honesty and fidelity in all transactions.
5. The title of regular employees will be Operative, Secret Service. Temporary employees will be Assistant Operatives or Informants.
6. All employment will be at a daily pay rate; accounts submitted monthly. Each operative will be expected to keep on hand enough personal reserve funds to carry on Service business between paydays.
Article 3 had been a constant bone of contention during the ten years Quincannon had worked in the San Francisco office. What he considered justified expenditures seldom coincided with Boggs’ opinion; their arguments had been mostly amiable, like an ongoing chess match each of them looked forward to — Quincannon for the challenge of finding a winning gambit, Boggs because he almost always won. That had been the case, at least, until the incident in Nevada the previous year. Now it was Article 4 that Boggs most often quoted — the continuing fitness and ability of Quincannon as an investigator. But he raised the issue gently, knowing as he did the full story of Katherine Bennett’s death and understanding what it had done to Quincannon. Boggs was not a man who generally yielded to personal feelings — the Service came first and foremost in his life — but he made allowances in this instance, out of a combination of loyalty, friendship, and pity. Quincannon did not really care one way or the other. He walled out Boggs and Boggs’ attitude as he walled out everything and everyone else: using pain for bricks and alcohol for mortar.
In the bottom drawer of his desk were a number of maps of the Western states and territories. He found the one for Idaho and spread it open. Silver City was in the southwestern corner of the state, in the Owyhee Mountains where the barren, unsettled corners of Oregon and Idaho met the equally barren Nevada desert — a silver-mining town that had been the center of a boom in the 1870s and was still a major producer of that precious metal. The closest rail service was at Nampa, just north of Boise, forty miles away; from there an overland trip via stage or horseback was required. Police jurisdiction in the area, Quincannon thought, would be thin and divided, thereby making it a favorite haunt of outlaws from four different states.
He took down the government survey pamphlet on Idaho and read what it contained about Silver City and the Owyhee region. Then, from his wallet, he removed the slip of paper he had found last night in Bonniwell’s hand and studied that again. He was still studying it when Boggs came in.
Boggs was in his mid-fifties, a round, graying man with a bulbous nose; one of his friends had once likened him to a keg of whiskey with the nose as its bung. He favored butternut suits, fashionable square-crown hats, and gold-headed walking sticks in a variety of designs. The stick he carried this morning bore the head of a lion.
His surprise at seeing Quincannon at his desk so early was evident. He said, “Well, this establishes a happy precedent,” and immediately went to the open window and banged it shut. Then he lit one of his Havana panatellas. He liked the office warm, even stuffy, and redolent of cigar smoke.
Quincannon said, “Bonniwell was murdered last night. Bludgeoned to death in his rooming house and the body dropped into the alley below to make it seem an accident.”
Boggs gave him a narrow, glowering look. “How do you know it was murder?”
“I saw the man responsible. He pushed the body through the window just as I was approaching.”
“And?”
“He escaped. I almost caught him.”
“Almost,” Boggs said heavily. “Were you drunk?”
“No. The rain and the muddy ground were to blame, not liquor.”
“Did you have a good look at him?”
“Red-thatched, big, face mindful of a slab of marble. I’ve never seen him before. But I’ll know him if I see him again.”
“Was there anything in Bonniwell’s room?”
“Nothing. The redhead saw to that. But I did find something in Bonniwell’s hand.”
“And that was?”
Quincannon stood and brought the piece of butcher’s paper to Boggs, who squinted at it through the smoke from his cigar.
“Whistling Dixon,” Boggs said. “Someone’s name?”
“No doubt. It means nothing to me.”
“Nor to me.”
Boggs went to his desk, sat down, and lifted out the file on the present case from the bottom drawer. Quincannon stood watching him shuffle through reports from a variety of sources both here in the West and in Washington; samples of the silver eagles and half eagles that had first begun to appear in Oregon, Washington state, and northern California close to a year ago; samples of the ten- and twenty-dollar notes that were now flooding the entire coast, as well as Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Utah, and had been for better than three months; lists of known counterfeiters, coney brokers, and boodle carriers. But it was a slim file, for all of that. Scattered bits of positive information, a welter of speculation and possibilities.
Neither the coins nor the greenbacks bore the style of any known counterfeiter. The ink and the silk-fiber paper that were being used to make the notes were of good quality and therefore would not have come cheap, but their source or sources remained a mystery. None of the counterfeit seemed to have been transported or distributed in a traceable fashion, through known carriers or brokers. The only definite link between the coins and greenbacks had come from a field operative in Seattle, who had managed to trace a man who had shoved $10,000 worth of queer on a local brokerage house. When the operative and the local authorities broke into the man’s rented flat they found a small cache of both eagles and bills. The man himself had not turned up until two days later — floating in Puget Sound with his face shot away. All efforts to identify him had failed. Samuel Greenspan was still working on that angle, still chasing down what his latest telegram referred to as “dead-end leads” in the Seattle area.
Boggs sat back after a time and licked his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. “Not a whisper of Silver City anywhere in here,” he said, tapping the file. “Did Bonniwell mention the place to you in any context?”
“No,” Quincannon said. “He had met someone who might be a boodle carrier for the gang and hoped to have more information for me last night — that was all.”
“This carrier’s name was Smith, he said?”
“Yes. A phony moniker, of course.”
“Bonniwell didn’t know where Smith was living?”
“Evidently not. He had met the man in a saloon.”
“No lead there, then. Not that we’ll need to worry about that, if Whistling Dixon and Silver City prove meaningful.” Boggs frowned abruptly. “John, could that piece of paper have been planted in Bonniwell’s hand? To put us off on a false scent?”
“There’s a chance of it, yes,” Quincannon said. “But the handwriting is Bonniwell’s — I’ve seen it before — and the paper was clenched so tight in his fingers that I had difficulty prying it loose. If the redhead put it there the grip would not have been half so tight.”
Boggs nodded and sat silent for a time, worrying his cigar. Then he said musingly, “Silver City, eh? Not such a bad place for koniakers to set up shop. Isolated, and not much in the way of law enforcement. Plenty of silver for the coney coins, too.”
“It also fits geographically,” Quincannon said. “Not far from there to Portland, Seattle, or San Francisco. They could make shipment by freight wagon, even by train from Boise under false bills of lading.”
“A risky business, though. Freighting paper and ink, machinery, other supplies into those mountains, then freighting out the queer. Any number of things could go wrong.”
“But nothing has. They’re a cocky bunch, and well-organized — that’s plain. And in the normal course of events, who would suspect a coney operation in such a place?” “Just as you say,” Boggs agreed.
Quincannon said, “I can be on a train leaving Oakland this afternoon, Mr. Boggs. And in Silver City in two days.”
“You can and you will. Use an assumed name and occupation; you’ll need to take every precaution.”
“I had already planned on that.”
Boggs allowed a few seconds to pass and then said, “John… you know how important this case is. If we don’t put these queers-men out of business, and damned soon, they have the potential to undermine the West’s economic system. The entire country’s economic system, if they should step up production and distribution to the East.”
