remained seated. “Perhaps we’ll see each other again before I leave Silver City, Mr. Truax,” he said.
“It would be a pleasure. Will you be staying long?”
“Not as long as I had expected.” Quincannon assumed a solemn expression. “The old friend I had hoped to see, Whistling Dixon, was killed last night.”
Truax’s reaction was nil, beyond a look of sympathy as feigned as Quincannon’s grief. If anything, he seemed disinterested — but that may have been feigned too. “What happened to the poor fellow?”
“No one knows exactly. He was shot sometime last night, in Slaughterhouse Gulch.”
“Shot?”
“Murdered.”
“Bandits,” Truax said immediately. “These mountains are acrawl with them.”
“Yes, so I’ve been told.” Quincannon shook his head. “It seems to be a day for unpleasant news,” he said. “I spoke to Will Coffin this morning; he told me the newspaper office was broken into again during his absence.”
Truax showed no particular interest in that either. “Was there much damage?”
“Little enough.”
“Those damned heathen Chinamen ought to be run clear out of the Owyhees.”
“So you said yesterday,” Quincannon reminded him blandly. “Poor Mr. Coffin. To compound his problems, his part-time printer, Jason Elder, has disappeared.”
“Elder? Oh yes, the opium addict.”
“You don’t know the man personally?”
“Of course not. I don’t keep company with dope fiends.”
Perhaps not, Quincannon thought, but your wife surely does. He said, “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time, Mr. Truax. Thank you for seeing me, and for your excellent whiskey.”
“Not at all. My pleasure. Ah, you will be sending a wire to Mr. Caldwell right away, won’t you?”
“This very evening.”
“Will you let me know if you have a reply from him?”
“Right away.”
Truax beamed at him. He even stood up as Quincannon took his leave of the office.
Riding out of the mine yard, Quincannon fired his pipe and reflected sourly that he was accumulating a great deal of curious information but that none of it seemed to fit together into a useful pattern. Nor did any of it seem directly related to the gang of koniakers, with the probable exception of Whistling Dixon’s murder and the possible exception of Jason Elder’s disappearance. And now he needed the answers to several puzzling and related questions before he could even begin to piece things together.
Why had Helen Truax signed over all of her two hundred and fifty shares in the Paymaster Mining Company to Elder — shares worth better than twelve thousand dollars?
Why had Sabina Carpenter taken those shares from Elder’s shack and what did she intend to do with them?
Why was Truax so eager to sell Paymaster stock?
What, exactly, was Helen Traux’s relationship with Jack Bogardus?
And if Bogardus was as dishonest as Truax claimed, did that dishonesty extend to counterfeiting and murder?
Chapter 9
When he arrived back in town Quincannon went directly to the Western Union desk at the Wells Fargo office. It was too early to expect answers to his wires, but there was always the chance that Boggs had news of his own to impart. He found nothing for him when he arrived, however. He sent Boggs another wire care of Caldwell Associates, this one requesting information on Jack Bogardus, and then returned his rented horse to the livery and walked back up to the War Eagle Hotel.
In his room he lay on the bed and cudgeled his brain for an hour, without much consequence. Restlessness and hunger drove him out again. He ate a small meal at a cafe nearby, and when he was done it was early evening and the saloons were beginning to fill up with cowhands, miners, and townsmen. He did as he had done the previous night: drifted from saloon to saloon, taking a drink in each, engaging this man and that in apparently idle conversation.
The murder of Whistling Dixon was a favorite topic, but Quincannon picked up no new information or useful speculation on the shooting. He did learn that although Dixon had no real friends among the Ox-Yoke cowboys, he had most often partnered with a waddy named Sudden Wheeler; and that if anyone had known Dixon and his private ways, it was Wheeler. Quincannon had already planned to ride out to the Ox-Yoke tomorrow. Now that he had Wheeler’s name, it might simplify his inquiries.
Information was meager on other fronts as well. As far as any of the miners who worked at the Paymaster knew, the mine was still producing high-grade ore on the same steady basis as in previous years. The payload vein wouldn’t last forever, as one miner said, and it wasn’t as rich as it had been in the seventies, but he wasn’t worrying about his job. That being the case, it was unlikely that Truax’s eagerness to sell Paymaster stock stemmed from an urgent need for money — at least as far as the mine itself went. Any other motives he might have were well hidden.
Jack Bogardus was generally disliked in Silver, though not with the vehemence Truax had exhibited. The consensus seemed to be that he had obtained the Rattling Jack mine through dishonest methods, as Truax had claimed. He had been an abrasive sort to deal with personally and professionally up until his discovery of the rich new vein; since then he had mended his ways somewhat, lost his public contentiousness and modified his penchant for petty conniving. Now he was tolerated, especially in saloon circles; when he was in town for reasons other than Helen Truax, which wasn’t often, he stood drinks for the house.
He was secretive about the Rattling Jack’s new vein; he had built a stockade around the mine compound and allowed no one inside except the dozen or so men who worked for him. Quincannon found this secrecy of potential interest. Perhaps the man was only being overly protective of his holdings; but a fence might also mean that he had something to hide. It was a fact to be looked into more closely.
Questions about Jason Elder netted him nothing more than he already knew. Questions about the Chinese population in general and Yum Wing in particular were likewise unproductive. Aside from the usual prejudice against the Chinese, there was little animosity such as Truax and Coffin had demonstrated. The yellow men were tolerated in much the same way Bogardus was tolerated, and that included Yum Wing and his opium peddling. A few of the men Quincannon spoke to even seemed surprised that Will Coffin was being harassed. “Hell,” one man said, “them Chinamen is a peaceable bunch. Seems to me it’d take a lot more than a couple of editorials to stir ’em up to busting into Coffin’s house and the newspaper office.”
Quincannon, from his personal knowledge of the Chinese race, agreed with that assessment. It was something that had been bothering him. Either trouble ran deep and dark between Coffin and the Orientals of Silver City, or somebody else was responsible for the break-ins. The same person or persons who had ransacked Jason Elder’s shack, for instance.
Sabina Carpenter?
Looking for what?
When Quincannon left the sixth saloon he was feeling the effects of the whiskey, starting to lose his clear- headedness. It was dark now and the gas lamps had been lighted along Jordan and along the narrow winding streets that climbed the hillsides to the east and west. The night wind blowing down off War Eagle Mountain was chill; he walked into the teeth of it, to chase away the muzziness from the liquor.
On impulse he turned west on Avalanche Avenue, toward Sabina Carpenter’s millinery shop. He expected to find it dark, but it wasn’t; lamplight illuminated the second-floor window and the words painted on it: SABINA’S MILLINERY FINE HATS FOR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. Quincannon stopped across the street, behind a waiting buggy drawn by a sleek dappled gray, and peered up at the lighted glass. Nothing moved behind it, at least not within the range of his vision.
He stayed where he was for a time, waiting for his head to clear completely, debating with himself. Should he
