“How much opium a day did you sell Jason Elder?”
Silence.
“How much yenshee?”
Silence.
“Where did he get the money to pay you?”
Silence.
“When did you last see him?”
“You will purchase opium? Yenshee?”
“If you tell me where I can find Elder.”
A small shrug. “I have not seen him in four days.”
“Did he say anything then about leaving Silver City?”
“I am only a humble Chinese merchant,” Yum Wing said. “Not worthy of such confidences.”
“Have you any idea where he went?”
“I have no idea. I have goods for sale. Very fine goods, very fine opium.”
“Will Coffin, the newspaper editor, doesn’t think so.”
Silence.
“You’ve had trouble with Coffin, haven’t you?”
“No trouble. China boys avoid trouble with white men.”
“Not always. Sometimes they have cause not to avoid it.”
Silence.
It was pointless to continue, Quincannon decided. Yum Wing would not admit to even knowing Will Coffin. And if he knew why Jason Elder had disappeared, or where Elder was now, he would not admit that either.
Quincannon said, “Will Coffin isn’t your true enemy, Yum Wing. Greed and hate are.” He turned and moved away through the dark, cramped, silent room, out into the sunlight and the throbbing noise from the stamp mills.
Owyhee Street was a short distance away: he found it without difficulty. It curled up one of the bare hillsides, petered out near a wood-and-tarpaper shack that had been built at an odd angle against a shelf of rock, so that its entrance was hidden from the road. This was the shack that Jason Elder occupied, according to what Quincannon had learned on his saloon rounds last night.
A beaten-down path led through a section of dry sage and weeds that separated the shack from the street. Two crabapple trees grew alongside the dwelling, shading it and further concealing its entrance. The single facing window, Quincannon saw as he passed under the trees, was glassless and covered with crude wooden shutters. Tacked onto the front wall was a rickety porch of sorts; he stepped up onto it, reached for the door latch.
It jerked inward in that same instant. And someone came hurrying out and ran right into him.
The collision threw them both off balance, knocked something loose from the other’s hand and sent it flying out into the dry grass. Quincannon blindly caught hold of the person’s clothing to steady them both; felt flesh under it that was soft, rounded — distinctly feminine. Hands slapped away his hands, shoved him back.
He was looking into the startled and angry face of Sabina Carpenter.
Chapter 7
She was wearing a plain skirt today, with a buckskin jacket over a white shirtwaist, and her dark hair was mostly hidden by a Portland-style straw hat. No reticule, which struck Quincannon as odd: it was his experience that women seldom went anywhere without a bag, unless they had a good reason. Two spots of color glowed on her cheeks; she rubbed at one as if to make the color disappear. “My God,” she said, “you frightened me half to death. What are you doing here?”
“I might ask you the same thing.”
She made no reply. She was peering out to one side of him, at where the object that had been in her hand lay on the ground. He followed the direction of her gaze, saw that the object was a fold of heavy parchment paper; he moved at the same time she did, so that he blocked her way with his body and reached the paper first.
Sabina Carpenter said angrily, “Give me that,” and tried to pull it from his grasp. Quincannon held her away, unfolding the paper with his free hand so he could determine what it was. A stock certificate — two hundred and fifty shares in Oliver Truax’s Paymaster Mining Company. It had been made out in the name of Helen Truax, but on the reverse side, Quincannon saw just before Sabina Carpenter kicked him and then wrenched the certificate away, was Helen Truax’s endorsement and Jason Elder’s name as the new owner of the stock.
Her breath coming rapidly now, the Carpenter woman had backed off a few paces clutching the certificate. There was a wary tenseness in her, but no apparent fear. If he moved toward her, Quincannon thought, she wouldn’t turn and flee, as most women would in such a situation; she would stand her ground and fight him.
He said mildly, “Thievery, Miss Carpenter?”
“Of course not.”
“That certificate has two names on it, neither of them yours.”
“It was lying on the floor inside,” she said. “Mr. Elder isn’t home and I thought… well, it seems valuable. I intend to take it to the marshal for safekeeping.”
“Why not return it to Mrs. Truax?”
She hesitated before she said, “It belongs to Mr. Elder now. Besides, I hardly know the woman.”
“Elder must know her quite well, to be the recipient of such a large amount of stock.”
“I couldn’t say.”
“And you must know Elder quite well yourself, to be inside his house alone.”
“Your innuendoes are offensive, Mr. Lyons,” she said stiffly. “I know Mr. Elder no better than I know Mrs. Truax. I came to see him about a hat he ordered. The door was open, so I simply walked inside.”
She was lying, Quincannon thought, making up her answers out of whole cloth. He said, “Then you aren’t aware that Elder has been missing for four days.”
“Missing? How do you know that?”
“Will Coffin told me.”
“I see. And why are you here, then?”
“Whistling Dixon. You’ve heard about his murder, haven’t you?”
“Murder?” Her surprise, at least, seemed genuine. “No, I hadn’t heard.”
“Yes. And I’ve learned that Dixon and Elder were acquainted. Were you aware of that?”
She shook her head. “I told you, I hardly know Jason Elder. And I did not know Whistling Dixon at all.”
He studied her for a time, and received the same sort of scrutiny in return. He felt stirred by her again, by her resemblance to Katherine Bennett and by her odd actions and by some intangible quality that he could not quite define. Uneasiness formed in him, made him yearn for a drink of whiskey.
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.