton Ryan crashed to the holystoned deck of the fo’c’sle.

  Instantly awake after being thrown from his bunk, he strained in the darkness for sounds of what was happening, but heard nothing over the wailing wind and the sea pounding against the hull of the brig.

  The Savannah listed sharply to port then stayed fast. Clint cleared his head and tried to collect himself. The ship was not rolling, not pitching and diving in the huge swells as she had been all day and night. He gained his feet, but the ship lurched again with a wrenching sound that echoed against the bulkhead.

  Shattering timbers—the splintering cry of a ship dying in the darkness.

  “Madre de dios”, we are sinking!” a shipmate cried out.

  “It’s every man for himself!” yelled another of the dozen sailors in the fo’c’sle.

  “Don’t panic, lads,” Clint managed, then grunted at a man over him with a muttered oath. The sailor drove a knee into Clint’s chest, knocking him back to the deck. Clint lurched to his feet before another stumbled into him. Men cursed and cried out, fighting for the ladder and the relative safety of the open deck. Another man crashed into him, and Clint shoved him roughly away.

  Sinking back into the recess of his bunk, he calmly checked his waistband. His knife was still there. He had been too exhausted to remove it when he collapsed into his narrow recess at midnight after twenty-four tortuous hours on deck. Taking a deep breath, he waited for the panicked men to clear out. It appeared that after twelve years at sea, having been cabin boy at fifteen, he was experiencing his first grounding and, possibly, a sinking.

  When the clamoring died, Clint made his way to the hatch, groping in the dark until his foot struck something solid. Kneeling in the four-inch-deep water, he realized one of his shipmates was down. Hoisting the man over his shoulder, he started up the ladder to the main deck.

  As Clint reached the wind-whipped darkness of the deck, stinging spray lashed at his face with a banshee wail. He strained his eyes, but could not see beyond the deckhouse. His burden moaned, and Clint gently lowered the man to the pine.

  When the man’s swarthy face was lit by a flash of distant lightning, Clint realized it was the Turk, a man who had signed on at Pernambuco. The man rolled to his back and sat up, shaking his head, throwing water from his curly black hair and mustache.

  Again the brig listed badly. Clint grasped a line to keep from sliding to the rail and knelt beside the sailor.

  “Are you all right?” he shouted over the wind.

  “Aye,” Turk said groggily. “Struck my head. What happened?”

  “We’re hard aground, fast on a reef. But she’s givin’ way. I fear she’ll broach soon.”

  As Clint regained his feet, Mackie, the second mate, grasped his shoulder and leaned close, shouting to be heard. Mackie’s eyes were wide and wild with fright, and even in the wind and rain, Clint could smell the rancid breath of a man who had been at the grog.

  The captain… the cap’n called all hands,” Mackie slurred, “all hands to scuttling cargo from the forward hold—”

  Before he could finish, the foremast snapped with a cannon-like report, and sixty feet of Sitka spruce crashed to the deck, carrying with it yardarms, rigging, and two thousand square feet of furled canvas.

  Tangles of stiff tarred stays and fiddle-string-taut running rigging crossed and crisscrossed the deck, snapping like musket shots as mast and yardarms tumbled overboard.

  Instinctively, Clint leapt back into the safety of the fo’c’sle hatchway, clinging for his life to the hand-holds. Hearing anguished screams over the moan of the wind, he spun to see the two men before him grasping at the deck with taloned fingers as they were carried away in a snarl of line and timber.

  They were overboard and underwater before he could reach them.

  Wind and gravity tore at him, and the ship listed even more. “She’s doomed,” he thought, and clawed his way back on to the deck and into the mess of line and cloth left aboard. He wiped water from his eyes and strained into the darkness.

  The rail… he had to make the rail. If she broached, being trapped in the spider web of line was sure death.

  A tar-covered stay looped his ankle like a constricting black snake and he went down—but had his knife in hand before he hit the deck. He slashed at the hemp that tried to drag him into a mishmash of splintered wood and canvas, and stubbornly it parted.

  He careened to the rail. There would be no need to dive. The ten feet of freeboard had disappeared, and her scuppers lay under surging water. For a moment, he stared at frothing dark death, wondering if he should try and ride it out with the ship. Then she listed more, and without hesitation Clint stepped over.

  A crashing wave slammed him back against the taffrail, knocking the wind from him then the back surge sucked him into the darkness, and the cold black waters
of the Pacific dragged him under.

  With powerful strokes, he fought for the surface. A yardarm slammed into his chest and knocked the wind from him again. As he gasped for air, he took water, burning lungs and throat, but he clung onto the floating savior.

  He slashed at the lines that bound the timber to the ship. Finally he and the flotsam were heaving and dipping but moving away from the vessel that would suck them down in a whirling maelstrom when she slipped from the reef.

  A breaker rolled over him, and his end of the yardarm dove deep. When he surfaced, gasping from the water he had taken, he made his way to the middle of the twelve-foot-long timber, and it stabilized.

  Backhauling the water from his eyes, he could just make out the outline of the ship. The Savannah slithered from the reef with a shuddering moan and disappeared into the deep. The ship where he had lived and worked for six months and the men he had lived and worked with were gone.

  He thought he saw the outline of a boat and men then water covered him again. He kicked and fought toward where he hoped he had seen the boat, but the wind and smashing waves tossed him back.

  Lightning split the sky, followed by the staccato cannon-fire thunder of the unhappy gods. The fleeting flash revealed nothing but heaving water and lashing rain.

  Taking a racking breath, he coughed scorching salt water from lungs and throat. He shivered as an icy chill sliced his spine like a frigid blade.

  It seemed a bizarre time to feel fortunate, he thought, looking into the howling blackness where the ship had been, but he knew most of the twenty-four-man crew of the hundred-foot hide, horn, and tallow brig could not swim. He was one of only a few.

  In the intermittent bursts of light, as the yardarm dipped and dived and tried to lose him, he madly searched the surface of the water for his shipmates. The boat, if it had been there at all, was gone. With a quiet dread knotting his stomach, he spotted no other survivors.

  Finally, after hours, the wind abated, and the twelve-foot battering waves became a steady six. Crashing tons of water became lapping whitecaps. Fingers of lightning no longer flicked death crackles at him, nor did his ears ring from the bombardment of the gods’ cannons. After the bellow of the storm, the silence hung ominously. Yet, with the reprieve, the first rays of light grayed the sky over Alta California’s mountains, and with a burst of glory, burnished the mountains gold.

  For the first time in hours, Clint lifted his eyes, taking a fleeting moment to revel in the distant beauty and his own survival. Then reality swamped him like another crashing wave, and he wondered which way he was drifting.

  Just surviving had been the challenge of the night. Now living became a high range of mountains on the horizon. He had clung on through the night, a triumph over shipwreck and storm and fatigue, and the dawn cheered him with its promised warmth. Maybe he would make it.

  He had no idea how far offshore they had been when they took the reef, but they could not have been far. Soon it would be light enough to judge, and it could mean whether he lived or died—whether the night’s torture was merely prelude to a deep cold death.

  With daybreak, he began to make out the features of the distant shore, but just as the first of the sun’s warming rays touched him, a cold numbing fog crept across the water like a wet white muslin sheet, enveloping him in dank confinement. “Damn the bloody mess,” he thought then reasoned, “Better fog than blistering sun.”

  As he drifted, to keep his mind busy and away from what might be lurking beneath him, he calculated how long they had been at sea. They had departed Boston in late October and rounded Tierra del Fuego at Christmastime then the long northerly trip up the west coast of the Americas. Five months and twenty-four days, Clint calculated

  They had made only three stops in Alta California—one at Santa Catalina Island to off load and bury cargo, so the trade goods would not be taxed by the Mexicans, and a stop at the capital, Monterey, to gain passport and pay the tax on what few goods were left on board, then another anchorage at Santa Barbara to begin trading shoes, boots, iron, and cloth for hides, horn, tallow, and otter and beaver skins.

  Clint snapped alert. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted a fin slicing the water and wondered if he could scale the narrow yardarm.

  Two

  Captain Quade Sharpentier snarled a rebuke to his oarsman. “Row, you sogger! It’ll be a month to Santa Barbara at this rate.”

  His eight-foot-long captain’s boat held his first mate, Cecil Skinner, a barrel-chested pig-eyed Englishman, and the cook Wishon, a wiry half-Carib—half-African from Martinique. Sharpentier reclined against the bow of the boat while Wishon, the smallest of the three, stroked the oars with a smooth steady rhythm and Skinner squinted into the morning sun, manning the tiller.

  They had salvaged the boat, launching her from the tilting deck of the doomed Savannah into the dark promised death of the angry sea, The boat had survived, and with the light, they had managed to raise her cat sail, but the fickle wind was not being kind at the moment—dead still except for the sea heaving and dropping in great sheets of flat gray. Both Quade’s boat and the larger shore boat that followed lay adrift in indolent doldrums. The sail whispered a quiet complaint, luffing uselessly.

  Six others had managed to gain the safety of the shore boat, eight of twenty-four men, nine if Ryan still lived.

  He had lost many a man at sea, but this was the only time Quade Sharpentier had marked a ship with the bottom, much less lost one. And he knew he was at fault.

  Damn the grog. He glowered at the horizon. He had made an oath to himself to curtail his drinking, but again had broken it. He, and every man in the crew, knew that he should have been topside during the storm, but he had not been.

  Anger gnawed at his gut and competed with the wretched throbbing head he had earned from too much rum. He set his jaw, and his rawboned knuckles whitened as he grasped the gunwales.

  The worst of it was not the loss of ship and men, but the potential loss of his captain’s papers—or worse. If the owners brought charges against him—and he knew they would—he could face the gallows. No, the blame must be laid elsewhere.

  “Hell will find the bugger,” Sharpentier mumbled for the hundredth time since they had managed to escape the wrecked brig, “if the cold deep hasn’t already claimed him.” He scratched his salt-and-pepper beard, and his eyes, cold and as blue as chipped ice, bulged. “As God is my witness, I wish Mackie would have lived. I’d relish the opportunity to stretch his Irish neck.”

  “You may still get a chance at an Irishman,” Skinner, the Englishman, placated his New England-raised but English-blooded captain. “John Clinton Ryan is Mystic reared, but he’s also an Irish blackguard, just as Mackie was. And it was Ryan that Mackie called to the bow watch. How a man could miss that reef?”

  Sharpentier had already begun to plant the seeds of blame on Mackie and Ryan, and the first mate believed it.

  “He’s no man!” Sharpentier snapped. “He’ll be bait for the gulls when I finish with the bloody bloke, if he’s not fishbait already. And Mackie, he got his comeuppance in the fires of perdition, as God willed.”

  They had found Mackie’s body in tangled rigging during their desperate struggle to escape the broaching brig. Mackie would not testify at any owner’s hearing. But the owners would want to wreak havoc on someone. As second mate, Mackie, cold in Davy’s locker, could bear the lion’s share, but the owners would want a live body to vent their wrath upon, or know that their captain had done so.

  Skinner should heartily go along with it. During a shore leave, Skinner had had his head knotted soundly by Ryan, so there was no love lost between the two. Skinner had been at fault for the confrontation, but Sharpentier had been unwilling to punish the common sailor—he would have had a mutiny if he had done so. Sharpentier knew that the still angry first mate would back any play he made against the Irishman Ryan.

  Sharpentier shaded his eyes with a reddened hand. “A little breeze would he a blessing....�
€ Then his voice lowered. “John Clinton Ryan, a sogger and a shirker.”

  The captain rearranged his reclining position in the bow and mopped beads of sweat from his mottled brow. The man who allowed my brig to go aground… an Irish bastard. When we reach Santa Barbara, I’ll buy the best piece of hemp in Alta California and take the thirteen turns. I pray on the grave of my sainted mother that the bastard lives, so I can stretch his cowardly neck and watch him do the hangman’s jig. He’s a man deserved of a piece of new hemp.”

  “Few lived,” Wishon said between oar strokes. “Few. And Cap’n, pardon me for sayin’, but I never see de man, Clint Ryan—never see him to shirk.”

  Sharpentier leaned forward and glared at Wishon with cold blue eyes. To the Carib they seemed like two gun-barrel muzzles.

  “You watch your tongue, you African devil,” Sharpentier’s voice was as cold as his eyes, “You’ll find yourself swiminin’ back to join your sorrowful mates.”

  “Den who’ll row de boat?” Wishon thought, but said nothing and kept up the steady pace.

  Sharpentier eyed the Carib harshly, but hearing no more from him, reclined again. He picked up his log and thumbed through the pages, grateful that the weather had been so bad that no entries had been made. He would fill in his own version of the night’s events long before he presented it to the owners.

  If the Lord smiles upon me, John Clinton Ryan lives,” He shaded his eyes. “I believe the breeze is rising. She’s rippling the surface and coming our way. Bring her ten degrees larboard.”

  “Clint Ryan will have to wait,” Sharpentier thought, but he’ll keep. I’m a patient man… a patient man.

  He shooed pesky kelp flies, a sure sign of the beach, from his sweat-glistening brow. “There will be a breeze, and before long, a reckoning,” he growled. “And someone to offer up to the owners’ wrath,” he thought, “a sacrificial lamb—and a log to report his malfeasance and his hanging.”

  Clint exhaled a long audible sigh of relief as he realized the circling fin was only that of a porpoise. It was a good sign—the sailor’s friend, It dove under him as if investigating an interloper then disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

  He shaded his eyes and searched the far-off shore for recognizable landmarks. As an oarsman, he had gone ashore at Santa Barbara for a few hours. Only to help with the loading of supplies, but he had enjoyed terra firma for a few precious minutes.

  Across the beach, he had seen two of Alta California’s renowned beautiful señoritas in the distance watching the gringo marineros. What a sight to behold: all lace and crimson and turquoise and turtle combs, one with long black hair and one with chestnut brown, and both with flashing dark eyes. He had been months at sea and had forgotten how soft a woman could look, how musical her laughter could be.

  Then they were bound north again, through the Canal de Santa Barbara where the channel passes between offshore islands and the mainland, toward San Luis Obispo, where the captain had heard there were hides aplenty. But the spring storm had struck off Punta Concepción.

  California’s coast was usually calm, almost lethargic as her people often appeared to be, but this storm had come with a vengeance. Taking water over the bow—the worst they had suffered since the horrific pounding of fifty-foot waves off Tierra del Fuego. And this storm, though less harsh than that, had driven them onto the merciless rocks.

  Again Clint opened his eyes and tried to find the horizon. “The morning fog was lifting, and the gray sea was calm. Deathly calm,” Clint thought, then wished he had not. With surprising haste, the sun began to penetrate the dank fog, glinting on the surface of the water, and gray brightened to glimmering blue.

  At first Clint welcomed it; then, though it was only May, the heat of the burning rays began to beat unmercifully. He had been worried about the cold and prayed for the sun’s warmth. Now he was intermittently dunking himself to escape it.

  Clint squinted and shaded his eyes, scanning the distant shore. Not a ripple blemished the surface—he would get no encouragement from the breeze. He worked his way to the end of the crossarm, pointed it toward what he figured was the nearest landmass and began to kick rhythmically with his long, muscular legs.

  Drifting and dying of thirst were not a part of his plan. A ship of his own was what he wanted and worked for, not a slow, throat-closing death on a flat gray sea.

  After three hours with the sun high above him, thirst began to tickle his throat, and he fought the urge to take in salt water. Drinking it would do no good. He had seen men with lips and tongues swollen from drinking sea water.

  No. Better no water at all.

  Put your head down and kick. Each stroke takes you closer to shore. Ignore the scorching sun. Fresh water awaits you. Life awaits you.

  Stroke.

  Kick.

  Raising his head, Clint wiped his eyes and realized it was getting dark. He had been stroking and kicking for hours, and his tongue had swollen. His mouth was packed with tongue, not a good sign, and his vision blurred. He wondered if it was lack of water or merely exhaustion.

  He stroked on, driving himself half the night, until cramped legs did not answer and exhausted arms knotted and ached with pain. Binding himself to the yardarm with what line was left, he slept.

  The sun came and went a second time, and he again pushed himself, ignoring his shrieking muscles. More and more he clung to the yardarm, hoping his arms and legs would still function. Then a breeze tickled his back. He lifted his head. A good sign. He tried to focus his eyes, but the shore seemed no nearer.

  Hoping for the strength to resume, a sea chantey came to him, and he hummed quietly and sang the words in his mind.

  I knew my love was drowned and dead,

  He stood so still, no word he said.

  All dank his hair, all dim his eye,

  I knew that he had said good-bye.

  All green and wet with weeds so cold,

  Around his form green weeds had hold.

  “I’m drowned in California seas, he said,

  “Oh you an’ I will ne’er be wed.”

  “The devil with that,” he thought. “To hell with that.”

  There was no one to mourn him, so what was the use of drowning? He began to paddle slowly.

  But by night he wondered if he would ever again see the dawn.

  Three

  "Aye, Alcalde, he is a tall man, blue-eyed, sandy-haired, thick of shoulder and chest, nothing more than a common sailor, goes by the name John Clinton Ryan.”

  Captain Sharpentier sat across the wide carved table from the justice of the peace, the alcalde, of Pueblo Santa Barbara and eyed the rotund bureaucrat, resplendent in a high-collared scarlet coat sporting large buttoned revers and gold braided epaulets over a purple velvet waistcoat. Don Francisco Acaya’s coat and waistcoat contrasted with his light blue trousers with gold stripes down the outer seams. A leather shako hat lined with gilded braid and topped with a red-feather pom-pom rested on a narrow library table behind his desk along with a Bilboa sword with silver-trimmed hand guard, sheath, and belt. He was the quintessence of pomp—and plump.

  But Sharpentier was not impressed. He had seen his share of peacocks before—though never such a fat one—and he was here on a mission. The captain wrinkled his nose as the unpleasant spicy odor from a small brass incense burner wafted across to him. He took a deep draw of the surprisingly good brandy the man had served him.

  “I want him,” Sharpentier continued. “If he appears, hold him in irons,”

  Don Francisco cleared his throat, and his jowls vibrated. He blinked wide-set, docile eyes. “I assure you, señor, we have a stock that will hold any man, and my juzgado is among the finest in Alta California, but—”

  “But?” Sharpentier raised bushy eyebrows.

  ‘But, it is a matter for you Anglos.’

  He will be in your country without passport, a trespasser.”

  “This is true, but not of his own doing.”

  “That is
where you are wrong, Don Acaya. It was his doing that the Savannah was wrecked. His doing that more than half my crew is drowned. His doin’ that thousands of dollars of cargo—goods that would have been traded to your countrymen for hides and horn—lie at the bottom of the sea off Point Conception. I want this man, Alcalde.”

  “I will write the governor, Capitán. He will instruct—”

  “That will take weeks!” Sharpentier snapped. Rising, he downed the last of the brandy. “I want this man, and I want to hang him, as the laws of the United States dictate.” Steel-gray eyes honed into the Mexican. “I will go to the majordomo at the presidio if necessary, and he will–”

  “No, you will not, Capitán.” Don Francisco Acaya puffed up like a strutting cock, and his docile eyes narrowed. “This is a matter for my office, or the governor, not the military.” The judge snapped to his feet, surprisingly light-footed in his brilliantly polished black half boots, his trousers fastened under the insteps. He marched around his desk to the office door.

  “You, señor, are not in the Unites States. You are in Alta California as a guest of the Mexican government.” Don Francisco opened the door and stepped aside so Sharpentier could exit. The captain worked his jaw so hard the muscles ached. He marched through the open door, then spun back to continue his tirade.

  Don Francisco, slightly calmer, nodded politely and clicked his heels. “As I said, señor, I will write the governor. If he concurs….”

  Sharpentier angrily turned on his heel and left the anteroom, stomping past a clerk who looked up in surprise over his quill pen and journal, and slammed the outside door behind him.

  Out in the square, Skinner unlimbered his apelike bulk from a bench under an equally massive live oak. The bench overlooked the pueblo’s main road, Calle Principal, and most of the little town. He squinted his small eyes in the bright sunlight and cautiously surveyed his boss. “Didn’t go well, Captain?”

  “It matters little,” Sharpentier said. “When the time comes, if the Turk is right and Ryan lives, we will stretch his neck—if we have to do it from this oak, right in front of the public house.”

  “Do we have to stay around here and wait to see if the shirker shows his face?” Skinner asked as he eyed the strong limbs of the oak. “Not that I would mind tightening the noose around his Irish neck. I never favored the man.”

  “And you, Captain,” he thought, ”need someone to blame for the loss of the brig. A man who’s done the hangman’s dance talks to no one.”

  “Yes, sir,” Skinner said, “it’s the hangman’s rope for the Irishman,

  Sharpentier smiled tightly. “The Charleston should make Santa Barbara soon, then I’ll be a bloody guest on a company ship until I can make passage home. I pray it’s not before Ryan shows up. A signed confession, before we hang him, would bode well with the owners, God knows they’ll be an angry lot, and hell could freeze before I get another share as captain.”

  “I’ll speak up for you, sir. Odds are, Ryan’s drowned.”

  “The Turk seems to think not. He was the last to see the sogger and swears he was afloat and clinging to some flotsam well clear of the ship. If we’re to decorate this oak with Ryan’s rotting carcass and smell up the alcalde’s square, I hope he’s right.”

  ‘The alcalde would not like that much.” Skinner furrowed thick eyebrows and displayed a mouth’ full of rotting teeth.

  “I don’t give a damn what the fat bastard likes. The only good thing about the alcalde is his brandy.” Sharpentier lowered his voice and checked to make sure he was not overheard. “Unless I miss my guess, if President Polk has his way, California will be a part of the Union before long. From the Atlantic to the Pacific—that has always been our destiny.”

  He leaned close to his first mate. “When we were in Monterey, I called on Thomas Larkin, the American consul and, from those gathered at his home, I heard more talk of rebellion.”

  Again Sharpentier glanced around but saw only two paisanos busily negotiating the road with a carreta overflowing with hides, well out of earshot. “The nine of us can handle a hundred of these Mexes. At least we could if we had our Aston muskets or, better yet, a few of those new Walker Colts I hear the Texas Dragoons are using.” He motioned toward an adobe. “Come on, we’ll bide our time in the cantina.”

  As they made their way across the courtyard, Skinner assessed the presidio, the military headquarters of Santa Barbara. “Maybe we should be figuring a way to relieve the alcalde’s armory of a few of those Spanish flintlocks I see the cholos carrying. They’re not much, but in the hands of a few fine sailing men…”

  Sharpentier laid a sun-reddened hand on his first mate’s shoulder, “By the gods, Skinner, you’ll make captain yet if you keep up that kind of thinking. Let’s gnaw on it over a mug of that godawful aguardiente brandy these papists drink. It would be a pleasure to throw the fat judge—and the mayor with him—in their own juzgado.

  “Juzgado?” Skinner repeated clumsily.

  “Gaol to you, my English friend, jail to the Americans.” He laughed. “Sounds good, the judge and the mayor in gaol. Captain Quade Sharpentier the new alcalde of Santa Barbara, and a town full of senoritas left to us.”

  He scratched his beard thoughtfully, “There be no need to keep our tail between our legs now. We don’t have to kiss the fat backsides of these heathen Mexes now that we’ve no ship to haul hides on and no goods to trade for them, thanks to Clint Ryan.”

  They reached the cantina, and Skinner pulled the hide door cover aside so the captain could enter. The rousing sound of seven other surviving members of the Savannah’s crew singing a lively sea chantey rang out into the square. Sharpentier paused in the doorway before he got within earshot of those inside.

  “Ryan and his confession, and a sweet señorita’s virtue, may be the last and only pleasure we take from Alta California.”

  With that, Sharpentier laughed deeply and stepped from the noonday sun into the dark cantina. Smoothing the two patches of stringy blond hair that edged his bald pate, Skinner lumbered in behind.