Bill Pronzini - Quincannon

At length she said, “I’ll be on my way now, Mr. Lyons. If you believe me guilty of wrongdoing, perhaps you would like to accompany me to the marshal’s office.”

“That won’t be necessary,” he said, and saw relief flicker in her eyes. She had no intention of taking the stock certificate to Marshal McClew, he thought. But why? What did she want with it?

Blackmail or extortion — was either of those her game?

She turned away from him and went along the path, around under the crabapple trees. Quincannon moved to the corner and watched her reach Owyhee Street, hurry down it toward Jordan. When she was out of sight he returned to the porch and entered the shack.

It was a single room, not clean and sparsely furnished. From the look of it, Jason Elder either lived in a state of upheaval — the “pigsty” Will Coffin had referred to — or the shack had been searched thoroughly and rather recklessly. Quincannon was inclined toward the latter theory, with Sabina Carpenter as the most obvious culprit.

A cot had been upended in one corner; a pair of filthy blankets were wadded nearby, along with a torn or slashed pillow leaking feathers onto the packed-earth floor. A flat-topped trunk, old and disreputable, stood with its lid up, some of its contents still inside and the rest spilled out around it. A chair lay on its side next to a small table. Pots, pans, two broken dishes, a tin basin, and a straight razor were also scattered about; and against one wall, a canister of flour and another of sugar lay upended, their contents mingled like a sifting of snow and acrawl with insects. The only items in the room that seemed to still be in their proper place were an ancient sheet-iron stove, its door hinged open, and an empty woodbox.

On one wall shelf was a black-lacquered Chinese tray; Quincannon crossed to look at it. It contained the instruments of Jason Elder’s opium addiction: the toy, a small bone box that held the opium; the yen hok needle on which the pill was cooked; a little oil lamp; the sponge known as the souey pow; an enamel cup to hold the yenshee; the slender ivory tube, not quite two feet long, that was the stem of the pipe; and the round, crusted black bowl, the size of a doorknob, with its tiny center hole. He picked up the toy, looked inside, and found that it contained a small amount of raw opium. And when he examined the yenshee cup he saw that at least a quarter of an ounce of the black scrapings lay within.

Everything was here, all the keys that would unlock the gateway to celestial dreams — keys that no opium addict would willingly leave behind. Wherever Elder had gone, circumstances must have forced him to leave in a great hurry, from some location other than this shack. Either that, or someone else had been responsible for his disappearance.

Quincannon examined the contents of the flat-topped trunk. Shirts, a pair of trousers, galluses, stockings, underdrawers, a pair of crumbling books on the printing trade in general and various type faces in particular, and an empty carpetbag — most if not all of Elder’s personal possessions. None of it contained any clues to his present whereabouts, to his connection with Whistling Dixon or Helen Truax or Sabina Carpenter. Nor was there anything that even hinted that Elder might be involved with the koniakers.

The remainder of the room likewise revealed nothing of interest. If any other unusual item aside from the stock certificate had once been kept here, Sabina Carpenter — or another party; Will Coffin, for one, had also been to the shack — had made off with it.

Quincannon went outside, back to Owyhee Street and then down Jordan. The first saloon he came to drew him inside and held him for ten minutes, the time it took to drink two whiskeys to ease his mind and eat a sandwich and two pickled eggs to ease the hunger pangs in his stomach. Then, following directions he had obtained from the bartender, he found his way to the house where the Truaxes lived, east across Jordan Creek on a hummock that overlooked most of the town and descending valley beyond.

The house differed considerably in style from most of the buildings in Silver City — a bastardized Italianate with a single jutting cupola and an ornate front veranda bordered by lilac bushes. No doubt the fanciest home in Silver, Quincannon judged; he would have been surprised, having met both Oliver Truax and his wife, if it had been otherwise. He climbed to the veranda, pulled the ring for the bell.

No one responded to the summons. Helen Truax was out somewhere, perhaps shopping; he would have to wait until later to talk to her.

From the Truax house he went to the Wells Fargo office, where he wrote out another Western Union telegram to be sent to Boggs in care of the “Caldwell Associates” mail-drop in San Francisco. This one read:

PRINCIPLE ACCOUNT BANKRUPT NO EXPLANATION YET STOP HAVE SEVERAL OTHER POSSIBILITIES TO INDICATE THIS IS FRUITFUL TERRITORY STOP WILL COFFIN FROM KANSAS CITY OWNER LOCAL NEWSPAPER HAS BEEN MOST HELPFUL SO HAVE OLIVER TRUAX OWNER PAYMASTER MINE AND WIFE HELEN STOP REMEMBER SABINA CARPENTER FROM DENVER QMK SHE IS HERE AND VERY ACTIVE

All of which would tell Boggs that Whistling Dixon had been killed, that his death might be connected with the counterfeiting operation, and that Quincannon required information on Will Coffin, the Truaxes, and especially Sabina Carpenter.

He remained at the Western Union counter until the brass pounder had sent the message. Leaving then, he located Cad-mon’s Livery near the stage barn. The hostler turned out to be the bespectacled man named Henry who had found Whistling Dixon’s corpse; Quincannon mentioned the murder and then asked, with apparent casual curiosity, if Marshal McClew had found anything in Slaughterhouse Gulch that might identify the killers.

Henry said that he hadn’t. “And he likely never will, either,” he added. “Outlaws done it. Damned few of those sons of bitches ever get caught. They don’t hang around Silver long enough for that, once they rob or kill somebody.”

Quincannon rented a horse — a blaze-faced roan with four white stockings — and then asked Henry how to get to the Paymaster mine. He rode out of town on a rutted wagon road that led up the face of War Eagle Mountain. Ore wagons rolled past him, on their way to and from the mines; the thud and boom of the stamps and powder blasts seemed to grow louder, hollower as he climbed toward the tiered buildings above. The high country wind blew cool against his face, made him feel almost chilly.

So did the nagging mental image of Sabina Carpenter, unwanted, vexing, like a splinter that had worked its way deep into his flesh and would not come out.

The buildings of the Paymaster mine were arranged on tiers down the mountainside, so that they resembled a single multilevel structure. Their sheet-metal roofs glistened under the afternoon sun. So did the fan of tailings below the stamp mill, spread out from the foot of the cantilevered tramway that extended down to the mill from the main tunnel above.

Quincannon rode into the mine yard. Three men were harnessing a team of dray horses to a big, yellow-painted Studebaker freight wagon; the only other men in sight were up on the tram, pushing ore carts from the tunnel to the chute that fed the mill, back again for another load. Quincannon. dismounted, tied the roan to one of the yard stanchions, and approached the men at the Studebaker wagon to ask the location of the mine office.

One of the men pointed to a small building upslope. “But if you’re looking for Mr. Truax,” he said, “he ain’t there.”

“Where would I find him?”

“Down in the mill. Stairs over yonder.”

A dynamite explosion deep inside the mine made the ground tremble as Quincannon descended a steep flight of stairs to the stamp mill. When he entered he had no trouble locating Truax; together with a burly man in miner’s garb, probably the mill foreman, he was inspecting one of the eccentrics that raised the stamps, shut down now and locked into place. Rather than interrupt them, Quincannon stayed where he was near the entrance and watched the machinery and the millhands at their work.