Blood in Sweet River

Book 3: Cleve Trewe Western

by John Shirley

Genres: Westerns; Anthologies; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Civil War veteran Cleve Trewe locks horns with a ruthless cattleman who’s hungry for land, thirsty for power—and out for blood . . .

BLOOD IN SWEET RIVER

After a long, hard journey west, Cleve Trewe is ready to settle down. He’s got his beautiful wife Berry in San Francisco, a baby on the way, and his sights set on a gorgeous piece of land in the Sierras. This sweet slice of heaven is aptly named Sweet River, and it’s the perfect place to build a ranch, farm, and home for his family. Problem is, Cleve’s not the only one with his eyes on the land. A big-time cattle baron named Asa Hawthorn is prepared to use threats, intimidation—and armed thugs—to get what he wants. Worse yet, Cleve knows the man from the darkest days of the Civil War . . .

Cleve’s not about to surrender his claim.. He’s got his buddy Kanaway by his side, a family of Paiute Indians on his team, and the property papers ready to sign. That’s when the real trouble starts. To squash the deal, Hawthorn unleashes his deadliest henchmen—including a would-be gunfighter from Cleve’s past and a killer-for-hire who never misses. The Paiute family recognizes some of them as the men who slaughtered their tribe—a massacre that Cleve suspects was the work of Asa Hawthorn. Either way, a major battle is brewing. And the crystal blue waters of Sweet River are about to turn red . . .
 

Release date: August 20, 2024

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

San Francisco. September 1875.

A pair of jacks . . .

A queen, a king, and a seven of spades.

Cleveland Trewe was trying to decide if that pair of jacks was worth the risk of a big raise. Poker seemed on his side tonight. He’d caught some good hands. But he full well knew that luck was “fickle as a country girl hunting a rich husband,” to use an expression favored by Leon Studge. Luck could turn tail with any new deal of the cards.

Still, Cleve had reasons to raise. He had a draw remaining, to improve his hand, and the man across from him at the circular table at the Montgomery Street’s Gentleman’s Club was fair drunk. A drunk card player could jump any old way. He might toss down his cards in disgust. He might call or raise on a whim. A drunk would just plain make the wrong decision.

But there was another reason Cleve wanted to raise—he was bored. He was full bored with poker games; he was bored with saloons, whether highfalutin saloons like this one or the sawdust and spittoon variety. He was powerful weary of San Francisco. He and Berenice had been here ten months, near nine of them waiting for the baby to come, for this was where the best physicians resided. Cleve had been able to make only the most pitifully tentative efforts to set up a ranch in Sweet River Valley. A few hundred cattle bought, kept for him near Sacramento; a discussion by mail with a man who might or might not sell Cleve the grazeland he hankered for. But the baby had come three weeks early, and it wouldn’t do for him to drag Berenice and little Alice to Sweet River till both were strong and fit enough.

It was stuffy in the “gentleman’s club,” and Cleve tilted his Stetson back on his head and considered taking off his black coat. Under it was a white silk shirt with French cuffs, a present from Berenice. The frilled cuff was a men’s fashion exhibited by the local bon vivants, and Cleve had been uneasy about it, figuring he’d resemble some decadent fop. But he’d come to prize the shirt, even if it didn’t quite go with his gray Stetson, gray-and-black-striped trousers, and well-worn black riding boots.

“Mister, you going to call, raise, or toss in the hand?” asked Stogie Whitt—snarling around his stub of a cigar. A black-bearded slab of a man in a gold and scarlet waistcoat, gartered shirt sleeves, and a Homberg tilted aggressively forward, Stogie chewed on the cigar with his bared tobacco-stained teeth and stared at Cleve with piggish eyes.

Given the tone of the question, Cleve declined to answer. He laid his cards face down, picked up a handful of gold eagles, and clinked them in his palm as if to amuse himself.

“Dammit, sir!” Stogie snapped. “Call, raise, or fold! I’ve got a pistol in my hip pocket and I do not care to be kept waitin’!”

Cleve kept clinking the coins and yawned, glancing around the saloon, as if casually wondering who else had come in.

Three men were drinking at the bar. The bespectacled, mustachioed bartender was lighting a customer’s pipe. It was Tuesday, approaching midnight. The stage’s few musicians had departed an hour ago, leaving a deathly quiet. Yet the gentleman’s club looked smokier and dingier than when he’d strolled in. Yellow gaslight sconces on the gold and red velvet walls threw a phlegmy light across two billiard tables, the carven-walnut back room bar, the brass statues of half-clothed Roman women boldly displaying their bosoms as they danced to either side of the mirror. The air was heavy and close, and in the cone of light over the bar the smoke seemed to arrange itself to mimic the paisley carpet.

“That’s done it,” said Stogie. He stood up and made to reach for the cash on the table. “You folded.”

Cleve tossed the double eagles on the table. “Raise a hundred. You want to win it from me, sit down. Call or fold—but do not touch the pot.”

Stogie glared, nostrils flaring. Cleve was ready to deal with the matter if the gambler reached for his gun. They were not supposed to carry weapons in San Francisco, but it was a rule often flouted.

Stogie snorted and sat heavily down. “You’re called!” He pushed a hundred dollars into the pot.

“I’ll take a card,” Cleve said, tossing down the seven of hearts.

Stogie blinked. “Just the one?”

“Just the one.” His hand might improve to a pair of queens or kings, to go with his jacks, maybe even three of a kind.

He watched closely as Stogie dealt him a card. The card was a jack of spades.

Cleve pretended to ponder his cards, humming to himself and peering at them. Then he shrugged and laid them face down on the table.

“Let’s shove it all,” Cleve said. “I’m about ready to go on home.” He pushed the rest of his money toward the center of the table.

“Ha!” Stogie said. “I call!” He flipped his cards onto the table face up. “Two aces, two tens!”

Cleve gave him a tight smile. He showed his cards. “Three of a kind.” He reached out and scooped the money toward him. “It’s been a pleasure.”

Stogie jumped to his feet, upsetting his chair. “You’ve been winning all night, and I know you’ve got cards tucked away in that coat!” He tugged at his pistol.

Cleve put his hand in his coat for his hideaway gun, reflecting that Berenice would not be pleased to hear he got in a shooting affray.

Someone hidden by Stogie’s bulk stepped up behind the gambler. Stogie grunted as his arm was twisted behind his back. “Reaching for that gun would end with you dying, feller,” said a familiar voice.

Cleve stood and blurted, “Leon Studge!”

“Let go of me!” Stogie bellowed.

Leon pushed Stogie away, keeping the big man’s gun. “You should be thanking me, mister,” Leon said. “I calculate I just saved your life.” Stocky, snub-nosed, not quite forty, Leon was dressed in a blue suit and an oxblood bowler hat; his eyebrows were lofted, his brickish face lit up by his grin. Cleve noted that Leon no longer wore a badge.

Stogie spat his cigar onto the floor and spun around, his cheeks flaming red as he massaged his arm. “You like to broke my arm!”

“I didn’t put so much as a bruise on your fat little arm. You know who you were about to pull a gun on?”

“I don’t know his name but I know his kind!” Stogie snapped.

Leon laughed. “You mistake him! That’s Cleve Trewe. Lawman of Denver and Axle Bust Creek. You might’ve heard something.”

Stogie’s mouth dropped open. The color drained out of his face. “Do you say so? Cleve Trewe?” He looked at the bartender. “That right?”

The bartender nodded. “That is indeed Mr. Trewe. And he does not have the reputation of a deceitful card-player.”

“Why—I might have mistaken . . . that is, the light in here is bad . . . perhaps I imagined . . .” He sniffed and took off his hat to Cleve. “I do apologize.”

Cleve nodded impatiently. “Give him his gun, Leon, and”—He took two of the twenty-dollar gold coins up and laid them together at the edge of the table—“buy yourself a drink or two on me, Stogie. No hard feelings.”

Leon handed the gun over, Stogie stowed it away, snatched up the two gold eagles, slapped on his hat, and hurried out. Leon chuckled, watching him go.

Cleve turned to Leon, so inordinately pleased to see his old friend he had to grin. “I just mailed a letter to you, yesterday, damn you!”

Leon shrugged. “Maybe it’ll be forwarded on to me, but I doubt it. I quit the job in Axle kind of sudden.”

Cleve laughed and the two men shook hands. “Lord, it’s good to see you. Is Teresa here too?”

“She’s with your wife, cooing over that baby!”

“How’d you find me in this teeming metropolis?”

“Your missus knows just where you like to gamble. I thought to hear a note of exasperation as she told me where you was likely to be.”

“Oh, well, once or twice a week. I’ve hired a housekeeper who nannies, too, and she—wait now! Berenice is all right? There’s nothing—?”

Leon was stacking Cleve’s coins and greenbacks. “Berry is just dandy. She wants you back before she goes to bed. Let’s have a drink and then I’ll drag you home by the ear, just like she asked me to.” He flicked a gold eagle to Cleve who caught it between two fingers. “Looks like you’re buying, Major . . .”

They walked side by side down the wooden walk along Montgomery Street, passing through pools of gaslight. The night air was cool, as a breeze came off San Francisco Bay. Cleve could smell the brine of it. Here and there, clusters of men, and a few women, were to be seen in front of the occasional saloon or whiskey bar, each group with its own little cloud of tobacco smoke catching the streetlight gleam.

Montgomery sported some hulking blocks of buildings, four and five and six stories, interspersed with smaller wooden structures, many with a false front, that could almost have come from Dodge City. A horse and buggy clipped and clacked by; two men across the street sang an obscene song about sailors as they drunkenly swaggered along, when Leon asked, “What’s this road made of? Looks red, like.”

“That’s crushed basalt. Does not get muddy. An old forty-niner friend of mine, Jep Cornwall, he says in the old days, the mud got so deep out here you couldn’t cross the street without fear of sinking away. And one night the rain was a pure deluge, so a horse sank and smothered in the mud. After that, they laid down redwood logs and basalt over the roads.”

“Is that so! Now, tell me this—what gun was you reaching for, back in that fancy saloon?”

“Forehand and Wadsworth .38 pocket gun. Based on an old Smith and Wesson hideaway. Haven’t had to fire it except at a target, as yet.”

“Forehand and Wadsworth? Is that the Swamp Angel?”

“No, young ’un, that’s their .41. They call this one the Bull Dog. Two-inch barrel.”

“Better have that man nose-to-nose-close with a dainty gun like that.”

“You’re not carrying an equalizer?”

“I don’t need a gun—I got two equalizers, we call ’em fists. And I got a folding knife on me.”

“You are surely bold since you killed that Hortlander son of a bitch—you did it without a gun, as I recall.”

“You forget, I did use a gun. The butt of a gun. Hammered him good with it.”

Cleve winced at the thought. “Well if ever a man deserved it . . .”

Leon paused in front of a false-fronted business and looked up at the gaslit sign. “I’d carry that fine Colt you gave me here, but I’m told the local gendarmes don’t like to see a man wearing his gun.”

“Which is why we carry them out of sight. About half the men you see have them, tucked away somewheres. We don’t all have your powerful fists.”

“Now you’re just taunting at me.”

Cleve chuckled. “You still got that town marshal badge somewhere?”

“I got the badge as a keepsake. I told you, I resigned.”

“And why?”

“Y’all don’t know—I decided to come in person to tell you and Berry. I’m plain done with Axle Bust! Six weeks ago, maybe seven, Berry’s brother shut the Golden Fleece. Said the mine was played out and too expensive, even if it wasn’t. Floodin’ on ’em all the time. Town got worried, and the laid-off men got drunk and rough and some of the old-time southern seshers—they come after Dave Kanaway, saying he was too uppity.” David Kanaway was a Black businessman in the mining camp. “I knocked some heads and had to shoot a man.”

“You shoot him dead?”

“He was still alive when I left. Anyway, the town council gave me a tongue-hiding over it, and I said you can kiss my Texas ass.”

Cleve chuckled. “I resigned from lawing there in much the same case.”

“So then, I calls on Kanaway and I says, ‘Dave, how’s about you sell out and go with me and Teresa, and we’ll see ol’ Cleve in Frisco? Dave, you know all about horses,’ I says, ‘and Cleve’s going to need that on the ranch.’”

“Dave’s here?” Cleve was much pleased. “A valuable man! Where is he?”

“Staying at some inn down by the ocean.”

“Close to the water? Not down in Barbary Coast!”

“It could be.”

“He could have bunked with us.”

“He didn’t want to put you out none.”

“Why, he’d be welcome. We have a sizable suite. If he’s in the ‘Barbary Coast’ district—that’s the rough part of this burg. Have to look into it tomorrow. You bring anyone else to San Francisco? Maybe Drizzle Dan?”

“Is that what you think of me, I spend my hours with that drunk?”

“You saying you never keep company with the lushes?”

“Why, I’ve got to keep an eye on them is all! Got to drink with ’em to do that. But you know—Drask come along with us, too, him and his Mai. He’s at the Grand. Going to hang out his shingle right here in town. They want to do something for some folks she’s got out here.”

“Lawyer Drask too! Berry will be pleased to see Mai.” Mai Ling, a Chinese girl who’d been sold into a kind of slavery and rescued by Cleve, was now Mai Drask, the lawyer having married her. “Be good to see ’em both. Now wait—you’re not staying here? You coming in with me at all?”

“Not if you don’t want me to,” said Leon, looking at him askance.

“I told you twice by mail, if you ever got tired of lawing, you can come in on the ranch with me. But it’s going to be rough out there.”

“Me raised up man and boy on a Texas ranch, you’re gabbling about rough?”

Cleve laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “I have never been gladder to see any man than I was to see you tonight, Leon!”

Seeming moved but embarrassed, Leon looked back at the sign on the false front and read it out: “California Steam Artisan Well Boring and Rock Drilling Company. Lord, is that what the man says when they ask him where he works? Sure’d be a mouthful.” He looked up at the gaslights on their wrought iron posts. “Pleasure to have some good lighting after Axle. I gloried in the gas lighting up in Chicago, after you let me out of Fort Slocum.” Leon had been Cleve’s prisoner, officially anyhow, at Fort Slocum, in the last months of the Civil War.

The Union Army had given Major Cleveland Trewe, wounded in the war’s last battle, what was supposed to be light duty overseeing Confederate prisoners at Fort Slocum. Shortly after Cleve’s arrival, Leon came to talk to him about conditions for the prisoners, and they worked together to get the men more food and medical care. They met again in Axle Bust, developing a close bond and mutual respect.

Leon turned to gaze up at the San Francisco hills, where the gaslights were like a diadem upon the city. “Now, that’s fine. Looks like stars in the prairie night. How they get the gas out here?”

“There’s a gasworks that pumps it out, sends it through the pipes. But you know every gas flame in every lamp still has to be lit, one at a time. And if the flame goes out indoors, and the gas is still on, why, people die from it.”

“I heard some theaters blew up, too, just like a mine explosion.” Leon yawned. “Say—that’s your hotel right there!”

Cleve chuckled. “Yep, four stories of stone and iron frame. When we first got here, Lotta Crabtree was staying in it too.”

“Lotta Crabtree! ‘San Francisco’s darling!’ I saw her dance and sing in Yuma. Did she kiss you? She is supposed to be a live one.”

“Kiss me? No, Lotta Crabtree is still alive.” Cleve went on with a straight face. “Berenice would have said she was sad to do it, but she’d have shot her dead for any such presumption.”

Leon laughed. “I reckon not—but she’d have cut that woman with a sharp tongue. For Berenice is a lady, if there ever was one.”

“You forget she shot that boss pimp in Axle. And she got pretty rough with those riders at Gunmetal Mountain . . .”

“Now that you mention it, I’d best be on my best behavior.”

“You ready to enter the Monkey Block?”

“The what! I saw no apes here! ’Cept maybe that big galoot across the street, making fists at the little fella.”

Cleve snorted. “That building is called the Montgomery Block—some, like Miss Crabtree, amuse themselves by calling it the Monkey Block.”

“Let’s go in. I’m about wore out, and I’d like one more look at that daughter of yours while she sleeps. Alice is sure the angel. How a Yankee rascal like you had anything to do with the making of her, Major Trewe, is past understanding.”

They went into the big stone building, shops and cafés on the ground floor, flats up above. Cleve’s mind was straying to Kanaway staying in the Barbary Coast district. Dave Kanaway could take care of himself—but the thugs in Barbary Coast did not fight fair, and once or twice a month a body washed up on the rocks near there, a man stripped of his valuables, and shot in the back . . .

They breakfasted on the first floor of the Montgomery Building, at the True Café—Cleveland Trewe stoically abiding the jokes twinning his name and the café’s. Cleve was in his frock coat and a white cotton shirt, for Leon had made fun of his “lady’s wear” silk shirt.

But Leon surprised him by cooing over the baby in Berenice’s arms even more than Teresa did.

Leon’s wife, red-haired and blue-eyed Teresa, gazed on Leon with benevolent speculation, as he held the infant’s tiny hand. Leon had mentioned in a letter that they were “abundantly happy,” though “she’s cruel strict in keeping the moons”: the method of timing marital intimacy so that conception was unlikely. The look on Teresa’s face, as she gazed at Alice, suggested to Cleve that she might soon set aside the calendar.

A successful dust panner and nugget digger, Teresa was petite yet voluptuous, prone to a mischievous smile, her scarlet hair tied back in a bun. She was a woman with wanderlust. A one-time partner of Nellie Cashman’s, she had held her own in a number of mining camps. Like Berenice, she had a fierce streak of independence.

Berenice. He turned to gaze on her. Cleve was always drawn back to contemplating Berry. Her dark brown, gold-flecked eyes, like the golden-brown form of the gem tourmaline; the onyx pupils glittering with intelligence; the pert set to her delicate lips; the tumble of her wavy chestnut hair, contrasting with the ivory shoulders exposed in one of the daring dresses inspired by French bateau gowns.

“I shall have to feed Alice soon,” she said. “She was too sleepy to have much interest when she first woke.” The infant had her mother’s eyes, and she shifted them toward Berenice at this. A toothless smile played around the infant’s lips. She was well aware of the word feed, it seemed. Alice had been born a few weeks early, small and frail, but she had put on weight with breastfeeding; as had the breasts who fed her. “At this stage, Cleve,” Berry had warned him, “you make free with my bosoms at your own risk.”

Alice was a good-natured, alert child, and Cleve was still astounded when he looked upon her, and thought, She is mine, my own child . . .

Cleve watched as Berry glanced around the crowded café, filled with people talking, or peering frowningly at the crabbed print of the San Francisco Call or The Spirit of the Times. She had that recurrent expression, a little puzzled, a little amused, that suggested she was surprised to find herself here—married, with a baby, in San Francisco. Mildly perplexed but not disheartened.

“How’d you come to call her Alice?” Leon asked. “A grandma’s name? In Texas, we name children after Bible folks and the elders, mostly. I’ve got a cousin named his boy Robert E. Lee Studge, but I don’t countenance any such.”

“The night before she was born, I was reading a book by a Mr. Lewis Carroll,” said Berry, pouring more tea into her china cup. “The heroine is a young girl named Alice. I admire her spirit, her gumption—”

“Her willingness to crawl down a hole to see what a rabbit was up to?” Cleve suggested, grinning. When they’d traveled together from Axle Bust to points west, many a time his wife, fascinated with the intricacies of the natural world, had tried to explore an animal’s lair. And she’d come riskily close to a pack of coyotes. He loved his Berenice for her free spirit, but it unnerved him sometimes. He feared her intrepid curiosity could cost her life.

“That what that Mr. Carroll’s child does?” Leon asked, shaking his head. “Seems foolish!”

“The rabbit was wearing a weskit and a pocket watch,” said Berry primly. “That’s reason enough to investigate.”

“Now I thought you read those journals of science all the day,” said Leon. “I don’t believe rabbits wearing pocket watches are found in burrows. I could be wrong. It’s a strange ol’ world.”

Berry laughed; a soft, liquid laugh that always seemed to reverberate somewhere inside Cleve.

“I do read the occasional monograph,” she said. “I’m reading one by Mr. T.H. Huxley: a great comparative anatomist who—like me—is largely self-taught in the ways of science. He has the advantage of his gender, and is quite influential. But I do admire him—he seems to be suggesting that Archaeopteryx—”

“The ark of what now?” Leon asked, blinking.

“It was a dinosaur,” Cleve said. “One that had feathers.”

“Just so,” said Berry, reaching out to squeeze Cleve’s hand. Her touch was as firm as it was soft—should that be possible?

“A dinosaur!” Leon said. “I read about them big lizards in the newspaper. Folks finding their bones and such. But lizards surely don’t have feathers, Berry!”

“This one did,” she averred. “It cannot be quite called a lizard. It may have been—as Mr. Huxley suspects—the ancestor of many of today’s birds. Indeed, all birds may have some ancient source in dinosaurs . . .”

“Now hold on a minute—!” Leon began. “Birds aren’t lizards!”

“Leon,” Teresa interrupted. “Aren’t you and Cleve going to see Mr. Kanaway at the docks this morning? Berry’s got to feed the little one. She and I shall retire upstairs.”

“Where’s Ulysses, Cleve?” Leon asked, as they headed down the slight slope toward Montgomery Street, the sun over Telegraph Hill warming their backs.

“Him and Suzie are in Alameda, there’s a good stable there, with a fair pasturage. We go and see them when we can. They’re getting restless. But Suzie’s had a foal. He looks more like Ulysses than her.”

“So you’re telling me you got your wife with child—and your horse got her horse with child?”

Cleve laughed. “He did! Where’s your own horse?”

“Place over by the missions. Wish I had him right now.” Watching a hire buggy clopping by, he added, “We could hire a buggy.”

“We need the walk. Too many flapjacks.”

A few couples in fineries were strolling down the sidewalk, the men in silk top hats and three-piece suits and the women in beribboned ladies’ toppers and lacy walking dresses. Cleve and Leon tipped their hats to them.

Leon wore the same rumpled suit today, and he shivered as a cold wind from the sea veered between the wood frame and stone buildings. “Lord, I thought it’d be warmer here in Californy.”

“We had our hot weather in high summer. But the ocean’s right here and the current is never warm. You know, most early morning there’s fog come rolling in off the bay. Even at this hour, down by the docks—”

“Now who the red devils is that?” Leon interrupted, as a tubby bearded man topped by a plumed top hat stepped out onto the corner up ahead. His hair and beard, black streaked with gray, poked out all unruly. He wore a gilded-buttoned blue officer’s parade coat with large gilt epaulets and an old cavalry saber on his belt. He paused on the corner reached into a pants pocket and drew out a large hunk of cheese. Watching horsemen and carriages pass, he began to gnaw on the cheese.

“Some kind of foreign ship captain, I expect?” Leon suggested.

“No—he’s a man of some importance around here.”

“Carries a hunk of cheese in his pocket, I see.”

“He lives hand to mouth. Yet that man is the Emperor, Norton the First—Imperial Sovereign of the United States. You never heard of him?”

“Believe I saw it in a newspaper once. He’s the madman who thinks he’s emperor?”

“I suppose he is. But he’s a good fellow. Kind to children and dogs, and sometimes he publishes a declaration of plans for improving San Francisco. Many of his ideas are good ones. He was a commodities merchant here, in gold rush times, and did well—and then got himself into a pickle and lost it all and his wife too. He never recovered. He blamed the government and announced he would replace it with something better. Declared himself emperor.”

“Is that all a man has to do? I’d like to declare myself King of Texas.”

“He’s wearing his finer hat today, I see. But he’s gone to seed some, of late. Getting old and accepting too many free drinks. He lives on the kindness of San Franciscans. Most will not laugh at him and always address him as Emperor Norton, or Your Majesty. He’s something of a friend of mine, and Berenice has a great affection for him—he blessed our baby, you know—and you must give him his dignity, Leon.”

“I surely will.”

They walked up to Norton, Cleve taking off his hat and. . .