The Bear Flag by Cecelia Holland

Author:Cecelia Holland [Holland, Cecelia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction

30 The rain had stopped. Dark clouds still lay over the eastern half of the sky, but the west showed bright blue, streaked with shafts of sunlight. Long wraiths of mist trailed up from the flat green meadows of the valley. Major Orozco leaned both hands on his saddlebows and stared away toward the long line of hills to the east, where the notched gray rocks of the Sierra del Gavilan burst up through the oaks.

“Very well, let’s go down there. Lieutenant Chavez, you will translate.” Orozco glanced over his shoulder at Pico. “There will be nothing this time but talk. Colonel, do you speak any English?”

“No,” Pico said.

“Neither do I.” Sohrakoff of course was fluent, but Orozco had already sent him elsewhere. Chavez, who had some English, would do well enough. “Let’s go.”

The air was steamy from the rain, but the clouds were breaking up and scudding away and the sun was brilliant, harsh to the eyes, cooking the odors of soil and grass out of the damp earth. Orozco rode at the head of the column, Pico on his right and Chavez on his left, up through the draw, toward the Anglos massed along the creekbank, with the two horns of Hawk Peak beyond them, the highest mountain in the Sierra del Gavilan.

When Orozco approached them Frémont’s men were breaking camp, loading their gear onto a train of packmules. Seeing him come, they stopped what they were doing — rough-edged, shaggy men covered in rags and hides — and walked forward toward him. He raised his hand to the lancers to hold them back, and with Pico and Chavez he rode up to the edge of the wet ground along the creek.

The Anglos crowded the opposite side of the stream; they had trampled down the brush that grew along it. They all had rifles. Some of them looked like Indians. In their midst stood a man in a blue United States Army coat with brass buttons, who hailed Orozco in English.

Chavez’s voice was high with tension. “He says he’s Captain John Charles Frémont of the United States Army Corps of Topographical Engineers and he has passports from New Helvetia.”

Orozco let his reins slip. His horse was edgy, snorting at the rank smell of the mules, and he stilled it with his weight and his legs. The Anglos cradled their rifles in their arms. They kept no military order, and only Frémont wore a uniform, which made them hard to read; but they were still an army, a familiar beast. He gave a quick look beyond them, noting the loaded mule train, and brought his eyes back to the Anglo officer in the blue coat.

Captain Frémont had a very bold and commanding air, almost too mighty. Orozco said, “Lieutenant Chavez, inform him that Don José Castro, commandante-general of California, has revoked his passports.”

Chavez chattered away in English. Frémont’s Missouri men were listening in a rapt silence. Most of them were gathered in behind the Anglo captain. Off to one

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