another Chinese in the dark or they would probably have murdered me too.”
“That explains the cut on your head — I’ve been wondering about that.” She paused. “Do you think they got the plates?”
“I’m certain they did,” Quincannon said. He explained what he had overheard at the Truax house.
“What will you do now?” she asked. “It seems to me you have sufficient proof against Bogardus to take direct action.”
“To me as well. But Mr. Boggs and the gentlemen in Washington are much more cautious in these matters than either of us.”
“I know what you mean. The man I work for in Denver, James Lumley, is the same sort. Which is why I’m still operating this shop and Oliver Truax is still a free man.”
“You have evidence of Truax’s guilt, then?”
“Considerable evidence.”
“A pyramid swindle?”
“Exactly. The man is riddled with greed, and reckless because of it. He will sell any amount of Paymaster stock to any interested party for immediate payment in cash. He told me there were no shares available for sale when I first approached him, but when I showed him the Agency’s five thousand dollars, I owned a hundred shares less than twenty-four hours later.”
“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
