The Stolen Gold Affair

by Bill Pronzini

  In the morning he tucked the revolver into his right boot before going down to the dining room. Cold, mistrustful silence greeted him, and he was left to eat alone. Not that he’d expected any different. O’Hearn had kept his promise to spread the word that J. F. Quinn was considered innocent of McClellan’s murder and would be returning to his work in the mine, but that didn’t exonerate him in the eyes of the hardrock men. Why, they’d be asking one another, would the mine superintendent have vouched for J. F. Quinn unless he’d been a spy in their midst all along?

  The morning being cool, Quincannon walked uphill to the mine instead of waiting for one of the wagons. In the yard a few of the topmen gave him hostile looks and one muttered a slanderous allusion to his masculinity, all of which he steadfastly ignored. Few of the day-shift crew had assembled yet; it was still more than an hour shy of the whistle. He crossed directly to the gallows frame, where he found Joe Simcox in conversation with the hoist tender.

  “You’ve no right to be walking around free,” Simcox said with a belligerent glare, “after what you done to Frank McClellan, much less allowed to go back down into the hole.”

  Quincannon paid that no heed, either. “Open the cage,” he said to the hoist tender.

  “Graveyard shift’s still working.”

  “I’ve no intention of bothering any of them. Open the cage, if you value your job.”

  “Goddamn company mole,” Simcox said, and spat juicily at Quincannon’s feet.

  Quincannon neither moved nor commented, matching Simcox’s glare with one of his own. It had been many years since he had lost a staredown, and he didn’t lose this one. Simcox muttered an obscenity, spat again, and turned his attention elsewhere.

  The hoist tender likewise thought better of any further argument. He went ahead and opened the cage. Quincannon barely had time to lower the safety bar before the brakes were released, and the descent was no less than what he’d expected— a fast downward hurtle and a jarring stop that rattled his teeth and popped his ears. As he stepped out into the station on twelve-hundred, he saw no one in the immediate vicinity. He stomped his feet to bring back his hearing, then went to fetch and light a cap lamp.

  The ring of steel against rock, shouts, and other noises told him that most of the graveyard crew was working in the new crosscut, getting ready to “tally and shoot the face”—mining parlance for the loading of drill holes with dynamite for end-of-shift blasting. He moved off quickly along the rails in the opposite direction, encountered no one on the long trek to the abandoned crosscut. As he neared it, he slowed his pace and transferred the Defender from his boot to his trouser pocket.

  The loose boards had been nailed securely into place across the entrance, but it took only a brief effort with a toll pick to gain access. He went ahead to the unfinished stope, stepped inside by a pace, then squatted to wash his light over the floor. It took him less than a minute to locate what he was looking for. As he’d surmised, there had been no good reason for McClellan’s murderer to have removed the object. He left it where it lay. Flimsy evidence because of its commonness in these confines, but coupled with McClellan’s boot it confirmed his suspicion as to how the frame against him had been arranged. One more piece of proof was all he needed.

  Distant “Fire in the hole!” warning shouts came as he emerged from the drift. He had enough time to replace the boards before the first of the end-of-shift dynamite blasts set up echoes and vibrations. He waited there until the other powder shots had been fired in sequence, then made his way back. When the whistle sounded, he was waiting behind a pile of timber for the night crew to file into the station and the cage to take them topside.

  Walrus Ben Tremayne and the rest of the day shift found him in the powder room a few minutes later, readying for work. As expected, there were ominous grumblings from the men, followed by a direct verbal assault from the shift boss.

  “You must be daft, Quinn, coming down here again after what you did yesterday.”

  “Spy for the owners,” one of the other miners muttered. “Paid to get away with murder.”

  “Aye, and not welcome among us,” Pat Barnes said, “no matter what Mr. O’Hearn says.”

  “I’m neither a spy nor a murderer,” Quincannon said. “Innocent until proved guilty, as the superintendent believes, and here to do a day’s work for a day’s pay same as you.”

  He had banked on the fact that hardrock men valued their jobs more than they disliked and distrusted interlopers, and he was right. If the murder victim had been one of their rank and file, instead of a crew boss, they might have given him a roughing-up in spite of O’Hearn’s orders. As it was, there were no further challenges and the men moved away to their various duties—all except Walrus Ben, who blocked Quincannon’s way as he started to join Barnes and the other timbermen.

  “You’ll not do shoring in the new crosscut, Quinn,” the shift boss said.

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because I say so. You’ll work where I tell you.”

  “And where would that be?”

  “We’ll be hoisting ore on the skip this afternoon. The night-shift boss tells me there’s a jam in number-four trap. You’ll pull the chute.”

  “Dangerous job for a new man unfamiliar with the trap.”

  “If you don’t follow orders, I have the authority to fire you for insubordination. Whether Mr. O’Hearn likes it or not.”

  “I didn’t say I refused. There’s no job I’m not up to.”

  “Then get to it!”

  Reluctantly Quincannon made his way to the main chute, which ran at a forty-five-degree angle under the drift to two trapdoor exits in the shaft, twenty feet below the station. Smaller chutes fed the main one from above, and the muckers on the graveyard shift had shoveled into them vast amounts of ore blasted loose at the end of the night shift. Jams were common. “Pulling the chute” meant climbing down into the shaft, opening the blocked trapdoor, and by means of a long, heavy iron bar, freeing the obstruction so ore could flow freely into the skip, a coffin-shaped steel box that held six tons.

  It was hot, dirty, hazardous work that required careful attention and dexterity of movement. Quincannon, standing on a plank two feet wide, poked and prodded the bar up into the chute’s innards in an effort to break the jam piecemeal. If it broke all at once, and he was not quick enough to dance clear, one or more of the rocks might knock him off his perch. Just last year, he’d heard, a chute-puller on one of the upper levels had been pulverized at the bottom of the shaft.

  The job went disagreeably slow. He was a novice at this kind of labor; the narrow plank was slippery and strewn with spilled ore that had accumulated and banked up. Water dripped steadily down the shaft’s walls, onto his neck and down his back. The smoky flame of his lamp gave too little light. The trap seemed about to free, jammed again, freed a bit, jammed. His arms and back ached from the strain of prying, poking, pounding.

  He had begun the task on his guard, but frustration and fatigue took their toll. He began to curse, even more inventively than usual, and his voice echoed loudly in the chute. So he didn’t hear the man ease into the shaft on the ladder above him. If the weapon the man carried hadn’t accidentally scraped against the rock wall, the last sound Quincannon ever heard would have been his own voice blistering the stale air.

  The ringing noise jerked his head around and up, just in time to avoid a savage downward jab with an iron bar identical to the one he held. The assailant was the slab-faced station tender. Teeth bared, Simcox swung the bar again. Quincannon screwed his body sideways, again in the nick of time; the iron swished air past his head, clanged against rock. For an instant he lost his balance, teetered on the edge of the plank. He managed to brace himself by jamming the bar against the wall, and shoved back out of the way as Simcox’s bar slashed at him a third time.

  It was the station tender who was off balance then. Before Simcox could set himself for another thrust, Quincannon reached up left-handed and caught a tight grip on the
end of the other’s weapon. He yanked downward, hard. His intent was to pull Simcox off the ladder, send him crashing into the chute, but Simcox released his grip. When Quincannon did the same, it was the bar that dropped clattering into the jammed ore.

  For an instant the two men glared at each other in the smoky light. Then Simcox’s nerve broke. He twisted around, clambered out of the chute. Quincannon hauled himself up the ladder and gave chase, still clutching his bar.

  When he burst through into the drift he saw Simcox fifty yards away, casting a look over his shoulder as he fled into the station. A knot of other miners stopped what they were doing to stare. Quincannon yelled, “Stop him! Stop that man!” but none of the men moved to obey.

  From beyond a curve in the drift there came a rumbling that signified an oncoming tram car. Simcox didn’t seem to hear it; he ran across the turning sheet, a massive plate of boiler iron where cars and skips were shunted and rotated, and onto the ties between the same set of tracks. A few seconds later the loaded car rattled into view, the old-timer, Lundgren, pushing it with his usual speed down the slight grade.

  Somebody shouted, “Look out!”

  Simcox heard the cry or the noise of the car or both, realized his danger in time to jump clear. But he lost his footing on the slippery floor, fell, rolled against the wall. In that same moment the car hit the switch to the turning sheet—too fast, causing the switch to malfunction. The car rocked, tilted, and then slipped sideways off the track, spilling most of its load at the point where Simcox had gone down.

  The station tender’s scream was choked off in the tumbling roar, and he disappeared under the crushing weight of steel and waste rock.

  Lundgren and the other miners swarmed around the wreckage. Quincannon joined in the frantic scramble to unpile the rocks and lift the car, but there was no hope of rescue. Simcox’s own mother would not have recognized him when what was left of him was finally uncovered.

  After the remains had been shrouded, the men stood in a silent, grim-faced cluster. One gestured angrily, and when he said, “Quinn here was chasing Joe across the station just before the accident,” every eye fixed on Quincannon.

  Walrus Ben Tremayne stepped forward, his nicotine-stained mustaches bristling. “Two men dead in two days. Damn you, Quinn, you’re a murdering menace.”

  “Bah. Simcox paid for his own sins. He slipped into the chute while I was breaking up the jam and tried to kill me.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He was ordered to.”

  “The hell you say. By who?”

  “By you, Tremayne.”

  Surprised mutterings came from the miners. Walrus Ben growled, “That’s a bloody lie! Why would I give such an order?”

  “Simcox was a high-grader,” Quincannon said. “So was McClellan. And so are you—and a cold-blooded assassin to boot.”

  The muttering voices grew louder, ominous now. Miners had no tolerance for high-graders among their numbers, and the accusation that their shift boss was both a thief and a murderer heightened their natural enmity; as were most taskmasters, Tremayne was generally disliked. Sharpened gazes shifted from Quincannon to Walrus Ben and back again.

  Someone said, “Can you prove what you claim, Quinn?”

  “Quincannon’s the name—John Quincannon, neither a miner nor a company spy but a San Francisco detective hired to investigate the high-grading. I was close to unmasking the thieves, and Walrus Ben knew it. That’s why I was marked for death today, that and his attempt to lay the blame for his murder of McClellan on me.”

  Tremayne snapped, “My murder of McClellan? Another damn lie! The derringer he was shot with belongs to you, and you were alone with him in the crosscut. Nobody but you could have murdered him.”

  “Nobody but you is more like it. You shot McClellan because you knew he would crack under pressure and implicate you, and then you knocked me on the head afterward.”

  “How in hell could I have done that from out in the drift, in the company of three timbermen?”

  Quincannon picked Pat Barnes out of the crowd and addressed him. “You were one of those with him, Pat. Why were the four of you on your way to the abandoned cut?”

  Barnes said, scowling, “Ben told us there was thought of reopening it and he wanted us to inspect the support beams.”

  “Did you notice I wasn’t with the timber crew or did he call your attention to it?”

  “He did. The rest of us were too busy shoring.”

  “Where were you working at the time?”

  “Number-four stope.”

  “Which direction did Tremayne come from?”

  “Why … the direction of the abandoned cut.”

  Quincannon nodded. “Where he’d just finished shooting McClellan and knocking me on the head.”

  Angry exclamations from the miners now, a trio of obscenities from Walrus Ben.

  One of the men demanded of Quincannon, “What were you doing back at the cut?”

  Briefly he explained the reason and told of his discovery of the tube mill and cache of gold dust. “Either Tremayne had a prearranged meeting there with McClellan, or he went to pick up the dust. He’s the one who has been smuggling it out at regular intervals. A shift boss doesn’t have to submit to routine inspections like the rest of you.”

  “That’s right, he doesn’t,” Barnes muttered. “Be easy as pie for him.”

  “After knocking me senseless, he found the tube mill, sack of dust, and derringer in my pockets. If McClellan hadn’t come along just then, the gun might well have been used on me. Tremayne used it on his cohort instead, after they carried me back into the cut. McClellan knew I was on to him, he was losing his nerve, and like as not he wanted no part of murder. It was the perfect opportunity for Tremayne to eliminate both threats at once, by shooting McClellan and framing me for the deed.”

  “How? How could he have done it? He was with us when the shot was fired…”

  “No he wasn’t. The killing was done several minutes earlier, before he sought you out. What you heard was what he brought you along to hear—the explosion of a blasting cap.”

  “By God! Now I think of it, the report did sound too loud for that of a derringer.”

  “Tremayne is a powder man,” Quincannon said, “and I’ve heard miners say that a good blaster can blow a man’s nose for him without mussing his hair. He carries those little copper detonators in his pocket; you’ve all seen him take one out now and then, I’ll wager, just as I have. He also carries lengths of Bickford fuse. Simple enough to cut a piece of just the length needed to give him enough time to gather witnesses, then crimp the fuse into one of the detonators and light it.”

  Quincannon’s words had had the desired effect on the group of miners. They had shifted position so that now they had closed ranks around the shift boss, their cap lamps shining on his seamed, sweat-slick face.

  “He made the mistake,” Quincannon went on, “of laying the fuse in such a way that a portion of it burned black along the side and sole of McClellan’s left boot. I discovered that yesterday afternoon, and this morning I found the exploded cap in the abandoned stope. That’s all the evidence needed for proof of his guilt.”

  Walrus Ben maintained a dark and sullen silence.

  Quincannon did not need to draw the sixty-eight-cent Sears, Roebuck Defender in order to take Tremayne out of the mine and deliver him to O’Hearn. The miners not only made no effort to prevent it, but an apologetic Pat Barnes and one of the other timbermen accompanied them as guards. Walrus Ben, wisely, gave no resistance.

  17

  QUINCANNON

  James O’Hearn was by turns shocked, incredulous, outraged. When Quincannon finished repeating the charges against Walrus Ben, the mine superintendent went to loom above the chair in which the shift boss sat stone-faced and spine-stiffened.

  “Why, damn you, Tremayne?” he demanded. “After a dozen years as a loyal company man, why?”

  Walrus Ben raised his beetle-browed head. H
e said with dull defiance, “Loyal company man! What did that get me, working down in the goddamn hole six days a week all those years?”

  “It got you promoted to shift boss.”

  “Sure, for a few dollars more a month. It also got me weak lungs from the rock gas explosion down on eight-hundred five years ago. What the hell did I have to look forward to? Nothing but another couple of years until I couldn’t do the job anymore and a disabled old age on the dole.”

  “So that’s why you turned traitor.”

  “Traitor, hell. I don’t owe you or Monarch anything more than a day’s work for a day’s pay, and that’s what I gave you. Even after the high-grading started, you got that from me same as always.”

  “I also got a dead assistant foreman from you. Explain that away.”

  Tremayne sat stone-faced again.

  “Traitor I can understand,” O’Hearn said, “but not cold-blooded murderer. First McClellan, then the attempt on Quincannon in the chute this morning—”

  “Wasn’t my idea.”

  “Nobody else was around when you shot McClellan.”

  “I didn’t mean McClellan,” the shift boss said sullenly. “That was an accident. Frank lost his head when he saw the ore-crushing hideout had been found. I had the derringer in my hand, he tried to grab it, and it went off. Only choice I had then was to put the blame on Quinn, or whatever his name is. I couldn’t shoot him, too, in cold blood. I’m not made that way, no matter what you think.”

  “No? What about the chute attempt?”

  “Simcox’s stupid notion, not mine. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Whose stupid notion was the high-grading? Yours?”

  “No.”