by J. T. Edson
“That it does,” the showman agreed, nodding as if to indicate he believed a shrewd point was being made. “And very good she is at it, by all accounts. In fact, I’ve heard there were a couple of times money was found missing from locked cash boxes. There was some suspicion on account of her known skill, but her own nature and having Jinks and Padoubny the strong man backing her play, nobody got around to trying to prove it.”
“So the three of them have been together and close friends for some time?” the Rebel Spy said quietly.
“They have indeed,” Barnum substantiated. “I don’t know what she sees in them, but, according to what I’ve heard, they would do anything for her without question.”
“You wouldn’t know whether there have been any unexplained robberies take place where they were appearing, sir?” Darren said, showing he was duplicating Belle’s line of thought.
“I’m afraid not,” the showman replied.
“Damn it!” the male agent exclaimed. “I’ve always said it’s a pity there isn’t a central collecting agency where lawmen could send information like that to be available to others when needed.”
“I’ve tried to have one set up several times,” Handiman claimed. “But I was always turned down by Our Masters, as I think you call them, Rache, because of the expense setting it up would entail and fears that the liber-rad softshells would object on the grounds that doing so would entail a loss of privacy for everybody who was kept on the records.”
“Before you ask,” Barnum said, and for once his voice lost its usual timbre. “Yes, I think Libby and her two friends could have pulled off the robbery at the Grand Republic with the help of the Martinellis. Climbing up and down the wall would be possible even for her, with Padoubny hauling in the rope on the way back.”
“How about the way the train was robbed?” Belle asked.
“I’d say they could have pulled that from the roof of the private car,” the showman assessed. “But not so the guards missed seeing them coming in.”
“Unless the killing was done before the others got in through the window that had been opened for them,” Handiman pointed out, despite having nodded as if approving of the theory being propounded by the Rebel Spy.
“That could have been done by Jinks wearing his masked-bandit outfit,” Darren asserted. “You said Charlie and Archie were shot by heavy-caliber bullets that stopped either from cutting loose in return after they were hit, sir. Knowing how experienced they were, I don’t see them mistaking any kind of gun that was large enough to take one—even a Remington Double Derringer, which would be about the biggest he could handle if he’s so small—for a harmless cap pistol.”
“He wouldn’t need to use the Remington, because of his size,” Barnum warned. “He’s as strong as many men a whole lot bigger, and I heard he once shot a drunken horse-wrangler from out west who tried to pick on him with his own Colt Peacemaker.”
“Only, even a Civilian Model Peacemaker would be too big to be passed off as a cap pistol,” Darren objected.
“A Storekeeper Model might get by, especially as it would be expected when they thought they were just watching a child playing a game of outlaws, which is how Jinks must have looked to them,” Belle pointed out, knowing that the major difference between the two types of Colts lay in the one she mentioned having a two-and-a-half-inch barrel against the other’s being four and a three-quarters in length. “And there are others on the market of a large enough caliber that are just as compact.”
“That’s true,” Handiman agreed. “The circus left by train going west this morning, so—!”
“Libby and her bunch weren’t with it,” the showman interrupted. “I had one of my men at the depot to see them off and learn where they’d be playing so our routes wouldn’t clash and, I’ll admit, trying to find out whether Cosmo had come up with any new attractions I might be able to persuade him to let join up with me. He asked about her specifically, as they’d been on good terms once and he’s still got a shine on her, and was told they’d gone ahead on the train that got robbed, only that wasn’t mentioned outright.”
“Would they all be in cahoots?” Belle inquired.
“I’d say not,” Barnum estimated. “It was before the newspapers came out, so they wouldn’t have heard about the robbery.”
“Then they could have done both of them,” Darren stated.
“They could,” the General admitted. “The only problem will be proving what we suspect.” Seeing that the showman was exhibiting signs of wishing to leave, he asked, “Is there anything more you can tell us, Barnie?”
“Only that you don’t want to take chances with any of them if what you’re thinking proves correct,” Barnum replied soberly. “Because even the two wops—Giovanni especially—could prove real dangerous given the opportunity to resist, and there’s no could about the rest.”
“What’s next, sir?” Darren inquired when the showman had taken his departure after having told Belle that he wished he could persuade her to go against her orders and take up his offer of appearing with his organization. “Was it really a just a decoy scheme thought up by the Treasury Department that went wrong and got Charlie and Archie killed, like the Mail says?”
“It wasn’t,” the General replied, speaking in what was a most definite manner to anybody who knew him as well as did his two agents. “But we’re going to do everything we can to make the gang and whoever’s behind them think it was. Because I’m sure they had to have somebody with more facilities than they’re likely to have let them know where to look and when to do it. What we have to do is convince them the real plates are going to be sent to San Francisco by a roundabout route and a courier nobody would be likely to suspect the Treasury of using and, because of interdepartmental rivalry, we aren’t going to be allowed to become involved.”
“It’s a pity we dealt with that bureaucrat of the Countess’s the way we did, Belle,” Darren remarked. “Fed the right news, I bet he’d soon find where to peddle it to the best advantage even if he didn’t already know.”
“And it’s lucky he isn’t the only bureaucrat willing to do things like that,” the General remarked in a casual-seeming fashion. “We’ve got one on tap who we’ve let sell items we wanted various people to know about without knowing he’s been set up to do it.”
“Then we’ll have to hope he can convince them that it will be me taking the supposed real plates while somebody else is doing it, sir,” Belle guessed.
“If there’s one thing I’ve never been able to stand, it’s a smart woman,” Handiman declared. “I married one and know just how smart they can be.”
Nine – It’s Me, Or the Law
“Wha—!” Lachlan Lachlan of the McLachlans gasped, starting to rise with his right hand going toward the uppermost drawer of his dilapidated desk as he saw that the person who had entered his private office unannounced was not the one he expected and remembered that the Remington Double Derringer in its card hold-out holster had failed to achieve the expected surprise when he last tried to use it.
“Wha—How—?”
“That crooked hardboot you call a clerk’s gone to the John, so I let myself in,” Libby Craddock explained as she gazed without favor around the grubby room in which she had last conducted her meeting with the scrawny fence. She was dressed and looked as she had been then. Gesturing with the bulky bag she was carrying in her left hand and slipping the right inside, she went on. “I must say you don’t seem very pleased to see me.”
“I never thought I would!” Lachlan admitted, being too disconcerted to wonder how his far-from-welcome visitor had deduced that Beagle was a jockey who had been warned off for dishonest behavior—carried out at his behest—as he started to slowly and, he hoped, with an appearance of innocent intent, ease the drawer open.
“Leave the damned thing in there, you stupid son of a bitch!” the reddish-brunette ordered viciously, bringing the fancy-looking pearl-handled Smith & Wesson revolver, which she could handle in a deadl
y fashion when need be, from the bag. “I thought you’d have learned better than to play games with me after the last time you tried, and I sure as hell don’t know why you’re at it again, unless you’re hoping to get them without paying.”
After having contrived to return Jinks to the prepared box in the caboose without being detected by the conductor or anybody else, Libby had found that the rest of the gang were just as successful in reaching the seats they had chosen on boarding to lessen the chance of it being realized they were traveling together. The discovery of the corpses had happened earlier than she envisaged. In fact, she had been surprised that it had happened so quickly until she had learned why the door to the private car was left open. However, while there was the considerable commotion she had known was certain to take place under the circumstances, nothing had occurred to make her believe she or any of her companions were suspected of being responsible for the killing of the two Treasury Department guards and robbery of the currency printing plates.
On arriving at the next major station along the line, nobody had been permitted to leave the train until after the local peace officers and officials of the railroad had conducted an inquiry into the incident and carried out a search of all the travelers’ persons and belongings. Because of her forethought, nothing of any incriminating nature had been found on any of them and the “widow’s weeds” she had on had ensured an undeserved sympathy. She had received so little attention that she could have had the loot, the now badly damaged leotard, and her weapons, as well as the means for making herself look as she had the last time she had contacted the fence—which she was compelled to have along so as to keep to the plan she had formulated—in her small amount of baggage without them being detected.
Being cautious by nature, at least where her own safety was concerned, Libby had been disinclined to take any more chances than were unavoidable, such as keeping the items needed for her disguise with her. Therefore, she had insisted all the garb used by herself and her associates while the robbery was taking place be thrown from the train after they had donned the more innocuous attire in which they were traveling. There could have been one snag to her arrangements in spite of the precaution, but this had not arisen.
Apart from his bulk drawing some attention his way regardless of his following the instructions he was given to dress in a similar fashion to the non-circus men who would be his closest traveling companions, being unarmed, there was nothing about Stanislaus Padoubny to make him noticeable or arouse suspicion. However, although their knives were found on them, the fact that the Martinelli brothers had refused to dispose of the knives aroused no interest or speculation when they were discovered, because many Italians often went armed in such a manner. The reddish-brunette had left her own knife, the Smith & Wesson, and the loot with Jinks, whose spirited and lifelike impersonation of a savage dog had prevented a close scrutiny of the container in which he was hidden.
Being at liberty to carry on after the abortive attempts to find the plates—or anything else to help learn who was responsible for the crime—were concluded, the reddish-brunette had insisted upon adhering to the schedule she had conceived. Once she and her associates had left the train, problems that she had suspected might happen had begun to arise. Not improved by Jinks’s mocking behavior and reminders that the twins were an essential portion of his act, a duty forced upon them that neither had ever relished, there had been considerable animosity from them over her returning alone to Washington, D.C., with the loot for disposal to Lachlan as had been arranged. However, with the all-too-willing support of the midget clown and backed unthinkingly by the menacing muscle power of strong man Padoubny, she had succeeded in quelling their objections.
Because of the need for Libby to bring back something close to a more harmonious relationship between the men—although this had always been a fragile thing where Jinks and the twins were concerned—when she set off by the first available train, she had been in a less-than-amiable frame of mind. Traveling in the over warm “widow’s weeds” and the rest of her disguise—the delay while settling the disagreements between her associates having prevented her from changing into the attire and makeup worn on her first visit to Lachlan—had been made even more irksome than was the case on the outward journey. Therefore, being tired and still less than at her best on arrival in the capital city, she had failed to notice the headlines inscribed in large and generally red letters on the notices pinned to news-stands telling the supposed result of the robbery.
Because of the time required to make the necessary alterations to her appearance in the women’s rest room at the depot and being engrossed by the thought of receiving the balance of the payment she was promised for delivering the plates, the reddish-brunette had reached the office of the fence without having discovered things were not going the way she had expected. Although she would have willingly gone through the accepted ritual before being admitted, she had seen Beagle going to answer the “call of nature” as she reached the head of the stairs, and had decided not to delay her entrance until he returned.
Being unaware of the true state of affairs, Libbey was surprised by the less-than-amiable reception she was being accorded.
“You mean you didn’t know?” Lachlan asked, his tone disbelieving as he raised his right hand from its proximity with the Colt Storekeeper Peacemaker revolver he kept in the drawer as a second line of defense for the Remington up his sleeve.
“What do I have to know?” Libby demanded, without showing an equal sign of relaxing and keeping the Smith & Wesson’s barrel directed at the center of the fence’s scrawny chest. “If it’s about those two guards being shot, you must have realized from the beginning that it would have to be done.”
“That hasn’t anything to do with it, although it happening hasn’t helped make matters any better,” Lachlan answered, and waved a hand to the two newspapers lying unopened on his desk. “Take a look at what’s said in these, if you haven’t already seen them.”
“They’re only bluffing about the plates,” the reddish-brunette stated, having contrived to read the accounts that were given in each paper without relaxing her watch on the fence to any great extent. Using her left hand, she extracted the items in question from her bag and laid them before him. “Take a look at these. Why the hell would they be carrying two complete sets if both are fakes?”
“Because it was wanted for the deception to look even more convincing.”
“How do you know that?”
“The man who told me said that it was so, and he is in a position to know.”
“Can you trust him not to be trying to throw you wrong?”
“He’s never been wrong with anything he brought to me in the past,” Lachlan asserted with complete conviction.
“And I’ve got too much on him for him to be deliberately trying to pull anything on me.”
“It still doesn’t seem right that they’d take so much trouble—!” Libby growled, glaring from the fence to the plates and back.
“Why not?” Lachlan inquired. “Like he said when he told me what he knows, with what’s at stake, the government would want every possible precaution taken to make sure the real plates get to San Francisco safely. Do you have any idea what it would mean if they didn’t?”
“Sure,” Libby declared. “Somebody would be able to print up a heap of money that can’t be told from the real thing.”
“It goes far beyond that,” Lachlan corrected. “The government will be in a hell of a bad state. The only way they could stop a disaster would be to call in all the paper money that’s around already and replace it with some that’s completely different. The moment that was started, there’d be a panic and everybody would want to start changing their paper cash for gold and silver currency. It could rip the whole economy of the country apart.”
“And you want that,” the reddish-brunette asked in a disbelieving tone, failing to see how there could be any profit in the situation for the fence.
“The pe
ople I’m working for d—!” Lachlan began, and stopped abruptly as he realized he was making an indiscreet response.
“Who would they be?”
“I can hardly—!”
“The hell you can’t!” Libby snorted, then grinned. “Anyway, you don’t need to. It’s big businessmen, isn’t it?”
“No,” Lachlan denied, and, wanting to flaunt his superior knowledge before the woman who had so ably got the better of him on their last meeting and was far less respectful than any other criminal with whom he had come into contact, went on. “It’s a bunch of wealthy ‘liberals’—or they claim to be that way in the hope of winning votes from the workingmen that they would need to get elected into political office—who know their only hope of taking control of the country is by discrediting both the elephants and mules, which would happen when word leaked out, as they would see it did, about the paper currency being unsafe because of the counterfeit they’d put on the market.”
“They must have plenty of cash to throw around,” the reddish-brunette said pensively. “Can’t they use these plates?”
“Certainly not,” the fence answered, his voice redolent of bitterness, as he had already considered the possibility and had it discounted by what he was told by the men who hired him and his informant. “Both sets look all right at first glance, but they’ve flaws that would let everything that was printed from them be easily detectable. Anyway, this is what they’ve told me to do.”
Gathering up the plates as he was speaking, Lachlan carried them to the still-lit stove and, expecting to hear a protest from the woman, threw them inside.
Instead of raising the anticipated protest, Libby tucked the Smith & Wesson into the waistband of her skirt and crossed to shovel some coal from the scuttle into the mouth of the stove.
“I know those damned things aren’t like the jewelry you tried to pull the old burning game on with me,” the reddish-brunette said, dropping the small shovel and drawing the revolver swiftly. “So we’ll just let them stay where they are until they’re ruined, in case you’re just trying to get out of paying me for getting them. Which you’re going to do.”
