Bill Pronzini - Quincannon

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.

The chill wind dried his sweat, raised gooseflesh on his arms and back as he moved along the shaft house wall. From the far corner his view of both bunkhouses and the stockade gates was obstructed by a pair of ore wagons and the rick of mine timbers. He ran across to the stack, went around the near side. Then he could see the gates; Helen Truax’s buggy was no longer there and he spied it nowhere else in this vicinity. Nor was there any sign yet of a watchman.

He edged forward until he could look past the downhill side of the rick, toward the bunkhouses. The bigger of the two, the one in which he judged the counterfeiting was being done, showed strong light in its single front window. The one farther downhill was also lighted and a man stood in front of it, smoking; the tip of his cigarette making a winking orange hole in the darkness.

Quincannon waited until the man finished his smoke, flicked the butt away, and went back inside. He was torn between two needs: to find out where Sabina was being held and determine if she was all right; and to unlock the gates in preparation for the arrival of McClew and his posse. His concern for Sabina’s welfare was paramount. He hastened back around the uphill side of the stack, paused at its opposite end to reconnoiter the bunkhouses. There was movement behind the window in the near one, then it became a blank yellow eye again. No one was outside that he could see.

The moon came out from behind the scudding clouds, bathed the yard in its brilliance for a few moments. When it vanished again he left the timbers, moving in a crouch, and ran over behind a jumble of discarded machinery, from there into the shadows cast by the stockade fence. That put him behind the nearest bunkhouse, at an angle to its uphill rear corner. He worked his way over there, up on the balls of his feet. At the side wall he flattened his back against the boards and stood listening.

Murmurs from inside, imperceptible. Ten feet ahead, the radiance from within spilled through a side window. Quincannon inched toward it, stopped just before he reached its frame. The murmurs were louder here, but of what was being said he could make out no more than one word in ten. He crouched, moved closer to the window, then raised up until he had a sidewise view through the grime-streaked glass.

The first thing he saw was the printing press. No wonder their counterfeit was of high quality; the press was not one of the old-fashioned single-plate, hand-roller variety, but rather a steam-powered Milligan press that would perform the printing, inking, and wiping simultaneously through the continuous movement of four plates around a square frame. Along with its accessories — bundles of paper, tins of ink, a long workbench laden with tools and chemicals — the press took up most of the forward half of the single room.

Quincannon. dropped low again, duck-walked under the sill, and stretched up on the window’s far side so he could see into the back half of the building. The illumination came from back there, a powerful Rochester lamp hanging above a large round table. The light clearly defined the faces of the two people seated at the table and the two men standing alongside it. One of the standing men was Bogardus. And it was Sabina he was talking to, punctuating his words with sharp, angry gestures.

She was pale but composed; whatever fear she might be feeling was contained inside her. It did not look as if she had been abused, at least not physically; her face and upper body bore no marks of violence. She kept shaking her head to whatever Bogardus was saying to her. Quincannon could hear the mutter of his voice, pick out a word here and there, but the sense of his browbeating was unclear.

The other two men in the room were strangers, although Quincannon judged that the mean-looking, fox-faced runt standing next to Bogardus was Conrad. Looking at that one, he felt the pain in his ribs and a sharp cut of hatred along with it. The third man, seated opposite Sabina, was cleaning his fingernails with a skinning knife; Sabina’s eyes kept flicking to the blade and away. He was bald and bull-necked, with half a yard of jaw, and the expression on his face said that he was enjoying himself.

Quincannon. had to fight down an impulse to rush in there, throw down on the three men now, while Sabina was still unhurt. It would be a foolish move, perhaps a deadly one. The time for action was after McClew and his posse arrived — and that time couldn’t be far off. The stockade gates were his first priority at the moment, if both he and Sabina hoped to get out of the compound alive.