Quincannon (16 page)

Quincannon. had to fight down an impulse to rush in there, throw down on the three men now, while Sabina was still unhurt. It would be a foolish move, perhaps a deadly one. The time for action was after McClew and his posse arrived — and that time couldn’t be far off. The stockade gates were his first priority at the moment, if both he and Sabina hoped to get out of the compound alive.

She would be all right until he got back here, he told himself grimly. Bogardus was taking his time; nothing would happen to her in the next ten minutes.

And when he got back here — then what? At the first inkling of trouble, Bogardus was liable to kill her or try to use her as a hostage. Even if he stormed the place, took them by surprise, there was a chance she would be hurt, a chance he might hurt her himself, as he had hurt Katherine Bennett, with a stray bullet — a chance he might not be able to take.

How was he going to get her out of there unharmed?

Quincannon moved to the rear of the building, waited there while the moon made a brief reappearance and then vanished again. From inside the barn nearby, a steady rattling sound gave him further pause; but then he recognized it — a bridled horse nervously tongue-rolling the cricket in its bit. Either one of the men had neglected to remove the tack from his animal or it was being kept ready for a ride later on. The disposal of another body, maybe, Quincannon thought with banked rage. Sabina’s, this time.

He ran silently across to the stockade fence. The shadows that bulked along it hid him as he made his way downhill past the second bunkhouse, around to the gates. They were built of slab-wood and held shut by a thick wooden bar set between a pair of iron brackets. Also attached to each half was a vertical iron rod around which a heavy chain could be looped and then padlocked. If the chain and padlock had been fastened, he would have been faced with a difficult decision; as it was, whoever had opened the gate to let Helen Truax and her rig out had not bothered to reset the chain, and it hung loose from one of the rods.

The bar was heavy but he had no trouble lifting it free. He set it aside, slid one of the gate halves open, and stepped out to peer down along the wagon road. The night was empty, hushed. McClew and his men still hadn’t shown up; if they had been out there now it would be close by, so they could keep watch on the gate, and they would already have signaled him.

He slipped back inside, pulled the gate half almost but not quite shut — open just enough to alert McClew. A thought came to him as he was about to start back the way he had come, along the east side of the fence. Instead he went the other way, around the stamp mill and under the framework of the overhead tram. In the tram’s shadow he continued uphill until he reached the stonewalled powder magazine he had noticed that afternoon.

The moon was out again, and when he opened the powder house door, enough of its shine penetrated to give him an idea of how the interior was laid out. He moved inside. Working by feel, he found an open box of dynamite sticks, another of Bickford fuses, a third of small copper detonators. He put two of the sticks and some of the fuses and blasting caps into his coat pocket. Then he backed out of the shed, shut the door, and turned toward the stack of timbers in the middle of the yard.

Downhill, not far away, somebody yelled, “Heyl Hey, you son of a bitch!”

Quincannon wheeled around. The dark shape of a man was running toward him, pawing a revolver off his hip — a skinny little runt, Conrad, drawn outside again by restlessness or on some damned errand. Everything changed in that instant; all of Quincannon’s previous intentions died, all his caution and his advantage of surprise came to an end. A rush of fear seized him, not for himself but for Sabina. His senses all sharpened at once, and he was down on one knee without even thinking about it, his own revolver coming up in his hand.

Conrad’s first shot slashed the air harmlessly, made a rocketing explosion in the stillness. Instinct kept Quincannon kneeling instead of throwing himself out flat; the blasting caps in his pocket were volatile and any sudden jarring might set them off. Another bullet whined off rock to his !eft — and that was all Conrad had coming to him. Quincannon shot him on the run, heard the man yell, saw him pitch sideways and then fall. By then he was up and running himself, at a downhill slant toward the bunkhouse where Sabina was.

There was a crashing noise from inside the building and the light suddenly went out. A man’s voice bellowed an obscenity. Quincannon didn’t understand at first what had happened, but the momentary confusion didn’t slow him down. Men were just starting to come out of the second bunkhouse, more confused than he was, armed but not knowing what to shoot at. Quincannon was too far away in the darkness for them to see who he was; he might have been one of their own.

In the next second the door of the first bunkhouse burst open. A figure came stumbling out — a figure with flaring skirts bunched high in both hands. Sabina.

Surprise and nascent relief put an end to Quincannon’s downhill charge. He shouted at her, “Over here, it’s Quincannon!” and saw her break stride, then veer his way. If he had had time to think about what he did next, the ghost of Katherine Bennett might have kept him from doing it. But he acted automatically, the result of years of training: he fired past the running figure of Sabina, emptied his Remington at the cluster of men by the bunkhouse and drove them back inside or to cover outside.

There were two answering shots, both wild. He saw one man, Bogardus, and then another come barreling free of the darkness inside the first bunkhouse; then Sabina was beside him, and he caught hold of her arm and dragged her back to the long row of timbers. They got around past the end of the rick just as a volley of shots started up from below.

Sabina said breathlessly, “My God, John! I thought ... I thought I was dead even after I got away from Bogardus. Where did you come from?”

“Never mind that now.” He was digging fresh cartridges out of his spares case, jamming them into the cylinders of the Remington. “You can shoot, can’t you?”

“I can and I damned well will.”

He shoved the reloaded weapon into her hand. “Get down low, back at the corner where you can see, and keep them at a distance.”

She didn’t ask questions, just did as she was told. Quincannon still had the sticks of dynamite, detonators, and Bickford fuses in his coat pocket; he hauled out one of the fat paper candles, thrust a fuse into one of the little copper tubes. Then he crimped its neck with his teeth and insert d the detonator into the hole punched in the side of the dynamite stick.

Sabina fired at something below; there were half a dozen answering shots.

Quincannon found a lucifer in his pocket, scraped it alight with his back to the wind, and lit the fuse. Immediately he stepped out and hurled the stick toward the bunkhouses, ducking back again as one of the counterfeiters pumped a shot at him.

Somebody shouted, “Dynamite! Look out!”

And the stick blew with a thunderous concussion, filling the night with the stench of its powder fumes. Dirt and pieces of rock showered down out of the haze of smoke. As the echoes rolled away, Quincannon heard one man screaming, another cursing in a steady, mindless litany. He took out the second stick, loaded it while the wind blew the smoke away.

The first blast had torn up earth and rock twenty yards from and midway between the two bunkhouses. One of the koniakers was down on all fours near there, crawling around in circles; he was the one who was screaming. The rest of them had all gone to cover. It was a standoff for the moment, while they regrouped, but it wouldn’t be long before they thought to fan out through the compound, try to catch Sabina and him in a crossfire.

Quincannon had another match in his hand, waiting. It was a minute or so before he saw movement again below — men starting to come out of hiding, to slip up to the stable or around to the stamp mill, while others opened fire to cover them. He lit the fuse on the second stick, hurled the dynamite without showing himself. This time the explosion was closer to the main bunkhouse, shattering the glass in its windows, throwing at least one of the counterfeiters off his feet. Quincannon was already moving by then, away from the rick, using the fresh confusion as cover for a run to the powder magazine for more dynamite and caps.

But he stopped midway, behind one of the ore wagons, because the smoke was clearing and a shout had gone up, followed by a fusillade of shots. Neither he nor Sabina were the targets now, however; the attention of the koniakers had been focused elsewhere.

McClew and his posse had finally arrived.

Crouched low, running back to rejoin Sabina, Quincannon saw the townsmen come boiling through the stockade gates — a dozen or more, spreading left and right, returning the counterfeiters’ fire. The lower section of the compound was like a battleground: men rushing this way and that, men falling, muzzle flashes, powdersmoke, the crack of two-score handguns, mingled shouts and curses and cries from the wounded.

Quincannon took his Remington from Sabina, stood watching tensely. She straightened and clutched his arm. “What is it, John? What’s happening?”

“McClew,” he said. “He should have had his deputies here sooner, but I’m glad now he was late.”

The battle raged for another few minutes. Quincannon could have gone down and joined it, but there was no sense in that. It would have meant leaving Sabina alone.

He said against her ear, “How did you get away from Bogardus and the other one?”

“The shooting distracted them,” she said, “and they turned their backs on me. I broke the lantern with my arm and managed to knock Bogardus off his feet on my way to the door. Was it you who started the shooting?”

“No, but I shot the one who did — the little mean-faced runt, Conrad. ”

“How did you know I was here at the mine?”

“I knew because it’s my fault you were abducted.”

“Your fault?”

“I’ll explain later,” he said.

Two of the counterfeiters had broken free of the fighting and were on the run toward the powder magazine. He fired at them, drove them back downhill. The possemen shot one; the other threw his weapon away and surrendered.

Not long after that the gunfire grew sporadic, finally stopped altogether. Quincannon spied McClew running back and forth like a military officer, barking orders that included the mounting of a search for Quincannon and Sabina. That made it time for them to show themselves. Quincannon holstered his revolver and stepped out to hail the marshal, let him know that they were both safe.

Half a minute later they had joined McClew near the main bunkhouse. The marshal wore an exhilarated, satisfied look; his mustaches fairly bristled. “Whoo-ee,” he said, “that was some skirmish. Nothing like it around here since the war with the Bannacks in Seventy-eight. You the one exploded that dynamite, Mr. Quincannon?”

“Yes.”

“Heard the first blast just as we was setting up outside. We come busting in right away. Would’ve been here five minutes sooner but we run into Mrs. Truax on the way out from town. Put her in custody and had one of the boys take her back to the jail.”

“Good work all around, Marshal.”

“Two of you look none the worse for all the fireworks,” McClew said. “You are all right, ma’am?”

Sabina nodded. “Yes, thank you.”

“Any casualties among your men?” Quincannon asked.

“Couple of flesh wounds is all,” McClew said. “T’other side didn’t fare half so well. Three dead, four others with holes ventilating their hides.”

Quincannon looked over at what was left of the koniakers, grouped together under the guard of half a dozen men and weapons. “Where’s Bogardus?”

McClew jerked a thumb at the bunkhouse. “In there. Reckon one of those sticks of dynamite done for him.”

The door to the bunkhouse had been blown off its hinges. Someone had found a Betty lamp, lighted it, and set it on top of the Milligan press; as he reached the door, Quincannon could see Bogardus lying sprawled alongside the press, his arms out-flung and his face twisted into a death rictus. The concussion had burst a couple of tins of ink, so that Bogardus had been splattered with the fluid as he was thrown against the press. Along with the blood from his mortal wounds, it glistened blackly in the pale glow from the lamp.

Fitting, Quincannon thought. Bogardus’ life had ended as he had sought to live it — with the mixing of spilled blood and printer’s ink.

For the next two days, the main topics of conversation in Silver City were the fight at the Rattling Jack, the unmasking of Bogardus and his crew as koniakers, the arrest of Helen Truax as an accomplice and co-conspirator, and the twin revelations that Quincannon was a Secret Service operative and Sabina Carpenter a Pinkerton detective. The excitment was such that a kind of carnival atmosphere prevailed. Quincannon, Sabina, and Marshal McClew were accorded the mantle of heroes and greeted effusively wherever they went.

Quincannon, however, had little time for socializing. He was kept busy sending wires, questioning prisoners and making arrangements for their transportation to Boise, and coordinating the activities of the other federal officers — among them Samuel Greenspan — who had arrived in Silver. Boggs, who had been both pleased at Quincannon’s success and disgruntled that he hadn’t waited for official sanction before raiding the Rattling Jack, issued telegraphic orders that all the counterfeiting equipment found at the mine be photographed and itemized in detail for Secret Service files. The Milligan printing press also had to be dismantled, and it and the rest of the equipment shipped to Boise for transshipment east to Washington.

The details of the coney operation that Quincannon did not already know or suspect were for the most part supplied by Helen Truax; she was more than willing to cooperate in order to save her own neck. She also filled in the missing pieces concerning Jason Elder and Whistling Dixon.

The boodle game had been Bogardus’ brainchild, in league with Elder, Conrad, and one other man, James Darby, who was now in custody. When the last silver-bearing vein at the Rattling Jack began to peter out, Bogardus and Darby had schemed up the bogus coin idea; Darby had worked as a diemaker and was responsible for the counterfeit eagle and half-eagle molds. Bogardus, meanwhile, had made arrangements through old criminal contacts in Portland and Seattle for the passage of the finished coins.

Bogardus had also, by this time, rekindled his affair with Helen Truax, who had turned up in Silver City as the wife of Oliver Truax. She was bored with Truax, if not with his money, and more than willing to take up with her former lover. She claimed that she hadn’t known of his counterfeiting activities until just recently, but Quincannon suspected Bogardus had confided in her almost at once.

The success of his coney coin venture had stirred Bogardus’ greed and made him determined to branch out into greenbacks. For that he needed an expert printer and engraver, but not one known to the authorities as a counterfeiter — and the word in Silver was that Jason Elder was such a man. The corruption of Elder had not been difficult; the promise of large sums of money and an unlimited supply of opium had been the bait that landed him. As it turned out, Elder had had the hand of a master and his ten- and twenty-dollar plates were among the best of counterfeits.

While Elder was designing the plates, Bogardus’ contacts in Portland and Seattle rounded up the necessary equipment and supplies, mainly through eastern channels, and had them freighted in to Silver City. Their first press had been one of the old single-plate, hand-roller types, but Elder’s plates were so good that the press itself didn’t matter except in terms of speed of production. The first batch of currency shipped to Portland had excited the gang members there and led to an increasing demand for more queer, which in turn led to the importation of the Milligan press. By this time the Rattling Jack was a factory, with its full attention devoted to the manufacture of bogus notes; the silver-coining end of the game had been abandoned some three months before.

The increased production schedule meant that more men were needed at the mine, and recruits were carefully solicited. One of those recruits, brought in by Conrad, was Whistling Dixon. But he had been a poor choice. Conscience had got the better of him; he had tried once to leave Bogardus’ employ, only to be persuaded otherwise by the promise of wealth and by thinly veiled threats. Word of Dixon’s skittishness leaked out through the network of boodle carriers and coney dealers and finally reached the ears of the informant Bonniwell in San Francisco.

But the red-haired man, Griswold, had been in San Francisco to meet with a local coney dealer and had gotten wind that Bonniwell was asking questions. He’d gone to Bonniwell’s rooming house that night, and murder had been the end result of his visit. His only mistake had been overlooking the piece of paper clenched in Bonniwell’s hand, the paper with Whistling Dixon’s name on it that had led Quincannon to Silver City.

Meanwhile, in Silver, Jason Elder had also begun to give Bogardus problems. He not only neglected his cover job with Will Coffin’s newspaper, but also neglected his work on the production of queer; more and more of his time was spent adrift in the dreamworld wrought by the opium poppy. Bogardus threatened him as a result, and the threat worked only too well: frightened, Elder appropriated the plates as a measure of self-protection and gave them to Yum Wing.

This shut down the production of counterfeit, of course, and sent Bogardus into a panic. At first he tried to buy back Elder’s confidence and thus the plates; Elder was given cash, and when there wasn’t enough of that on hand to satisfy him, Bogardus induced Helen Truax to sign over her stock in the Paymaster Mining Corporation. Still Elder balked at returning the plates, thereby signing his own death warrant. Bogardus lost patience and had Elder beaten, then tortured — rough handling that had gone too far, for the printer had died “of a seizure” before revealing the whereabouts of the missing plates.

Desperate then, Bogardus had ordered searches of Elder’s shack, the newspaper office, and Will Coffin’s house. The second search of the
Volunteer
’s premises had been a reckless and just as futile measure.

With the location of the plates still unknown, the redhead, Griswold, had returned to Silver City with news of what had taken place in San Francisco. The fact that Whistling Dixon was a potential threat to the operation had spurred Bogardus — a murderer already — to order the death of Dixon. Griswold had carried out the order, having accompanied the old cowboy to Slaughterhouse Gulch on a ruse; but he had neglected to search the body afterward, or he would have found the watch Dixon had earlier appropriated from the corpse of Jason Elder.

Then Sabina had found the stock certificate in Elder’s shack, and Quincannon had drunkenly given away that fact to Helen Truax. Neither Bogardus nor Mrs. Truax cared that her husband might find out she had signed over her stock; what they were afraid of was any sort of incriminating link between her and Elder. And they were also highly suspicious of Sabina’s motives. Mrs. Truax was unaware of her husband’s pyramid swindle; it never occurred to her that Sabina’s interest might be in him, not her.

It was not until Bogardus read Coffin’s second editorial excoriating the Chinese in general and Yum Wing in particular that he realized where the plates must be. Their eventual recovery by Conrad and Darby and the resumption of production at the mine had not completely relieved him, however. He remained suspicious of Sabina, and with his planned departure from Silver City coming imminent, he sought to eliminate all possible threats. He had killed twice; murder no longer bothered him, not even that of a woman.

And now it was finished. Bogardus was dead; Darby and Helen Truax were in jail. So was Griswold, who had been captured on the outskirts of Boise and his wagonload of queer confiscated. Quincannon had been given the names of gang members in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — one of the names that of the man who had murdered the boodle carrier in Seattle and dumped his body in Puget Sound — and had telegraphed those names to Boggs. The men were now being systematically rounded up. Boggs’ estimation was that the final arrest total would exceed two dozen.

Sabina, too, had been busy. News of his wife’s arrest had reached Oliver Truax before dawn on Friday morning and he had fled immediately for fear that his swindling activities would come to light. Armed with this fact, Sabina had persuaded her Pinkerton chief and their clients to press immediate charges of fraud against the mine owner. Truax, who had expected to have plenty of time to clean out his various bank accounts and then find sanctuary, had been arrested in Nampa late Friday afternoon.

Quincannon and Sabina did find time, on Saturday evening, to have a quiet supper at McClew’s home. They talked of their work, and tentatively of personal matters; but he did not mention Katherine Bennett’s name. He would have liked to tell Sabina about that day in Virginia City, and perhaps someday he would have the opportunity. But not now, not yet.

She observed once that he seemed not to be drinking. He said, “I’ve been too busy to think about whiskey.”

“Then perhaps you don’t need it so badly after all, John.”

“Perhaps not,” he said. “No, perhaps not.”

Changes had been wrought inside him; he was not the same man who had arrived in Idaho one week ago. He felt as if he were just emerging from an abyss, one that blind, senseless guilt had dropped him into. He had begun to see things differently now that he was coming out of that abyss. One life had been destroyed, yes, through tragic accident. His guilt and his dependence on alcohol had almost allowed a second — Sabina’s to perish. If he allowed those factors to continue governing him, they
would
destroy a third life — his own this time. What was the sense in that? There were things to be done with his special skills, good things over many years of public service. And weren’t those things a proper memorial to the short and tragic life of Katherine Bennett?

On Saturday morning he and Sabina left on the stage for Boise; she had only been leasing the millinery shop and all that went with it, so the closing of it had presented no problem. There was fanfare at their departure — a brass band, the mayor offering an eloquently worded speech — but neither of them paid much attention. Nor did they pay much attention to their fellow passengers on the long ride out of the Owyhees and across the plains.

They said goodbye at the new rail depot in Boise. “Will we see each other again, John?” she asked.

“Would you like it if we did?”

“I would. And you?”

“Yes. I’ve worked in Denver many times; I’ll be sent there again soon, I’m sure.”

“And I to San Francisco.”

“It won’t be long, then,” he said. But he was thinking that in truth it had been two years since his last visit to Colorado; and that Sabina was an attractive woman with too much to offer to remain an unattached widow for long. There was a sadness in him as he watched her board an eastbound Central Pacific car — a sadness born of something he suspected was much more profound than simple kinship.

Two weeks after his return to San Francisco, following a great deal of deliberation, Quincannon sent a wire to Sabina care of the Pinkerton Agency, Denver. It read:

I AM CONSIDERING RESIGNATION FROM SERVICE TO ESTABLISH PRIVATE PRACTICE STOP WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN MOVE TO SF TO JOIN ME THIS VENTURE QMK BUSINESS ONLY OF COURSE

He waited anxiously, but not long, for her reply. It came the next afternoon.

Quincannon wired his affirmative. Then he went to the Palace Hotel, and because he had not had a drink of alcohol in nineteen days, he did his celebrating with a pot of black coffee and a fifty-cent cigar.