Quincannon

by Bill Pronzini

  “Was she alone?”

  “No, sir. She was with Oliver Truax’s wife. Two of them rode off in Mrs. Truax’s buggy.”

  Helen Truax. Sabina and Helen Truax.

  And then he understood; the knowledge came to him with a suddenness that was jarring, followed by a wave of anxiety and self-hatred. He should have understood long before this. If he had, this wouldn’t have happened at all. His fault. It was his fault if any harm came to her.

  What he had overheard Bogardus and Helen Truax plotting this morning, what he had stupidly failed to grasp at the time, was Sabina’s abduction and eventual murder.

  Chapter 17

  He ran out of the barbershop, across the rutted avenue toward Jordan Street. A keg-laden wagon from the local brewery almost ran him down; the driver reined his team aside just in time, hurled a string of curses at Quincannon’s back. He barely noticed. His head was full of the words Bogardus and Helen Truax had spoken this morning, words that fairly screamed their significance to him now.

  I don’t like it, Jack. Hasn’t there been enough of that already?

  Yes. Too much. But it can’t be helped.

  Why do I have to be the one?

  We’ve already discussed that.

  It has to be tonight?

  The sooner the better.

  I don’t have to stay at the mine, do I?

  Why not You might enjoy the game....

  Another disappearance, Jack?

  Never mind that. One matter at a time. But we can’t afford to let anyone stand in our way now, this close to the finish. Not anyone, you understand?

  They hadn’t been discussing him; it had to be Sabina. His fault. He’d told Helen Truax about Sabina finding the stock certificate and then hiding the fact; he’d made her realize Sabina knew about her connection with Jason Elder, made her suspicious of Sabina’s motives. Naturally they wanted to know what her game was. And when they found out — or even if they didn’t — Sabina would die. His fault. If he’d kept his Goddamned mouth shut, if the whiskey he’d consumed that night hadn’t loosened his tongue, her life would not be in danger now.

  The whiskey. It was the whiskey, too, that had kept him from realizing the sense of what he’d overheard at the Truax house. Damn the stuff, befuddling his mind and his judgment....

  A steady consumption of liquor distorts a man’s judgment, slows his reflexes, makes him prone to mistakes.

  I won’t make any mistakes.

  Different voices echoing in his memory, Boggs and his own in San Francisco last week.

  I won’t make any mistakes. ...

  The irony of it was bitter, appalling. He had taken to drink to drown the horror of what he had done to Katherine Bennett, an innocent woman; and now the drink in turn had caused him to place the life of another innocent woman in jeopardy. He couldn’t allow it to happen again, he could not bear the awful burden of responsibility for a second woman’s death — a woman, in spite of her resemblance to Katherine Bennett, he found himself caring more about than any he had known except his mother. He would rather die himself, here tonight. If anything happened to Sabina he would die tonight — at the hands of Bogardus and his men, or if he survived them, by his own hand later on.

  He crossed Jordan Street, cut through an alley to Washington. There was little doubt where Sabina had been taken: the Rattling Jack. Once Helen Truax, the Judas, had driven her out of town, Bogardus or some of his men would have been waiting to accompany them to the mine; there would be no escape for Sabina either from them or from the compound. A half hour to forty-five minutes ago. They would just about be arriving now. And it would not take long for one man, or several, to torture a defenseless woman, to do even worse to her.

  I don’t have to stay at the mine, do I?

  Why not? You might enjoy the game....

  Quincannon’s emotions urged him to run straight to the nearest livery for a horse and then to ride hell-bent for the Rattling Jack. But his intellect demanded otherwise. The chances were good that he could get inside the compound without being seen, down the bluff at the rear; but what then? How could he free Sabina and then get both of them safely out and back to town? One man pitted against a dozen or so was suicidal. No, he had to have men to back him up, men to tilt the odds in his and Sabina’s favor. He couldn’t wait for federal officers and the proper legal papers to arrive; he had to have a raiding party now, tonight, within two hours.

  Prepared for it or not, he had to put his faith in Marshal Wendell McClew.

  Darkness was fast approaching; he could see the lighted basement window of the marshal’s office half a block away. Pain from his battered ribs had him gasping for breath when he finally reached the door. He threw it open, half-stumbled down the stairs.

  McClew had been tacking a wanted dodger onto a wall filled with them, using the butt of his Colt sixgun for a hammer. He swung around and said in surprise, “What the bloody be-damned! You look all het up, Mr. Lyons.”

  “My name isn’t Lyons.” The words came out in sharp little exhalations, like puffs of steam from an overworked engine. “It’s Quincannon — John Quincannon. I’m an operative for the United States Secret Service.”

  “The United ... what?”

  “Secret Service. Listen to me, now, don’t interrupt.”

  Quickly, trying to catch his breath between sentences, Quincannon explained what he was doing in Silver City and what he had learned; who Sabina Carpenter was and what she was doing here; the urgency of matters as they now stood. McClew’s eyes grew wider and wider; his amazement seemed genuine. So did his skepticism.

  “That’s quite a yarn,” he said when Quincannon was finished. “You have any proof to back it up?”

  Quincannon was still carrying the bundle of bogus greenbacks he had lifted from the Studebaker wagon; he hadn’t wanted to leave it in his hotel room earlier. He also had Boggs’ wires and his Service badge. He put these items on McClew’s desk and waited impatiently while the marshal examined the badge, read over the wires, then squinted at the queer twenties.

  “Counterfeit, all right,” McClew said, holding up one of the notes to the wall lamp. “Seen a few in my time; these here is good but not quite good enough.” He put the bill down, tapped the badge with one of his blunt forefingers. “This looks genuine, though. I reckon I got to believe you’re who you say you are.”

  “Can I count on your help, then?”

  McClew nodded, spat tobacco juice in the general direction of the cuspidor alongside his desk. “But I sure as hell wish you’d come to me right off. Makes my job a whole lot easier when folks trust me and tell me the truth.”

  “I had to be certain of your honesty first,” Quincannon said.

  McClew wasn’t offended. “Suppose you did,” he said and spat again. “Bogardus, huh? Well, I never did like that son of a bitch. Nor Ollie Truax and that tramp he married. Give me pleasure to

  haul the lot of’em in.”

  Quincannon asked, “How many special deputies can you gather on short notice?”

  “Dozen or more, I expect. Maybe six or eight’ll be experienced; others’re liable to stoke up on Dutch courage. But I can keep ’em in line.”

  “How soon can you have a posse ready to ride?”

  “Hour, hour and a half.”

  “As fast as you can, then. I’ll go ahead; I’m fairly certain I can get inside the compound without being seen — by rope down the bluff at the rear.”

  McClew looked dubious. “What can you do in there alone?”

  “Find out where they’re holding Miss Carpenter,” Quincannon told him, “and keep her from harm if I can. And I’ll open the stockade gates for you and your men.”

  “Makes sense,” McClew admitted. “I ain’t going to argue; no time for it and I see your mind’s made up. All right. Me and my men get to the Rattling Jack, then what?”

  “How well do you know the terrain out there?”

  “Better’n you ever will, son.”

  Quincannon nod
ded. “Leave your horses in the draw and come on foot to the fence. If the gates are unlocked, go ahead inside — quiet if you can, shooting if you have to.”

  “And if the gates ain’t unlocked?”

  “Don’t wait more than half an hour. If the gates aren’t open by then I won’t be alive to open them.”

  “Good a plan as any. You got a horse handy?”

  “No.”

  “Take mine, then. Big grulla, tied out back of the courthouse; he won’t give you no trouble. Loop of good saddle rope on him too. I’ll get me another horse at Cadmon’s.”

  Neither man wasted any more words or time. They went outside together, parted there in silence, and Quincannon ran around behind the courthouse to where the marshal’s grulla was picketed. He mounted and kicked the horse into a run, west out of Silver into the wind-swept darkness beyond.

  Chapter 18

  The ride out to the Rattling Jack seemed interminable. Restless clouds kept the moon hidden most of the time, and the darkness lay thick and cold over the rumpled terrain; he was forced to slow McClew’s grulla to a walk on the rutted and rubble-strewn wagon road. The last thing he could afford was to have the horse stumble and break a leg — maybe throw him and break his leg.

  He met no one on the road. Helen Truax, despite her protestations to Bogardus this morning, had evidently remained at the mine; the timing was such that he would have seen her buggy if she’d left after delivering Sabina. It was just as well. Avoiding her or confronting her out here — either one — would have cost him valuable time.

  A few scattered lights in the distance told him he was finally nearing the Rattling Jack. He found the way down into the ravine, let the grulla pick its way along below the mine, and then climbed out and up onto the bluff. He dismounted a hundred yards from the rim and tied the horse to a juniper bush. McClew’s saddle rope was a new, strong hemp, maybe fifty feet of it. Too short to reach all the way to the bottom of the bluff face; this afternoon he had judged the drop at sixty feet or better. But there was nothing to be done about that now.

  Carrying the rope, he moved ahead to the rocks along the edge and hunkered there to study the compound. There were lights in the two bunkhouse buildings; another glowed dimly inside the main shaft house. The yard itself was in heavy shadow and looked empty — no watchman posted tonight, either. Near the stockade gates were the lumpish shapes of a horse and buggy, no doubt Helen Truax’s rig. Bogardus’ false sense of security would be his undoing, Quincannon thought.

  Quincannon knelt among the rocks for a few seconds more, watching and listening. With the mill shut down, the night was hushed; indistinct sounds drifted up to him — horses moving about in the stable, men moving about and making noise in the bunkhouses. Outside, there was only stillness.

  He worked out a loop in one end of the rope, found an upthrust knob of granite, and tied the loop around it. When he yanked on the rope, using his full strength, it held firm; the rock was anchored solidly enough to support his weight. He played the rest of the rope down the bluff wall, wound part of its upper end twice around his right leg and once around his right hand. Then he checked the compound again, made sure his revolver was tight in its holster, and swung out.

  The descent was slow, arduous work — a drop of a few feet at a time, so as not to burn his hands on the rope and lose his grip; brake with his bootsoles braced against the rock wall; rest, and repeat the process. The strain on his arms and legs was acute; sweat flowed on him despite the chill plateau wind. By the time he neared the end of the rope he was short of breath again and his right side was afire.

  With only a few feet of the rope left, he rested and looked down. Still more than a dozen feet to the jumble of talus and loose dirt at the base. Off to the left was the best place to make his fall — more dirt there than rock. He shoved out that way, dropped to the rope’s end, straightened his body against the bluff face, and let go.

  He was angled forward, waving his arms for balance, when his boots struck the loose dirt. He felt himself sliding downward, tried to throw his body down belly-flat so he could help brake his momentum with his hands; but his foot struck a heavy piece of talus and pitched him sideways, toppled him and sent him rolling over twice before he fetched up among the rubble at the bottom. The noise of dislodged rocks and his own tumbling body seemed loud in his ears. He was aware of that far more than the pain in his ribs and the scrapes and cuts from the sharp-edged talus as he dragged himself to his feet.

  He pawed at his holster, felt the butt of the Remington still lodged there, and broke into a stumbling run toward the main shaft house. He saw nothing in the yard before reaching its shadowed wall, but voices came to him from somewhere beyond, carried on the wind.

  “... Thought I heard something back there.”

  “Hell. Nothing but the wind.”

  “Wasn’t the wind. Sounded like somebody moving around up by the shaft house.”

  “Phantoms, Conrad. Ghosts and goblins.”

  “Stay here, then, you smart bastard. I’ll go have a look myself. ...”

  Quincannon thought: Damn them! If they came back here with a lantern, he was done for. He might be able to hide from them in the darkness, but that rope hanging down the cliff face was a dead giveaway....

  He groped around on the east side of the shaft house, away from the sound of the voices. Open ground beyond — nowhere for him to go there. The footsteps of the two men were audible now, coming closer; but they didn’t have a lantern, not yet, or he would have seen its shimmer against the blackness. He kept moving, feeling the wall with his hands.

  Doorway, with its thick slab of a door pulled shut. He located the latch, opened the door just wide enough to slip his body through, and shut it soundlessly behind him.

  A lighted lantern hanging to one side of a steam hoist let him see most of the big gloomy interior. There was no place for him to hide; he realized that at once. Off to his left, the boiler loomed dark and bulky, with pockets of heavy shadow around it; but if they came inside, and it seemed probable they would, that was one of the first places they would look. He couldn’t get down into the main shaft, either. Its eye was blocked by the lifting cage, and starting the hoist was out of the question.

  He ran toward the far end of the building. A mine of this size had to have an emergency shaft that would also serve as ventilation for the network of drifts and adits and winzes below. He found it — an opening some three feet in diameter, with a low framework of timbers around it as a safeguard against accident. An in-draft of cool air came out of it; its dank smell blended with the odors of warm grease and steam escaping from the boiler.

  Sounds came to him from outside a second door, opposite the one through which he had entered. Hastily Quincannon climbed over the protective framework, found the cleats fastened to one side of the shaft. As he did, a trick of his mind brought back to him an old miners’ saying. When you step across the shaft collar you’re gambling with death. But he had no choice. He was trapped here either way. He swung his body into the opening and started down.

  The trapped feeling intensified as he lowered himself into the heavy blackness. But he kept moving as fast as he dared; they must be in the building by now, and it would not take them long to investigate this shaft. Whether or not they came down themselves depended on how spooked Conrad was.

  It was a good fifty feet before he reached the first drift. He stepped off the last of the cleats, stood aside peering up toward the collar; he could barely make out the opening, a faint grayness against the deeper black. He stood still, listening. Nothing but silence for a time. Then he heard the voices again, indistinct murmurs at first that grew louder and became clearer as the men approached the shaft. He took a blind, shuffling step sideways, fingers groping against the cold rock; he did not want to move any farther away from the shaft, not unless it became necessary, for fear of bumping into tools and equipment that might have been left in the drift.

  “Nobody in here either, I tell you.”
/>   “Be quiet. Listen.”

  Silence for several seconds. Quincannon stood motionless, forcing himself to breathe shallowly and inaudibly through his mouth.

  “You satisfied now? Who the hell would want to come in here and go down inside the mine?”

  “I don’t know. But with that woman here ...”

  “Yeah, that woman. I don’t like that.”

  “Then don’t think about it.”

  “Just the same, I don’t like it. I need a drink. You coming or not?”

  No answer from Conrad. Silence settled again, so thick and clotted that it was like a continual soundless scream. Quincannon thought that they had moved away from the shaft collar, maybe left the building, but there was no way to tell. He stayed where he was, waiting, sweating, listening to the silence.

  Five minutes. Ten. Or maybe it was only five after all; down here in the clotted black, the passage of time was difficult to gauge. If they had gone outside and checked the bluff wall and seen the rope, they would already have sounded an alarm and the compound would be swarming with men. When they didn’t find him they would come in here again and take the cage down one level at a time. There would be no escape for him then, no way to fight them; they knew the mine and its maze of drifts and crosscuts and he didn’t.

  The feeling of trapped panic welled in him again. He couldn’t stay down here, not any longer. Sabina — Christ knew what Bogardus might be doing to her.

  He felt his way back to the cleats, began to climb them through the close confines of the shaft. Sweat made his fingers slippery around the metal; it was a constant strain to keep his labored breathing inaudible. Above him, the shaft collar grew more distinct, a lighter gray, a dull yellow. He paused a few feet below it, wiped his hands dry, and drew his revolver. Then he eased up the rest of the way, poked his head out for a quick, furtive look around.

  The building appeared empty.

  He climbed out and over the framework, stood for a moment to let his mind and body adjust to the release of claustrophobic tension. When he reached the main door he edged it open. There was nothing to hear outside except for the faint skirling of the wind, the distant snorting of a restless horse. Trap? he thought. But that was foolish; if Conrad and the other man had sounded an alarm, they would have come after in full force, not be waiting for him to come to them. He opened the door wider, saw nothing to keep him inside, and slipped out.