Whiteoak watched him go, making certain neither of the boys could be detected from outside. Sure enough, apart from a few bits of faint whispering between them, Michael and James had all but vanished. Although his business was on the western half of town, Whiteoak turned toward the north and the rest of Third Street. While there were plenty of storefronts and homes to be found that way, he was more interested in the solitary figure standing at the mouth of an alley twenty paces away.
Byron Keag stood with a pistol in his hand, watching the professor with narrowed eyes. Before he could say anything, he was silenced by Whiteoak who touched the tip of his finger to his pursed lips. Byron waited for the other man to draw closer, but held his gun at the ready.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The two men walked down the street a ways, one man strolling while at gunpoint and another armed with the weight of heaven and hell on his shoulders. Once they’d gotten far enough, Whiteoak stopped and turned to face the other man.
“I should kill you,” Byron snarled.
“Keep your voice down.”
“Why? Everyone in town is either dead or dying!”
“That’s not true. They’re sleeping. So kindly speak in a civilized tone so I can explain myself.”
“Yeah, that’s right you’ll explain yourself,” Byron said in a softer voice. “Why don’t you start with what you gave to that child?”
“A coin I picked up in San Francisco. I believe it’s from somewhere in Asia. Worthless, but intriguing. Someone passed it to me in lieu of genuine currency. It is genuine, but not here. The tonic I mixed was too strong a dosage for a child.”
“So you didn’t poison them?”
“Of course not,” Whiteoak snapped. “What kind of a monster do you think I am?”
“That’s what I’m trying to determine. Wait, where are you going?”
The professor had turned a corner to head toward First Street. “Come along and you’ll see.”
“You’ll go where I say or you’ll be shot where you stand.”
“You won’t fire,” Whiteoak said with a backhanded wave. “And even if you did, I’ve been shot before and one more time won’t stop me now. Not unless you kill me, and I highly doubt you’d do anything of the sort.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you could have done it already. If you were so concerned about those children, you certainly would have pulled your trigger back there.”
“I was watching you,” Byron explained halfheartedly. “Carefully.”
“I know. I could feel your gaze. Quite chilling.”
Hurrying to catch up with the professor whose strides had grown longer and faster, Byron lowered his pistol. “What the hell is going on around here? And where’s my sister?”
“She’s at home, in her bed.”
Byron’s pistol came up again. This time, however, its hammer was snapped back without the slightest hesitation. “If you sullied her in any way . . .”
“Now why on earth would I do that?” Whiteoak asked, his hands propped defiantly upon his hips.
“Wh . . . why would you do any of this?” Byron shot back as he waved a frantic hand at the entire town surrounding him.
Within a few seconds, the fire in Whiteoak’s eyes died down. “All right,” he said. “I know how this looks, but these people aren’t dead. They’re sleeping.”
“They look dead.”
“They’re not. I checked a good number of them and I know exactly what I’m doing. The dosage they were given wasn’t enough to kill. At the most, it would only make them sleep a couple of hours. Most will be awake before that.”
“I knew you were the one behind it!”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Good Lord above, you’re a trial to talk to when you’re rattled.”
Byron holstered his pistol. The gesture wasn’t one of peace so much as a show of exasperated surrender. “You drugged the whiskey you were giving away, didn’t you?”
“Actually, I drugged the flavoring I gave to Robert at the Dove Tail and he drugged the whiskey. The tea, however, was all my doing. I presume you suspected something,” Whiteoak added. “That’s why you didn’t drink either of them.”
“You’re damn right. Also, it seemed too peculiar for you to give away anything at all. You paying for drinks, even you parting with some of your tonics in exchange for drinks that would be handed out for free just seemed mighty strange. But you drank some of that whiskey! I saw it with my own eyes!”
Pride exploded from Whiteoak’s face like beams of sunlight through a bank of clouds. “I did and after all the years I’ve spent working with and testing my own mixtures, I can ingest quite a lot of them without feeling any of their effects.”
“Well I wasn’t going to let Lyssa have any of it,” Byron said. “Until she downed some just to spite me.”
“Couldn’t have done it better myself.”
Byron’s fist cracked against the professor’s jaw, snapping his head to one side and sending a few drops of spittle through the air. Recovering from the blow, Whiteoak rubbed his chin before dabbing at his mouth with a handkerchief. “I had that one coming,” he said.
“Damn right you did, especially with what you did to my sister.”
“I already told you, she’s sleeping like all the others.”
“You didn’t do anything . . . else . . . to her? Or with her?”
“No,” Whiteoak said regretfully. “The compound is something I’ve been working on for some time. I perfected it after months of work and even tested it out on other men right here in town to make sure it was just right. Naturally, it was.”
“Who did you test it on?” Byron asked.
“Remember how those fellows at our poker game passed out after that round of drinks I bought?”
“Yeah.”
“There you go,” Whiteoak said as if he’d pulled a rose from his sleeve in front of an adoring crowd.
“What’s this compound made from?”
“That would be too complicated to explain and I doubt you’d understand. No offense, but you’re not a chemist.”
Although Byron clearly wanted to argue the point, he couldn’t exactly prove his credentials.
“Whoever drank that whiskey or my tea will be asleep for some time. Enough time,” Whiteoak added while checking his watch, “for me to finish the business that brought me here in the first place.”
“You put the whole town to sleep?” Byron asked incredulously.
“Not the whole town. That would be preposterous. I was only hoping to tuck the committee away so they wouldn’t be around to turn the streets into a shooting gallery when I took my leave of this place. It turned out that a lot more folks accepted my invitation for a drink than I’d expected. Chalk that up to my charming personality, I suppose.”
“And what brought you here in the first place?”
“The bank, of course.”
“Damn,” Byron grunted. “I knew you were a thief.”
“My good fellow, was that ever in question?”
“No. No, it wasn’t.”
“I’d heard there was something valuable in that safe, but the trick was getting into it. I have many friends in various lines of work and they mentioned this prize in passing. When I asked why none of them or their associates went after it themselves, they said it was far more trouble than it was worth and getting into the safe was only half of the chore. The other half was getting out of town alive.”
“So you came in under the guise of a snake oil salesman.”
“How many times do I have to tell people?” Whiteoak said. “I do not sell snake oil. And my profession is not a guise or any sort of ruse, per se. I am as all of my credentials portray me.”
“Uh-huh. Where on your wagon does it say you’re a bank robber?”
“What I propose in this instance isn’t robbery insomuch as a marvelously plotted scheme with vaguely illegal undertones.” Upon feeling the thick air of disgust roll off of Byron, Wh
iteoak added, “Highly illegal. But nobody will get hurt and if anyone knew the lengths I went to make certain of that, they’d let me walk out of this town with naught but a pat on the back for a job well done.”
“This is . . . insanity.”
“Oh, come now. You must have had some sort of suspicion that something grand was taking place and even if you didn’t know what it was, you wanted to be a part of it.”
“Why would I want to take part in a swindler’s insanity?”
“Because you’re tired of being a messenger. Otherwise,” Whiteoak said slyly, “why would you wait until now to see what I was up to?”
“How was I to know you were up to anything at all?”
“Why didn’t you drink any of that whiskey?”
Byron didn’t have a quick answer to that one. He found it even harder to speak once he saw the Second Bank of Barbrady drawing closer with every step. “I did know you were up to something,” he said quietly.
“My point, exactly,” Whiteoak replied. “Admitting something is the first step to overcoming it.”
“I didn’t think you’d do something that would hurt the entire town.”
Raising a finger, Whiteoak said, “Nobody is hurt. Just sleeping.”
“Yes, but I walked a good distance before finding you and I only saw one or two people on their feet and they were too old to do much of anything!”
“I appreciate that. Your observations, combined with all of the checking I did, tell me that most of the town is slumbering nicely. Now if you’ll take a few deep breaths and calm yourself, you might be of some use to me.”
Byron looked at Whiteoak as if the other man had sprouted a set of udders and strapped a bell around his neck. “Some use to you? I don’t even know if my sister is truly breathing and you offer me some sort of job to do?”
“If it’ll make you feel better, go check on Lyssa and confirm what I’ve already told you numerous times. I’ll be inside the bank when you’re through, but be quick about it. We don’t have all day.”
Like a dog that had been cut loose after being cooped up its entire life, Byron didn’t know what to do with his newfound freedom. Then his expression hardened and he stabbed a finger at the professor. “You better not go anywhere!”
“I won’t.”
“Come to think of it, I want you to come along with me while I see Lyssa for myself.”
They were directly in front of the bank by now and if there had been a bit in Whiteoak’s mouth, he would have bitten clean through it already. “I’m not going anywhere but inside that bank.”
Byron drew his pistol and pointed it at him. “You’re coming with me.”
Already on his way into the bank, Whiteoak waved off the command, bypassed the door altogether and kicked in a few of the boards that had been used to repair the large hole which had once been the bank’s front window.
“Hey!” Byron shouted. When Whiteoak didn’t respond to that, Byron sent a round into the air. The sound of that single shot echoed through town, bouncing off of walls where it was apparently heard by no one, because that’s who responded to it.
He considered going to find Sheriff Willis until he remembered the lawman was out hunting for George Halstead. Byron considered dragging Deputy Avery to the bank until he recalled all the times he’d seen the junior lawman at the Dove Tail. The odds of him passing up a free drink, no matter who was responsible for it being there, were slim at best.
All he had to do was consider his sister and Byron couldn’t run to her house quickly enough.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
It wasn’t long before Byron returned to the building which seemed to be at the center of all of Barbrady’s recent problems. “Henry!” he shouted while stepping in through the broken window. “Answer me, damn it!”
“In here,” came the professor’s reply.
Byron followed the sound of the other man’s voice to the back of the lobby, which was where he’d been headed in the first place. When he got there, his hand was already resting on the grip of his holstered pistol. Although he had plenty of things he wanted to say to Whiteoak, the first thing that popped out was, “How’d you get that safe open?”
Hunched in front of the safe, Whiteoak took a quick glance over his shoulder and said, “Bailey tried to hide the combination from me when he was opening it, but he didn’t do a very good job of it.”
Byron looked into the lobby and saw the cash drawers near the tellers’ windows were open and emptied. “Just once, I’d like to see a time when things don’t go your way,” he sighed.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“How was your sister?”
“She’s fine,” Byron said as he stepped into the back room so he could get a better look at what the professor was doing. “Couldn’t wake her up, but she seemed fine.”
“Give her another hour or so and she’ll be plucky as ever. Hopefully we’ll be done with this in that time.”
“We?”
“Of course! Since you’re providing assistance, you’re entitled to a cut of the profits. I’m certain there’ll be plenty to go around.”
His interest sparked, Byron huddled next to Whiteoak so he could look into the safe at the rows of small square doors. “What’s in there, exactly?”
“I don’t know yet, but we need to get to it quickly if we’re to pull this off. Do me a favor and take a look behind that desk.”
“Desk?” Byron turned around and spotted a small writing desk in the corner of the room near the door. The piece of furniture was barely large enough for two pieces of paper to be set on top of it side by side, which explained why he’d overlooked it earlier. It slid away from the wall with a single shove, exposing a dusty corner filled with cobwebs, some of which had been recently torn by a ring of keys that had been dropped on the floor.
“You find them?” Whiteoak asked. “They should be right there.”
Reaching into the grimy corner, Byron picked up the keys and carried them over to Whiteoak. “Are these the ones Mister Bailey was holding?”
“The same. They got kicked somewhere during the tussle between me and that teller. Only problem now is figuring out which ones to use in which locks.”
“Keep trying until one fits.”
“It won’t be that easy,” Whiteoak replied.
Having been drawn into what now seemed to be more of an oversized puzzle box than a safe, Byron asked, “Why not? It shouldn’t take too long to get most of those doors open.”
“To answer that, I have one word for you. It also happened to be the same word that was the last one to pass from Jesse Nash’s dying lips.”
“You mean, after he said all those things about the Founding Four and who was behind the robberies?”
“He never said any of that,” Whiteoak confessed.
“What?”
“Do you honestly think a dying man in that much pain could go on for that long on any subject?” Whiteoak thought back proudly to the tale he’d spun on the matter in front of his audience cloaked in swirling gun smoke. “I saw an opportunity to set some wheels in motion and being the sole recipient of Nash’s final words was the perfect device. I aired some dirty laundry, espoused some of my own suspicions and generally poked the bear until it came trundling out of its cave. Considering how Davis and Halstead wound up, I’d say my display worked rather well.”
“So that was a bluff?” Byron said incredulously. “With everything that happened, all the times we could have been killed, with all the guns pointed at you, you still found time to bluff?”
“The more audacious, the better where such matters are concerned.”
“So what did Nash really tell you?”
“I asked him the one thing I needed to know and he answered.”
“Yeah?”
Whiteoak turned around so he could look Byron straight in the eyes when he said, “Colfax.”
“Colfax?”
“That’s right.”
“And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“Not a lot on its own,” Whiteoak said, slipping into the melodic tone he used when pitching a new elixir outside of his wagon. “But considering this job pivots around this particular safe, it means quite a lot.”
Since the professor had turned back around to carefully flip through the bundles of cash stacked beneath the square doors, Byron hastily said, “Keep talking.”
“Myron Colfax is a designer of safes and lockboxes known for his sense of intricate eccentricity. He started his career building music boxes and the occasional timepiece, but found he could make more of a living crafting specialized items for a different set of clients.”
“You mean building safes for rich men.”
“Exactly. In one of my earlier careers, I stumbled across a few Colfax originals and found them to be quite infuriating. You see, they’re designed specifically to guard against robbers.”
“Aren’t all safes made for that reason?” Byron asked. While he wouldn’t admit as much to Whiteoak, he found himself drawn into the story. As he listened, the professor studied each individual bill in the bundles of money he was handling rather than pocketing them straight away.
“Yes,” Whiteoak said, “but a Colfax safe is made to protect valuables even after it’s been opened. His genius was in not underestimating the wits or tenacity of a desperate man’s efforts to bust open an iron door. Any Colfax is strong in that regard. The real treasures to be found, however, lay within the compartments that aren’t so easy to crack.”
Byron was now crouching so he could gaze directly along Whiteoak’s line of sight. Wearing the smile of a student that had just figured out the arithmetic problem that had been stumping him for so long, he said, “You mean those little compartments right there.”
“Partly.” Whiteoak removed one of the bills from the thin bundle he’d been examining and set it on top of the rest. He then sifted through the keys on the ring Byron had handed to him. His breathing took on a quicker pace as he excitedly held one key up to Byron’s face. It was too close for Byron to see anything but a metal blur and before he could pull back far enough to get a clearer look, the key was stuck into the door of the third square compartment within the safe.
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