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.
She would be all right until he got back here, he told himself grimly. Bogardus was taking his time; nothing would happen to her in the next ten minutes.
And when he got back here — then what? At the first inkling of trouble, Bogardus was liable to kill her or try to use her as a hostage. Even if he stormed the place, took them by surprise, there was a chance she would be hurt, a chance he might hurt her himself, as he had hurt Katherine Bennett, with a stray bullet — a chance he might not be able to take.
How was he going to get her out of there unharmed?
Chapter 19
Quincannon moved to the rear of the building, waited there while the moon made a brief reappearance and then vanished again. From inside the barn nearby, a steady rattling sound gave him further pause; but then he recognized it — a bridled horse nervously tongue-rolling the cricket in its bit. Either one of the men had neglected to remove the tack from his animal or it was being kept ready for a ride later on. The disposal of another body, maybe, Quincannon thought with banked rage. Sabina’s, this time.
He ran silently across to the stockade fence. The shadows that bulked along it hid him as he made his way downhill past the second bunkhouse, around to the gates. They were built of slab-wood and held shut by a thick wooden bar set between a pair of iron brackets. Also attached to each half was a vertical iron rod around which a heavy chain could be looped and then padlocked. If the chain and padlock had been fastened, he would have been faced with a difficult decision; as it was, whoever had opened the gate to let Helen Truax and her rig out had not bothered to reset the chain, and it hung loose from one of the rods.
The bar was heavy but he had no trouble lifting it free. He set it aside, slid one of the gate halves open, and stepped out to peer down along the wagon road. The night was empty, hushed. McClew and his men still hadn’t shown up; if they had been out there now it would be close by, so they could keep watch on the gate, and they would already have signaled him.
He slipped back inside, pulled the gate half almost but not quite shut — open just enough to alert McClew. A thought came to him as he was about to start back the way he had come, along the east side of the fence. Instead he went the other way, around the stamp mill and under the framework of the overhead tram. In the tram’s shadow he continued uphill until he reached the stonewalled powder magazine he had noticed that afternoon.
The moon was out again, and when he opened the powder house door, enough of its shine penetrated to give him an idea of how the interior was laid out. He moved inside. Working by feel, he found an open box of dynamite sticks, another of Bickford fuses, a third of small copper detonators. He put two of the sticks and some of the fuses and blasting caps into his coat pocket. Then he backed out of the shed, shut the door, and turned toward the stack of timbers in the middle of the yard.
Downhill, not far away, somebody yelled, “Heyl Hey, you son of a bitch!”
Quincannon wheeled around. The dark shape of a man was running toward him, pawing a revolver off his hip — a skinny little runt, Conrad, drawn outside again by restlessness or on some damned errand. Everything changed in that instant; all of Quincannon’s previous intentions died, all his caution and his advantage of surprise came to an end. A rush of fear seized him, not for himself but for Sabina. His senses all sharpened at once, and he was down on one knee without even thinking about it, his own revolver coming up in his hand.
Conrad’s first shot slashed the air harmlessly, made a rocketing explosion in the stillness. Instinct kept Quincannon kneeling instead of throwing himself out flat; the blasting caps in his pocket were volatile and any sudden jarring might set them off. Another bullet whined off rock to his! eft — and that was all Conrad had coming to him. Quincannon shot him on the run, heard the man yell, saw him pitch sideways and then fall. By then he was up and running himself, at a downhill slant toward the bunkhouse where Sabina was.
There was a crashing noise from inside the building and the light suddenly went out. A man’s voice bellowed an obscenity. Quincannon didn’t understand at first what had happened, but the momentary confusion didn’t slow him down. Men were just starting to come out of the second bunkhouse, more confused than he was, armed but not knowing what to shoot at. Quincannon was too far away in the darkness for them to see who he was; he might have been one of their own.
In the next second the door of the first bunkhouse burst open. A figure came stumbling out — a figure with flaring skirts bunched high in both hands. Sabina.
Surprise and nascent relief put an end to Quincannon’s downhill charge. He shouted at her, “Over here, it’s Quincannon!” and saw her break stride, then veer his way. If he had had time to think about what he did next, the ghost of Katherine Bennett might have kept him from doing it. But he acted automatically, the result of years of training: he fired past the running figure of Sabina, emptied his Remington at the cluster of men by the bunkhouse and drove them back inside or to cover outside.
There were two answering shots, both wild. He saw one man, Bogardus, and then another come barreling free of the darkness inside the first bunkhouse; then Sabina was beside him, and he caught hold of her arm and dragged her back to the long row of timbers. They got around past the end of the rick just as a volley of shots started up from below.
Sabina said breathlessly, “My God, John! I thought… I thought I was dead even after I got away from Bogardus. Where did you come from?”
“Never mind that now.” He was digging fresh cartridges out of his spares case, jamming them into the cylinders of the Remington. “You can shoot, can’t you?”
“I can and I damned well will.”
He shoved the reloaded weapon into her hand. “Get down low, back at the corner where you can see, and keep them at a distance.”
She didn’t ask questions, just did as she was told. Quincannon still had the sticks of dynamite, detonators, and Bickford fuses in his coat pocket; he hauled out one of the fat paper candles, thrust a fuse into one of the little copper tubes. Then he crimped its neck with his teeth and insert d the detonator into the hole punched in the side of the dynamite stick.
Sabina fired at something below; there were half a dozen answering shots.