“He tried the same ploy on me,” Quincannon said, “when I approached him on behalf of the owner of my fictitious patent medicine company.”
“Then you see what I mean. Bold as brass. The reason he went to Boise was to sell five hundred shares to a banker there; I got wind of the deal and arranged for a witness to the exchange. And still Mr. Lumley and our clients want more proof to insure a conviction.”
“Who are your clients?”
“A group of Paymaster investors. They began to suspect the swindle a few weeks ago.”
Quincannon nodded, and a momentary silence settled between them. A shaft of sunlight slanting in through the window touched her hair, making it glisten with reddish highlights. He felt the physical desire again, rebuked himself sharply, and looked away from her.
“May I ask you a personal question, Miss Carpenter?”
“That depends on the question.”
“How do you happen to work for Pinkerton?”
She smiled faintly. “Do you hold a prejudice against women operatives, Mr. Quincannon?”
“None whatsoever. I met Allan Pinkerton’s first female employee, Kate Warne, on a case in Chicago some years ago and found her highly competent. But I confess to curiosity: detective work is not an ordinary job for a woman.”
“My husband was an operative for the Denver agency,” she said. “One of its best, I may say.”
“Was?”
“He was killed while on a land-fraud case two years ago.” She spoke the words matter-of-factly, but he detected traces of bitterness and lingering grief. “Shot to death during a raid.”
“So was my father,” Quincannon said. “Several years ago on the Baltimore docks. He was a detective too, a rival of Pinkerton’s.”
There was a space before she spoke again; her eyes, steady on his now, held a look of what he took to be compassion and a sense of kinship. He felt that he wanted to go to her, touch her, but he was afraid she might misinterpret any such intimacy as another improper advance.
“Birds of a feather,” she said. “Lonely birds, always on the wing — targets for a hunter’s gun.”
It was an odd phrase, vaguely haunting, and it invited no reply.
She asked. “You are lonely, aren’t you, Mr. Quincannon? I sense it in you. Is that why you took to whiskey?”
“No.”
“Then why? Is it because of the woman I resemble?”
The conversation had become too personal; her questions made him feel ill at ease, brought Katherine Bennett back into his consciousness. He said, “I had better leave now. There are things to be done.”
“Yes. Of course.”
He turned for the stairs, stopped after two paces, and faced her again. “How late do you expect to be here tonight?”
“Until about six.”
“I wonder… if I came back then, would you consider taking supper with me?”
The faint smile again. “Do you intend to kiss me again afterward?”
“No,” he said. And then, on impulse, “Does it offend you that I find you an attractive woman?”
“I should be offended if you didn’t.”
He laughed and so did she, spontaneously, and his feeling of awkwardness and unease vanished. She had a fine, rich laugh; he thought that it would be good to hear it more often. “At six then, Miss Carpenter?”
“Very well, Mr. Quincannon — at six.”
“John, if you will.”
“Sabina.”
Downstairs, he switched the sign in the door glass so that it read Open facing outward, then unlocked the door and went out. The meeting with Sabina Carpenter had gone far better than he had anticipated. He felt almost cheerful, almost human again — the first time he had experienced such normal feelings since Virginia City. He neither needed nor wanted a drink, and that too was an odd new feeling.
On Washington Street he went down across the creek toward Cadmon’s Livery. It was still his intention to rent a horse, but no longer to visit Oliver Truax; he was convinced, after his talk with Sabina, that Truax was much too involved in his own illegal enterprise to be mixed up in the coney game. Quincannon’s aim this time was the Rattling Jack and any sort of flaw in its fortress-like defenses.
But what he saw when he neared the livery diverted that aim for the present and gave him a different purpose. A yellow Studebaker freight wagon was drawn up in front of the entrance, its deep bed covered with canvas — the same wagon and the same team, he was sure, that Jack Bogardus had brought from Truax two days ago. Its burly driver was up on the high seat, engaged in some sort of argument with the liveryman named Henry. The man’s slablike face was turned so that Quincannon could see it and the thatch of fiery red hair that topped it.
Both were familiar, unmistakably so. The driver of the Rattling Jack freight wagon was the man who had murdered Quincannon’s informant, Bonniwell, in San Francisco.
Chapter 16
It was doubtful the red-haired man had got a good look at him in return that night, shielded as he’d been by the rain and darkness, but Quincannon turned quickly aside and detoured over toward the blacksmith’s shop beyond the livery. He needn’t have worried. The redhead was intent on his argument with Henry and for the moment oblivious to his surroundings. Quincannon stopped under the drooping branches of a willow that fronted the blacksmith’s, directly behind the wagon and close enough to overhear what the two men were arguing about.
“How the hell you expect me to get this ore down the mountain with a spavined horse and a cracked doubletree?” the redhead was saying. “I wouldn’t make it half way to the Poison Creek station.”
“Is that my fault?” Henry said. “I told you, Griswold, I ain’t got a doubletree for that kind of rig. Why don’t you try Tully’s place?”
“I already did on the way in. Can’t you make one?”
“Couldn’t Tully?”
“Said it’d take him all afternoon.”
“Well, it would me too.”
“I tell you, I got to get this load to Boise,” the redhead, Griswold, said. “Listen, how about repairing the doubletree. You can do that, can’t you?”
“I suppose I could,” Henry said grudgingly. “Piece of scrap iron might do it. But I couldn’t give you any guarantee she’d hold up.”
“I ain’t asking for any guarantee.”
“Hell, I don’t know. I got other work to do…”
Griswold said, “I’ll pay you an extra twenty if you get me on the road by two o’clock.”
“Twenty dollars, you say?”
“A brand new greenback. Well?”
“All right, then. Pull the wagon inside and I’ll see what I can do.”
Henry stepped back and the red-haired man brought the team around, drove the Studebaker up the ramp and into the shadowed interior of the livery. When Henry had gone in after it, Quincannon left the shade of the willow. He wanted a look at the “ore” in the wagon, but he was not about to get it with both Griswold and Henry in there. What he had to do was find a way to get them out of the building for a time.
He moved along the south wall, around to the rear. There was a back entrance, he saw, a single door that he surmised would lead in among the horse stalls. He stood for a moment, scanning the area. Out here were a good-sized manure pile, some patches of dry sage and grass, the skeletons of two abandoned wagons, and more sagebrush climbing the slope beyond. There was nobody around. And once he had taken half a dozen steps toward the manure pile, the entrance to the blacksmith’s, from which he could smell the sharp odors of burning coal and hot metal, was no longer visible.
The droppings around the edge of the pile were dry; quickly, using the side of his boot, he scraped some of them into a separate mound in a big patch of dead grass, twenty feet or so from the back wall of the livery. Then he pulled up handfuls of sage and grass and added them to the mound. The wind was gusty, blowing down from the higher elevations; he put his back to it, so as to shield his hands, and scraped a match alight. Within seconds the dry grass and sage began to blaze. And when the droppings caught, the smoke that poured up from the fire thickened and was wind-driven against the livery.