Bill Pronzini - Quincannon

“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 nodded. “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.

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.