Page 9 of Whispers of Fortune (Golden State Treasure Book #1)

N INE

“They went this way.” Josh led them up a trail Brody would have overlooked if someone else wasn’t in charge. He paid extra close attention and saw boot prints. Two sets. His brothers’ prints.

“How far could they hope to go on foot?” Brody brought up the rear. Ellie was ahead of him, with Josh in front of their single-file search team.

Josh looked over his shoulder with a purely scornful expression. “So you’re upset they didn’t steal horses when they ran off? That’s a hanging offense, you know.”

Brody flinched. “Is it a hanging offense if they ride off on them and then come back?”

“Yes.” Ellie and Josh both glared at him and spoke at the same time.

“You’re thinking of hanging my brothers?” Brody grabbed the saddle horn to keep from dropping to the ground.

Ellie added, “For land sakes, we wouldn’t call the sheriff, Brody, but if you don’t know stealing a horse is a serious business, then you need to learn.”

“I’m not going to steal a horse!” Brody was no great rider. His family had certainly never owned a horse, nor had they been able to afford to rent one. But when in college, he’d gone home with friends a few times and learned how to ride. After a fashion. When he’d rented the horse in Dorada Rio, he’d been nervous about it, and he was down to his last few coins. He’d eyed the horse nervously. The swayback had stood with its head down. It looked suspiciously like it was sneaking in a nap. Even being saddled did little to rouse the horse.

Then Brody had asked for directions to the Two Harts. A fifteen-mile walk—which was what the hostler had told him—could be done, but he was driven by an almost frantic need to find out if his brothers were all right. At the mention of the Two Harts, the drover had given him a different horse and said to keep it for as long as he wanted. And if he stayed at the ranch for good, the Harts would provide him with a horse, and Brody should send the horse back to town with any of the cowhands who rode in.

The Harts were good customers.

Now, Brody rode on his gentle, well-trained horse and wondered if that hostler hadn’t tried to rent one of his less biddable horses to a tenderfoot—until he heard the words Two Harts .

“Look there.” Josh pointed. “They’re running. I reckon the sun must’ve finally come up. They were moving slowly in the dark. Wherever they’re headed, they’re going fast.”

Josh had been studying the ground, but now he picked up the pace.

“You said they ran off before but came back on their own.” Brody swallowed hard and forced himself to ask, “Do you think they ran off this time to get away from me? Do you think this time they don’t plan to come back?”

Josh didn’t answer. He turned off onto a slightly less wooded stretch of trail and pushed his horse at a fast walk. Ellie dropped back to ride alongside Brody.

The way she was studying his face, Brody wondered what he looked like. He felt the weight of these mountains on his shoulders. “I was a bad brother to them. I should have quit school and come home to help. I wanted to be a doctor badly, though, and so did Ma. But it was too much for her.”

“You said you sent money.” Ellie reached across her horse and patted him on the arm. “Your ma managed for several years with your money and the boys’ help. Why do you blame yourself for her death? She didn’t die those earlier years.”

“Going without finally caught up with her.”

“She wanted you to be a doctor, Brody.”

“Yes, but not to the point she’d give her life for it.”

“You don’t know that. She might have been happy to give all she had so you could achieve a dream you both shared.” Ellie was silent for a moment, then said, “My ma died before I left home. In fact, her and Pa dying was part of the reason I moved away. A year after they died, I went to college near San Francisco. They had full bellies and plenty of money, but they died anyway. We can’t know the time or the place where God will call us home.”

Brody fell silent for long moments as their horses’ hooves clipped along on a trail more rock than dirt. The trees had fallen back, and the blue sky came into view with a warm sun. Birds chirped in the trees, and a hawk soared overhead.

All of it was so beautiful it almost hurt—the mountain wilderness surrounding them, the gentle breeze, the country sounds, which were so different from what New York City and Boston had sounded like. No crowds of people rushing around. No streets busy enough so as to risk your life to cross them. The air was scented with pine and so fresh his lungs enjoyed each breath.

It suited Brody just fine.

“If we find them—”

“ When we find them,” Ellie interjected.

Brody forced his slumped shoulders to square and lifted his chin. Because of course they would find them. Probably. “ When we find them, what should I do? Isn’t this proof, right here, that I can’t force them to see sense, to give up on Pa’s obsession? Do I just help them with the hunt, even if it takes the rest of our lives? I can’t do that. I made a commitment back east.”

“I don’t think you can force them to quit. Short of locking them in a room all night and posting a guard over them all day.”

They rode on for a few minutes, Brody lost in thought, and he tried to figure out what in the world to do with his brothers.

“Can you present them with a reasonable way to search? Can you promise to ... I don’t know, take a week off twice a year and tromp around searching for the treasure? Or maybe promise to spend all day Saturday hunting? Maybe they’d see it as you supporting them without letting it disrupt your life and theirs.”

Brody shrugged. “I don’t think there’s a treasure, Ellie.” He sighed. “I guess I could see it as exploring the mountains. But I hate the idea of spending every Saturday the whole time I’m in California hunting for something that isn’t there. That’d be a waste of time.”

“Maybe you could start out with one Saturday a month. Maybe the boys would come to see how useless it is after a year or two.”

Brody made a terribly rude sound. Year or two? No, he had to get back. “My pa searched for most of my life. He never gave up.”

“The boys stayed here for a while.” Josh interrupted their talk. “When they moved again, they took this trail, narrower and steeper. It’s gonna get cold up higher. I wonder if they’ve got any idea what they’re looking for?” Josh turned his horse onto an upward trail that pointed north rather than west.

Ellie went next. The trail was too narrow for them to ride two abreast.

Brody brought up the rear. He made out footprints, so the boys weren’t trying to hide a trail. At least they hadn’t figured out that level of sneakiness—not yet anyway.

Loyal watched Beth Ellen ride by with her brother and a stranger. The stranger Loyal had seen at the ranch when he’d been spying. A doctor, it seemed. He itched to grab the woman who’d brought him to ruin, but Josh Hart was a salty cowboy, well-armed and nobody’s fool.

Loyal let them go, but his chance would come.

Sonny Dykes had decided not to shoot him when they’d both been skulking around the Two Harts. Instead, they’d teamed up.

Loyal didn’t particularly believe in a treasure, but he could use one. Sonny believed with his whole heart.

As soon as the riders were out of earshot, Sonny talked about his favorite subject: “I got wind of someone with knowledge of MacKenzie’s Treasure. I haven’t tracked it down solid yet, but I heard rumors that the old man owned a mining claim. If we could find that claim, we’d find his treasure.”

Loyal Kelton straightened and looked at his new saddle partner. “These mountains are full of myths and legends about lost treasure. Just because Frasier MacKenzie spent his life searching for it doesn’t make it real.”

“No, it doesn’t, but we’ve never known the exact location of any of those myths and legends. If we found the old man’s claim, we’d know right where to look. We need to search old records. And hope it hasn’t been lost and has the location of the MacKenzie land.”

“It’s been dormant for years. They can’t still own it.”

“Way outside of town, there’s no taxes, nothing to make it fall back to the state. If we can find it, it doesn’t matter if they own it or not—we’ll still have the location.”

“And did you find it through that old fool Frasier MacKenzie?”

With a smile so sharp he could’ve cut someone’s throat with it, Sonny said, “Nope. I stumbled on it through Mayhew Westbrook. He’s had a secretary combing through old documents for most of the last year. His secretary hasn’t found it either, but I got word he was huntin’.”

The two of them lived in near squalor in a falling-down shack on the edge of the Sutter land. Most of the land had been claimed by John Sutter, whose mill had sparked the California gold rush. But Sutter’s vast holdings had been overrun by the gold rush, and Sutter had lost most everything and moved back east.

Mining claims had resulted in shacks. Those had given way to farms. But plenty of old shacks tucked into rugged forest, not suited for farming, were abandoned. Loyal thought bitterly of his father cutting him off over his broken engagement to Beth Ellen Hart. He’d fallen a long way from his life working in his father’s bank. Now he and Sonny lived in one of those hovels. He thought of Beth Ellen with hate in his heart and plotted ways to make his father pay, Beth Ellen pay— everyone pay who’d turned their backs on him when they’d found out his father had disowned him.

Revenge was the juice that kept his blood flowing.

He hated how far he’d fallen, but he also loved it. Getting kicked out of his rich life and finding Sonny had opened his eyes to a life he relished. A life severed from all the rules of polite society.

Yes, his father had a mistress for years. His mother knew and turned a blind eye. Both of them seemed content with their lives.

Loyal had found a mistress just like his father had. Of course he had. All men did that. But Beth Ellen, his then-fiancée, had found out and left him. Father had called him a fool for not being more discreet.

That, along with Loyal’s hefty gambling debts, funds missing from the bank, and Loyal’s open contempt for his father’s hypocrisy had gotten him kicked out of the bank job. The tidy mansion his father had bought for Loyal in anticipation of his marriage to Beth Ellen and the money father had deposited in his account, along with his bank salary, had all been taken back.

All of that for simply admitting with no remorse that he led the same life as his father ... well, except for the gambling.

Loyal had admitted it, even bragged about it. When his father, enraged, had slapped him across the face, Loyal, with pent-up anger after years of such slaps, had hit back.

Father, his nose bleeding, his eye swelling shut, there on the floor of his library in the mansion on Nob Hill in San Francisco, had looked afraid. Furious, but afraid. It was an expression that swelled Loyal’s heart. Filled him with fierce satisfaction and made him want to punish everyone who’d turned their backs on him.

Most especially his father, his mother, who’d slipped him some money on the sly, but wouldn’t stand up to his father. And that little fool Beth Ellen. So superior, so much better than everyone else.

Yes, he hated this life, but he loved what had been turned loose in him after years of trying to put on the front of a proper, wealthy son of a banker.

“Tell me what you know about MacKenzie’s Treasure.”

Sonny, with a mean expression, drew his knees up and rested his forearms on them. “First, you need to know we’re going to have to get the money to polish you up a bit. The folks we need to talk to will only do business with a man in a good suit, a man with flashing good manners. You’ve got them. I can’t even pretend to fake them.”

And Sonny was a decent liar, so he must want Loyal to really shine for someone. His smile sharper than ever, Loyal said, “To find that hoard that’s supposed to go along with MacKenzie’s Treasure, I’ll put on a suit. I can find the money. Just tell me who I have to kill.”

Sonny laughed, and it stirred Loyal’s cruelty to say something pure evil and have a friend who’d enjoy it.

“I wondered about your pa.”

“I’d kill him and not miss a minute’s sleep, but the sheriff would come looking.”

“We don’t need to kill him.”

Loyal felt a wave of regret, and yet he knew it was best.

“We just need to steal from him.”

And that made Loyal laugh again.