Quincannon

by Bill Pronzini

  The men sat on the far side of the waiting room and continued their conversation desultorily, as if they really had little to say to each other. Quincannon shut his eyes for a time. He opened them when he again heard the sound of the door, saw a woman come in — and then came to his feet with such violence that he kicked over his chair, sent it clattering across the floor.

  He was looking at a ghost — the ghost of Katherine Bennett.

  At the sudden noise the woman swung around to face him. He saw then that the resemblance was superficial, that it was only in profile that she might have been Katherine Bennett’s twin: the same tall, slender form, the same facial bone structure, the same black hair worn long about her shoulders. But the moment had left him badly shaken; his hands twitched, his body was filmed in sweat.

  The woman was staring at him, as were the two men across the room. She said, with puzzlement but without anxiety, “Is something wrong?”

  “No,” he said, “no, it — ” The words clogged in his throat. He shook his head, moved away to the door, outside into the warming air.

  There was no one near the stable at the rear. He leaned against the depot wall, drank quickly from his flask. The whiskey steadied him, steadied his thoughts. Was the woman another passenger for Silver City? He was not sure how he would bear up under a long ride with her, in the close confines of a Concord coach.

  But he had no choice in the matter: when the stage clattered in a few minutes later, the woman was the first to board. She gave him a curious look as the driver helped her in; so did the roly-poly man and the one with the hemp-colored hair. Quincannon let the three of them get settled, waiting until all the luggage had been stowed in the boot and the driver was ready to depart before he steeled himself and swung inside.

  The woman was sitting on the seat that faced forward, the tall man beside her. Quincannon occupied the space next to the fat man and opposite the woman, who gave him another curious glance. The fat man must have smelled the sharp odor of whiskey on his breath; he muttered something about strong drink so early in the day. Quincannon. paid no attention to him. In spite of himself he could not take his eyes from the woman.

  She was perhaps thirty, attractive in a quiet, mature way. She wore a knitted shoulder cape over a gray traveling dress, and a rather fancy summer leghorn hat. There was strength in the shape of her face and mouth, intelligence in eyes the dark color of the sea at dusk. He found himself both fascinated and repelled.

  The four of them sat in silence as the driver climbed onto the box and kicked off the brake and the stage jerked into motion. There was some polite talk after that, among the woman and the two men; they were all acquainted, though evidently not too well. None of them spoke to Quincannon until the stage rumbled aboard the ferry across the Snake River. Then the tall man stepped out to smoke a pipe at the railing, and a few moments later the fat one moved to join him. Quincannon shifted on the leather seat and tried in vain not to look at the woman.

  She said abruptly, “Why do you keep staring at me?” But there was still no anxiety in her voice, nor any anger; only curiosity.

  “I apologize for that,” he said. “My manners are generally much better.”

  “Do I remind you of someone?”

  “... Yes.”

  “A loved one?”

  “No, not that.”

  “Someone you knew well, then.”

  “Someone I never knew at all.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand. ...”

  “A private matter,” Quincannon said shortly.

  “And you would rather not discuss it.”

  “No. Do you live in Silver City, miss?”

  “I do now. I’ve a milliner’s shop there.”

  “Would you know a man named Whistling Dixon?”

  “That’s an odd name,” she said. “No, I’ve never heard it before. Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is he what brings you to Silver City?”

  “No, business does.”

  “What is your business, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Salts.”

  “Salts? Do you mean patent medicines?”

  “Dr. Wallmann’s Nerve and Brain Salts. The finest blood purifier on the market today, guaranteed to — ”

  She held up her hand. “Please,” she said, smiling slightly, “I’m not a prospective customer, Mr. — ?”

  “Lyons, Andrew Lyons.”

  “I’m Sabina Carpenter. Now that we’re acquainted, I’ll feel better about being stared at. Assuming you intend to continue.”

  He didn’t smile. “I will try to control myself.”

  “It gave you quite a start when you first saw me, didn’t it?”

  “Yes. Quite a start.”

  Silence for a few moments. Then she said, “May I ask an impertinent question, Mr. Lyons?”

  “As you like.”

  “Do you always drink whiskey so early in the day?”

  Quincannon said seriously, “Yes, I do. I’m a drunkard.”

  “I see,” she said, as if he had just told her he was a Presbyterian. “But a harmless one, I trust.”

  Harmless, he thought. He said nothing.

  “Are you proud of your drunkenness, Mr. Lyons, that you speak of it so frankly?”

  “Hardly that. But I see no point in telling a lie when the truth will suffice.”

  “An honest man. How refreshing.”

  “Don’t you know many honest men, Miss Carpenter?”

  “Not as many as I would like to.”

  “The two gentlemen riding with us — are they honest men?”

  “I don’t know either of them well enough to judge,” she said. “At the least they are both influential men.”

  “Oh? In Silver City?”

  “Yes. The fat one is Oliver Truax, owner of the Paymaster mine. The Paymaster is one of the largest and richest on War Eagle Mountain.”

  “You say that as if you have a proprietary interest in it.”

  “I do, as a matter of fact. I recently bought several shares of stock in the Paymaster Mining Company. You wouldn’t happen to be interested in that sort of investment yourself, would you, Mr. Lyons?”

  “Not I. I haven’t the money for it.”

  Outside, one of the ferrymen shouted to someone on shore; through the door window Quincannon could see that the ferry was about to dock on the west bank of the swift-moving river. The other door opened just then and the tall man reentered the coach, followed by Oliver Truax.

  Sabina Carpenter apparently decided that introductions were in order. Truax had no interest in a drummer of nerve and brain salts, especially one who began the day with a breakfast of straight whiskey; he said, “How do you do,” and gave his attention to what was happening outside the coach. The tall man, whose name was Will Coffin and who was the owner and publisher of the Owyhee Volunteer, seemed friendlier and more inclined to make conversation.

  “These salts of yours, Mr. Lyons,” he said bluntly, “are they any good?”

  “Excellent. The finest on the market.”

  “What sort of ills will they cure?”

  “Nervous irritability, night sweats, blurring of eyesight, slow circulation of the blood, swollen veins, and weakness of the brain and body as a result of excesses or abuses of any kind.”

  “Very impressive. How much do they sell for?”

  “One dollar the box.”

  “Perhaps I’ll purchase one when we arrive,” Coffin said. “I have been under a nervous strain lately.”

  “Pressures of your profession, Mr. Coffin?”

  “Not that so much as the fact that I am being harassed.”

  “Harassed?”

  “By the Chinese population in Silver. Some of them have broken into my house and the newspaper office and destroyed property in both places. God knows what other indignities they’ve perpetrated in my absence; I’ve been two days in Boise gathering political news. I asked friends to watch my house and the
office, but ...” He grimaced and shook his head.

  “The Chinese are generally a peaceable race where white men are concerned,” Quincannon said. “Why have some of them taken after you?”

  “Opium,” Coffin said.

  “Sir?”

  “Opium. I have editorialized against the filthy stuff and their open selling of it in no uncertain terms. Do you know what yenshee is, Mr. Lyons?”

  Quincannon nodded. It was the scrapings of the opium pipe, gathered and saved and sold to addicts who could not afford pure opium; a quarter teaspoon of yenshee mixed with a small amount of water sustained the opium eater’s illusion of well-being until his next pipe.

  “The worst of them, a merchant named Yum Wing, gives small quantities of it away free — a means to corrupt men and bring him more customers.”

  “And that ploy has succeeded?”

  “All too well. My compositor, Jason Elder, became an addict that way and has been all but useless at his job since.”

  “Was Elder a good printer before his addiction?”

  “Yes. One of the best I have ever worked with.”

  Quincannon filed Jason Elder’s name away for future consideration.

  Oliver Truax said, “There are too many Chinamen in Silver, that’s the problem.” Now that the stage had come off the ferry and was underway again, he had apparently decided to make himself heard. “The whole lot of them should be run out of town. And Yum Wing and the rest of the elders tarred and feathered first.”

  “What a quaint idea,” Sabina Carpenter said mildly.

  Her sarcasm was lost on the fat mine owner. He said, “We would all be better off in that event. And it might happen, too. Mark my words, it well might.”

  “Vigilante action, Mr. Truax?” she asked.

  “If necessary. Wendell McClew is an incompetent buffoon, everyone knows that — the worst town marshal Silver has ever had. He can’t control the Chinamen and he can’t do anything about the outlaws running loose in the hills, preying on innocent men and women. He can’t do anything worth a tinker’s dam.”

  “You’re being a bit hard on him, Oliver,” Coffin said. “McClew isn’t as bad as all that.”

  “I say he is. I say he should be removed from office and a better man installed in his place before the Chinamen run amok.”

  “Are matters with the Chinese really that serious?” Quincannon asked.

  “Hardly,” Sabina Carpenter said.

  Truax looked at her as if she were a child. “You haven’t been in Silver very long, Miss Carpenter. You haven’t a proper understanding of the situation.”

  “But of course you do.”

  “Of course,” Truax said. It was obvious to Quincannon that he was the kind of man who believed in the absolute sanctity of his own viewpoint. It was also obvious to Quincannon that he was an arrogant, pompous, and bigoted troublemaker. “Get rid of the heathens, I say. God-fearing men and women are what we want in Silver City.”

  “God-fearing white men and women,” Sabina Carpenter amended.

  Truax nodded emphatically. “Just as you say, Miss Carpenter. Just as you say.”

  They lapsed into silence as the stage rattled on through fertile farmland, the coach jouncing and swaying in its thoroughbraces. The movement and the amount of whiskey he had drunk in Nampa gave Quincannon a vicious headache, created more queasiness in his stomach; he sat with his eyes closed, enduring it.

  Noon came as they crossed less settled flatland toward the rugged, looming shapes of the Owyhee Mountains. Just before they reached the low foothills that marked the beginning of the Owyhees, they encountered a section of road covered with ruts that ran parallel to each other the width of the coach. The other three passengers had been over this road before; they lowered the side-curtains over the windows as the stage began to crawl through the ruts. Each was full of potholes, some hidden by buildups of powdery dirt; one wheel or another sometimes dropped clear to the hub and caused the coach to jerk and bounce violently, the four of them to hang onto the straps with both hands. Even with the curtains down, the air was clogged with dust. Quincannon had to struggle to keep his sickness down inside him. His head felt as if hobnails were being driven into the inside of his skull.

  When they cleared the rutted section the driver stopped and allowed his passengers to rest briefly and compose themselves. Quincannon took the opportunity to drain his flask. The whiskey steadied him again, but added to the pounding in his temples.

  Early in the afternoon, well into the lower elevations of the Owyhees, they reached a way station that had been built at a point where two other roads joined the one they had been traveling. The main building was wood-frame, with a covered porch and a sign above it that read: Poison Creek Station • Meals at All Hours. At the rear were a large barn and corral. In front was what Coffin referred to as “the big hill”: the road seemed to climb straight up until it disappeared around a curve on the towering mountainside.

  “Eight miles from here to Sands Basin and Silver City,” Coffin said. “And uphill all the way.”

  The others ate beans and biscuits inside the station; the sight of the food made Quincannon’s stomach jump, and he went back outside to the water pump and washed his face and neck. The rest of his supply of whiskey was in his warbag. He asked the driver, who had just finished putting oats into gunny-sack nose bags for the horses, to get the bag out of the boot for him. When his flask was refilled he had another drink, a small one this time, and judged himself ready to resume the trip.

  The uphill trek was slow but not nearly so rough; the road had a natural gravel surface and was less rutted up here. They climbed past basalt bluffs, through stands of juniper and cottonwood and mountain pine, toward granite heights that were partially obscured by low-hanging clouds. Deep canyons fell away below them, some with willow-choked creeks bubbling along their bottoms. The smell of sage that had stayed with them all the way from Nampa was replaced by the spicy scent of juniper. And the air grew cooler as the sun westered and was lost behind the high rocks.

  When they neared New York Summit, less than three miles from Silver City, Quincannon could hear dull pounding echoes that he identified even before Truax said, “Powder blasts in the mines. We’ll soon be able to hear the stamps as well. It won’t be long before our arrival.”

  Quincannon nodded.

  “You’ll like our city,” Truax assured him, as if he were a member of the Chamber of Commerce. He seemed to have forgotten that Quincannon, at least as far as he knew, was a mere patent medicine drummer. “It’s the fastest growing and most progressive in Idaho.”

  For anyone who doesn’t happen to be Chinese, Quincannon thought. He said, “I hope to make many new acquaintances there, Mr. Truax. And to renew an old one.”

  “Ah? You know someone in Silver, then?”

  “A man named Whistling Dixon.”

  “I don’t believe I’m acquainted with anyone by that name.”

  “I am,” Coffin said, “though not personally. He works for one of the cattle ranches at Cow Creek — the Ox-Yoke, I believe.” He glanced at Quincannon. “Odd that you should know an old Owyhee cowboy, Mr. Lyons. To the best of my knowledge, Dixon was born in these mountains and has seldom been away from them.”

  Quincannon said, “My father ranched cattle in Oregon for a time, along the Rogue River, and worked with Dixon there. I was a boy then; Dixon took me under his wing and we became friends. He told me, of course, that he was from this area.”

  It sounded flimsy in his own ears, but Coffin and Truax seemed to accept the explanation at face value. Sabina Carpenter, however, was watching him curiously again — perhaps even speculatively. A bright woman, Miss Carpenter. And in a way he could not quite define, an odd one too. He wondered just what she was thinking at this moment.

  Chapter 4

  It was coming on twilight when they arrived in Silver City. The town had been built on the western flank of War Eagle Mountain, a thousand feet below the summit — the highest peak
in the Owyhee range, Truax said. It nestled along the upper grade of a deep canyon, cut through by Jordan Creek and full of shadows now, that ran down past smaller and now mostly abandoned mining settlements: Ruby City, Booneville, Wagontown. Mountain peaks rose majestically around Silver, their flanks steep and rocky and supporting few trees; patches of snow still remained in protected spots under the peaks. A saddle coated with gray-green sage and chaparral connected War Eagle with Florida Mountain to the northwest.

  Most of the mines were on the sharp-angled slopes of those two peaks. Through the door window, Quincannon could see some of the larger ones built down the side of War Eagle — the long, sweeping angles of their roofs, the fans of faintly luminous white tailings alongside. But while his eyes were on the slopes and on the town ahead, his thoughts were on the drink he would have when they arrived.

  They rolled down past a large stage barn, across a railed bridge, and onto a crowded business street that curved up the steep grade of the canyon — “Jordan Street, our main stem,” Truax said. The business section appeared to encompass several blocks of Jordan Street and the two immediately parallel to it on either side. Out away from Jordan, the cross streets turned residential. Most of the buildings that stairstepped up the bald, brown hillsides were the high, narrow type common to mining camps; weatherbeaten, constructed in close packs. Lamplight already glowed palely in many of the windows.

  As the stage climbed uphill, noise hammered at Quincannon’s aching head: the whistle of the hoisting and mill engines, the sullen roar of powder blasts, the tinny throb of saloon music, the rumble of wagons, the cries of animals and the raucous shouts of men. Horses, ore and dray wagons, and private rigs jammed the roadway; people filled the boardwalks. Several of the men wore the garb of cowboys, in for the evening from the nearby ranches. The cattle industry was almost as important in the Owyhee region as mining, Quincannon knew from the government survey pamphlet he’d read in San Francisco. The bare plateau that supported the silver-bearing mountains was carpeted in rich bunchgrass that had drawn stockmen from as far away as Texas.