Quincannon removed his miner’s hat, sleeved road grit from his face. As early as it was, the day promised more Indian summer warmth, with none of the cooling winds that often blew in these Sierra Nevada foothills. Off to his right, the departing wagon raised another column of dust as it started back down the long passage to Patch Creek. Where the creek itself was visible among willows and aspens, the water caught sunlight and dazzled like molten silver.
He moved across the noisy mine yard, took up a position next to Pat Barnes, and pretended to ignore McClellan and Simcox. Soon the whistle blew and the shaft cage began its rattling ascent. As on previous mornings, the hoist engineer played his dangerous little game of bringing the cage to a jolting, squealing halt. More than one of the graveyard-shift crew cursed him on their way out, as some did every morning; the profanity only succeeded in producing a jeering grin.
Quincannon and the other day-shift men crowded into the cage. He contrived to stand next to McClellan as Walrus Ben gave two sharp pulls on the hoist cord, the signal to lower the cage. McClellan glared at him, fidgeted, then turned his back.
The plunge into the bowels of the mine rendered Quincannon deaf as usual. He stamped his feet to ease the pressure, followed the others across the station into the powder room, where he exchanged his hat for an oil-wick cap lamp. Down here on twelve-hundred the temperature was thirty or more degrees cooler than topside, and twice as damp—a cold dampness that got into and lingered in a man’s bones. He hadn’t gotten used to that, either, and likely wouldn’t as long as he worked in the hole.
He started after Barnes and the other timbermen toward the crosscut that was being driven across a new and potentially rich vein. Before he’d cleared the station a hand caught hold of his arm from behind and drew him to a halt. McClellan. The assistant foreman’s breath was redolent of the Perry Davis’ Pain Killer he hoarded in his cabin, and his fox face already ran with sweat. In the smoky light from their cap lamps, his eyes held a sheen of what Quincannon took to be a mix of anger and fear.
When the other men passed out of earshot, McClellan said in a harsh whisper, “Who the hell are you, mister?”
Quincannon shrugged off his hand. “J. F. Quinn, timberman. As if you didn’t know.”
“I know you’ve been eyeballing me up here, following me down in Patch Creek. What I want to know is why.”
“You’ve made a mistake. I’ve no interest in you beyond our time in this treasure hole.”
“You’re not a miner,” McClellan said. “I know miners … You’re too soft, too deep for this work.”
“Too deep, mayhap. Hardly too soft.”
“What are you after?”
“My wages, same as you.”
“I think you’re a damn company spy.”
“Do you now? And what would you have to hide that would bring you to the attention of Mr. O’Hearn?”
McClellan clenched his teeth, stared hard for a few seconds as if at a loss for something more to say. Then he spun on his heel and clumped off into the drift. Quincannon watched him leave his sight with a feeling of satisfaction. This particular fish was well hooked and squirming. It would not be long before McClellan—and soon enough after this, his fellow thieves—was caught in the net.
* * *
The morning passed quickly. Quincannon was too busy hauling and shoring lumber to slip away, as he had done previously whenever the opportunity presented itself, for short searches of the maze of tunnels and stopes that might offer some clue to the high-grading method.
McClellan spent part of the morning on twelve-hundred, then disappeared. Gone up to eleven-hundred, or was he up to something down here? He returned toward the end of lunch break, spoke briefly to some of the men, one of them Joe Simcox, while his gaze roamed among the others. When he spied Quincannon, he looked away almost immediately. A short time later he wandered off along the drift, but not without a backward glance to see if he was being observed. Quincannon pretended great interest in the contents of his lunch pail.
The timber crew was working in the same general area that McClellan had gone. Quincannon followed Pat Barnes and two other members of the timber crew along the narrow rail track, walking on ties made slippery by an ooze of water that ran down the walls and trickled across the floor. Some distance beyond the station, the drift ran in a slight upward gradient. A tram car loaded with waste rock rattled toward them, pushed rapidly by an old-timer named Lundgren, and the group parted in a hurry. There was no sign of McClellan in the vicinity.
“Fire in the hole!”
The warning shout came from the direction of the newly driven crosscut and was quickly repeated by a number of other voices. Walrus Ben or another powder man had set a charge of dynamite that was about to be detonated. Quincannon and the others in the drift held still, covering their mouths with handkerchiefs. When the blast came, a relatively small one probably designed to remove a stubborn obstruction, Quincannon felt the rough rock floor quiver slightly beneath his boots. Soon afterward a thin mist of silica dust came rolling into the drift, briefly impairing vision until it settled.
Quincannon seized the opportunity to slip away into a narrow side turning. He would not be immediately missed by Barnes and the others, and when he was, it would be assumed he’d gone after more lumber.
Once around the turning, he was alone in the sultry gloom. He bent to reach inside the top of his right boot for his hideout derringer, slid it into a trouser pocket. It was a serious offense for an employee to bring a pistol into the mine, and he had not cleared his breach of the rules with O’Hearn. But he had a strong feeling that his investigation was coming to a head, and there was no rule made that he wouldn’t breach in the interests of his own safety.
A second turning, some two hundred feet ahead, brought him into another crosscut that opened to the left and was relatively free of rock dust from the recent blast. The cut had been sealed off months ago, when the vein that ran there played out and traces of rock gas made further blasting unsafe. Once before he had seen McClellan head alone in this direction, but by the time he was able to follow, there’d been no sign of the man. Nor was there any sign of him now. He was either in the abandoned crosscut or he’d climbed one of the stopes that led up to eleven-hundred.
Quincannon paused at the boarded-up entrance to the cut. No light showed between the chinks and no sounds came from within. He examined the boards—and a small smile curved his mouth when he discovered that two had been pried loose of their fastenings and then propped back into place. By McClellan, no doubt. And there could be only one reason for the assistant foreman to venture inside an unused tunnel such as this.
Extra light was called for, Quincannon decided. He lit one of the candles he’d appropriated from the storeroom, pulled the loose boards aside and then back into place behind him as he stepped through. The air within was stale, dank, but carried no hint of gas. His cap lamp and the candlelight threw flickering shadows over walls of rock thinly veined with quartz. The cut had progressed no more than forty rods. Halfway along was the roomlike opening to an abandoned stope. He went inside, held the candle high. The stope hadn’t been cut all the way through; it ended in solid rock some fifteen feet above his head.
He inspected the support timers and other possible hiding places without finding anything, then continued his examination along the walls of the cut. Thin trickles of water wet them, dripping down to collect in little puddles here and there along the base. It was in a rotting pile of scrap lumber near the unbroken face of the end wall that he found what he’d been hunting for—the method by which the high-graders were refining chunks of gold-bearing ore, and a cache of pure gold dust produced by the process.
The dust was in a small drawstring sack similar to the one he’d found in McClellan’s cabin. Some twenty troy ounces, judging by its weight—several hundred dollars’ worth.
The method was a small but well-constructed tube mill—a short length of capped iron pipe with a bolt for a pestle. When a piece of
rich ore was dropped into the tube, a few strokes of the grinding pestle would pulverize it. The residue would then be washed out with water in a battered tin cup and the gold transferred to the sack. How the dust was being smuggled out past the shift inspectors remained to be determined.
Doubtless there were more homemade grinders hidden elsewhere on this level and eleven-hundred above. How many depended on the exact number of miners in the gang and just how much dust they were milling from pockets with a substantial accumulation of native gold. Every half spoonful of looted gold, according to O’Hearn, represented the loss of ten dollars clear profit to Hoxley and Associates.
Quincannon considered returning the sack to where he’d found it, decided confiscating it was the better course of action, and slipped it into his pocket. The tube mill was too large to fit there without detection; he returned it to its hiding place. In McClellan’s present jittery state, confronting him with knowledge of it and the cache of dust might crack him open like a bad egg. Not down here in the hole, however. Topside, in a private place such as McClellan’s cabin, where he could use intimidation and guile—and if necessary, force—to bring about a confession.
He made his way back to the entrance, extinguished both his oil-wick lamp and the candle before he moved the loose boards and stepped out. Thick darkness awaited him, and he heard nothing except the distant ring of sledgehammers on steel, the thump and rattle of ore carts on the tram tracks. He struck a lucifer to relight his lamp.
No sooner had the match flared than his ears picked up a faint scraping noise behind him, the unmistakable sound of a boot sole on stone. He hunched his shoulders, started to duck down and away—too late. Something solid fetched him a savage blow alongside the temple, bringing a spurt of blinding pain.
Quincannon and the match went out at the same time.
* * *
He was just lifting onto all fours, conscious again but dull-witted, when he heard the sound of the pistol shot. It jerked him upright onto his knees, set up a fierce pounding in his head. His vision was cloudy with double images; it seemed a long while before he was able to bring his eyes into focus. And when he did, he could not immediately credit what he saw in the dancing light from a kerosene lamp that had been spiked into a nearby support beam.
He had been carried or dragged back inside the abandoned crosscut to within a few feet of the unfinished stope. In front of him the body of a man lay on its back, legs inside the little room, torso and arms stretched outward. McClellan. Blood gleamed across the front of the assistant foreman’s heavy-weave shirt; wide-open eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling. On the wet floor alongside him was the Remington hideout gun.
Wincing, holding his head with one cupped hand, Quincannon used the rough wall as a fulcrum to lift himself unsteadily to his feet. He leaned there to look around, breath rattling and whistling in his throat. Except for the dead man, he was alone in the cut.
But not for long.
Noises came from the closed-off entrance—boards being yanked aside, men crowding through. A dark mass of them separated into four as they hurried forward, their cap lights throwing distorted shadows along the walls. Pat Barnes, two other timbermen, and Walrus Ben Tremayne. They drew up short when they saw what lay on the rock floor.
“Lord Almighty!” Barnes said. “It’s Mr. McClellan. Dead?”
Walrus Ben hunkered beside the body. “He’ll never be deader. Shot clean through the heart.”
One of the timbermen said in awed tones, “Never thought I’d see the day when something like this happened down here.”
“What did happen, Quinn?” Walrus Ben demanded.
“I’ve no answer for that yet.”
“So? What were you and him doing in here?”
Quincannon said nothing this time. He wiped sweat from his forehead, trickling blood from the wound above his temple, then lowered his hand to feel his pants pocket. It was empty now, the sacked gold dust gone. He had no need to look for the tube mill to know that it had been taken, too, and either rehidden or disposed of. Hell and damn! Anger flared hot in him, driving away the last of his confusion.
Walrus Ben scooped up the derringer, peered at it in the flickering light. “And whose bloody damn weapon is this?”
There was no denying ownership. The letter Q was carved into the handle. “Mine.”
“Brought down to kill poor McClellan, eh?”
“I’ve killed no one.”
“Why were you armed, then?”
“I had good reason.”
“There’s no good reason for bringing a pistol into the hole. What do you claim happened here, if not cold-blooded murder? Hard words over something, a fight?”
“I didn’t kill him, I tell you,” Quincannon said. “I was slugged from behind, and only just regaining my wits when I heard the shot.”
“Aye, we heard it too,” Barnes said. “Missed ye in the drift and come looking.”
Walrus Ben said, “If you didn’t fire the pistol, Quinn, who did?”
“The same man who pounded my head. But I didn’t get a look at him either time.”
“A bloody thin story, that. You admit ownership of the weapon. And there’s no one here but you and McClellan, him dead as a doornail.”
“Whoever did it must have gotten out of this cut before you arrived and escaped into a stope.”
“No likelihood of that,” Barnes said. “We were in sight of the entrance when the shot sounded.”
“Then he’s hiding somewhere nearby.”
But he wasn’t. Walrus Ben ordered the timbermen to examine the rest of the cut and the unfinished stope.
“There’s but one way in and out of here,” the shift boss said then, “and nobody alive before we came except you, Quinn. You’re the slayer, no other. Confess and have done with it.”
Confess and be damned for a crime I didn’t commit? Quincannon thought bitterly. Faugh! But there was no gainsaying that the circumstantial evidence against him appeared conclusive—as pretty a frame as ever had been set around an innocent man. By whom? And how had the bloody deed been accomplished?
13
QUINCANNON
Quincannon had no great liking for jails, and he actively detested the one in Patch Creek. One reason was that it was the only one he had ever been locked up in as a suspect in a crime of any sort. Another was that the cell’s stone walls and floor were cold, damp, unclean, and smelled about as sweet as a backyard privy. And the third was that his jailer, Micah Calder, was even more simple-minded than James O’Hearn had led him to believe.
“No, I ain’t gonna send for Mr. O’Hearn,” the sheriff kept saying in a voice like the scrape of a rusty pump handle. “He’s an important man, he ain’t got time to bother himself with a murderin’ timber hauler.”
Quincannon felt like strangling him; since that wasn’t possible, he strangled two of the rusty bars that separated them instead. An audience with the mine superintendent would set him free of this hellhole, but nobody was willing to grant him one. Not Walrus Ben Tremayne or Pat Barnes; they’d turned deaf ears to his pleas when they tied him up, escorted him out of the Monarch, and put him into one of the mine wagons under guard for the run to the Patch Creek jail. And not this dunderheaded lawman, half a century old and the owner of a face the approximate hue and texture of a dried chili pepper, with a brain to match.
“How many times do I have to say it?” he said. “I did not murder Frank McClellan.”
“Evidence says you did. Witnesses say you did.”
“There weren’t any witnesses to the shooting.”
“That ain’t what I was told. Four witnesses say it was you done it, else you wouldn’t be in here charged with a capital crime.”
Quincannon pointed to his temple, wincing when his fingertip touched the weal there. “Hell, man, do you think I gave myself this knot?”
“Could have. I knew a fella once hit himself on the head with a hammer so hard he near busted his skull.”
“And I’ll
wager I know who it was.”
“Think so? Who?”
“You.”
“Hey, now,” Calder said in offended tones, “ain’t no call for you to get personal.”
Quincannon gave vent to a blistering six-jointed oath, quit strangling the bars, and flung himself down on the cell’s lone cot. The fact that the mattress was as thin and hard as a slat, it and the blankets no doubt a-crawl with vermin, urged him to unleash another lengthy oath. The sheriff shook his head twice as if pained by the outbursts, then stomped out of the cellblock and locked the door after him.
Quincannon allowed himself a calming five-minute sulk, after which he commenced cudgeling his brain for an explanation to McClellan’s murder. The motives for it and for the frame he found himself in were not difficult to surmise; the identity of the slayer and the methods by which he’d committed the deed and vanished afterward continued to elude him. Damnation! If only his head would stop aching long enough so he could think clearly again.
Time passed at a sluglike crawl. Calder didn’t come back. The other three cells were empty; the only sounds were those that penetrated the windowless stone walls from outside. Quincannon’s headache finally eased, as did most of his anger, and he resumed his brain cudgeling, this time with glimmerings of success.
The day was waning into dusk before he had company again, not the sheriff but a fat deputy bearing a tray of something resembling food. A renewed demand for an audience with O’Hearn fell on deaf ears; the deputy went away without saying a word, not even when Quincannon unleashed his frustration again in a blistering assault on the man’s lineage.
The Stolen Gold Affair Page 8