Quincannon

Chapter 18

The ride out to the Rattling Jack seemed interminable. Restless clouds kept the moon hidden most of the time, and the darkness lay thick and cold over the rumpled terrain; he was forced to slow McClew’s grulla to a walk on the rutted and rubble-strewn wagon road. The last thing he could afford was to have the horse stumble and break a leg — maybe throw him and break his leg.

He met no one on the road. Helen Truax, despite her protestations to Bogardus this morning, had evidently remained at the mine; the timing was such that he would have seen her buggy if she’d left after delivering Sabina. It was just as well. Avoiding her or confronting her out here — either one — would have cost him valuable time.

A few scattered lights in the distance told him he was finally nearing the Rattling Jack. He found the way down into the ravine, let the grulla pick its way along below the mine, and then climbed out and up onto the bluff. He dismounted a hundred yards from the rim and tied the horse to a juniper bush. McClew’s saddle rope was a new, strong hemp, maybe fifty feet of it. Too short to reach all the way to the bottom of the bluff face; this afternoon he had judged the drop at sixty feet or better. But there was nothing to be done about that now.

Carrying the rope, he moved ahead to the rocks along the edge and hunkered there to study the compound. There were lights in the two bunkhouse buildings; another glowed dimly inside the main shaft house. The yard itself was in heavy shadow and looked empty — no watchman posted tonight, either. Near the stockade gates were the lumpish shapes of a horse and buggy, no doubt Helen Truax’s rig. Bogardus’ false sense of security would be his undoing, Quincannon thought.

Quincannon knelt among the rocks for a few seconds more, watching and listening. With the mill shut down, the night was hushed; indistinct sounds drifted up to him — horses moving about in the stable, men moving about and making noise in the bunkhouses. Outside, there was only stillness.

He worked out a loop in one end of the rope, found an upthrust knob of granite, and tied the loop around it. When he yanked on the rope, using his full strength, it held firm; the rock was anchored solidly enough to support his weight. He played the rest of the rope down the bluff wall, wound part of its upper end twice around his right leg and once around his right hand. Then he checked the compound again, made sure his revolver was tight in its holster, and swung out.

The descent was slow, arduous work — a drop of a few feet at a time, so as not to burn his hands on the rope and lose his grip; brake with his bootsoles braced against the rock wall; rest, and repeat the process. The strain on his arms and legs was acute; sweat flowed on him despite the chill plateau wind. By the time he neared the end of the rope he was short of breath again and his right side was afire.

With only a few feet of the rope left, he rested and looked down. Still more than a dozen feet to the jumble of talus and loose dirt at the base. Off to the left was the best place to make his fall — more dirt there than rock. He shoved out that way, dropped to the rope’s end, straightened his body against the bluff face, and let go.

He was angled forward, waving his arms for balance, when his boots struck the loose dirt. He felt himself sliding downward, tried to throw his body down belly-flat so he could help brake his momentum with his hands; but his foot struck a heavy piece of talus and pitched him sideways, toppled him and sent him rolling over twice before he fetched up among the rubble at the bottom. The noise of dislodged rocks and his own tumbling body seemed loud in his ears. He was aware of that far more than the pain in his ribs and the scrapes and cuts from the sharp-edged talus as he dragged himself to his feet.

He pawed at his holster, felt the butt of the Remington still lodged there, and broke into a stumbling run toward the main shaft house. He saw nothing in the yard before reaching its shadowed wall, but voices came to him from somewhere beyond, carried on the wind.

“… Thought I heard something back there.”

“Hell. Nothing but the wind.”

“Wasn’t the wind. Sounded like somebody moving around up by the shaft house.”

“Phantoms, Conrad. Ghosts and goblins.”

“Stay here, then, you smart bastard. I’ll go have a look myself.

…”

Quincannon thought: Damn them! If they came back here with a lantern, he was done for. He might be able to hide from them in the darkness, but that rope hanging down the cliff face was a dead giveaway…

He groped around on the east side of the shaft house, away from the sound of the voices. Open ground beyond — nowhere for him to go there. The footsteps of the two men were audible now, coming closer; but they didn’t have a lantern, not yet, or he would have seen its shimmer against the blackness. He kept moving, feeling the wall with his hands.

Doorway, with its thick slab of a door pulled shut. He located the latch, opened the door just wide enough to slip his body through, and shut it soundlessly behind him.

A lighted lantern hanging to one side of a steam hoist let him see most of the big gloomy interior. There was no place for him to hide; he realized that at once. Off to his left, the boiler loomed dark and bulky, with pockets of heavy shadow around it; but if they came inside, and it seemed probable they would, that was one of the first places they would look. He couldn’t get down into the main shaft, either. Its eye was blocked by the lifting cage, and starting the hoist was out of the question.

He ran toward the far end of the building. A mine of this size had to have an emergency shaft that would also serve as ventilation for the network of drifts and adits and winzes below. He found it — an opening some three feet in diameter, with a low framework of timbers around it as a safeguard against accident. An in-draft of cool air came out of it; its dank smell blended with the odors of warm grease and steam escaping from the boiler.

Sounds came to him from outside a second door, opposite the one through which he had entered. Hastily Quincannon climbed over the protective framework, found the cleats fastened to one side of the shaft. As he did, a trick of his mind brought back to him an old miners’ saying. When you step across the shaft collar you’re gambling with death. But he had no choice. He was trapped here either way. He swung his body into the opening and started down.

The trapped feeling intensified as he lowered himself into the heavy blackness. But he kept moving as fast as he dared; they must be in the building by now, and it would not take them long to investigate this shaft. Whether or not they came down themselves depended on how spooked Conrad was.

It was a good fifty feet before he reached the first drift. He stepped off the last of the cleats, stood aside peering up toward the collar; he could barely make out the opening, a faint grayness against the deeper black. He stood still, listening. Nothing but silence for a time. Then he heard the voices again, indistinct murmurs at first that grew louder and became clearer as the men approached the shaft. He took a blind, shuffling step sideways, fingers groping against the cold rock; he did not want to move any farther away from the shaft, not unless it became necessary, for fear of bumping into tools and equipment that might have been left in the drift.

“Nobody in here either, I tell you.”

“Be quiet. Listen.”

Silence for several seconds. Quincannon stood motionless, forcing himself to breathe shallowly and inaudibly through his mouth.

“You satisfied now? Who the hell would want to come in here and go down inside the mine?”

“I don’t know. But with that woman here…”

“Yeah, that woman. I don’t like that.”

“Then don’t think about it.”

“Just the same, I don’t like it. I need a drink. You coming or not?”

No answer from Conrad. Silence settled again, so thick and clotted that it was like a continual soundless scream. Quincannon thought that they had moved away from the shaft collar, maybe left the building, but there was no way to tell. He stayed where he was, waiting, sweating, listening to the silence.

Five minutes. Ten. Or maybe it was only five after all; down here in the clotted black, the passage of time was difficult to gauge. If they had gone outside and checked the bluff wall and seen the rope, they would already have sounded an alarm and the compound would be swarming with men. When they didn’t find him they would come in here again and take the cage down one level at a time. There would be no escape for him then, no way to fight them; they knew the mine and its maze of drifts and crosscuts and he didn’t.

The feeling of trapped panic welled in him again. He couldn’t stay down here, not any longer. Sabina — Christ knew what Bogardus might be doing to her.

He felt his way back to the cleats, began to climb them through the close confines of the shaft. Sweat made his fingers slippery around the metal; it was a constant strain to keep his labored breathing inaudible. Above him, the shaft collar grew more distinct, a lighter gray, a dull yellow. He paused a few feet below it, wiped his hands dry, and drew his revolver. Then he eased up the rest of the way, poked his head out for a quick, furtive look around.

The building appeared empty.

He climbed out and over the framework, stood for a moment to let his mind and body adjust to the release of claustrophobic tension. When he reached the main door he edged it open. There was nothing to hear outside except for the faint skirling of the wind, the distant snorting of a restless horse. Trap? he thought. But that was foolish; if Conrad and the other man had sounded an alarm, they would have come after in full force, not be waiting for him to come to them. He opened the door wider, saw nothing to keep him inside, and slipped out.

The chill wind dried his sweat, raised gooseflesh on his arms and back as he moved along the shaft house wall. From the far corner his view of both bunkhouses and the stockade gates was obstructed by a pair of ore wagons and the rick of mine timbers. He ran across to the stack, went around the near side. Then he could see the gates; Helen Truax’s buggy was no longer there and he spied it nowhere else in this vicinity. Nor was there any sign yet of a watchman.

He edged forward until he could look past the downhill side of the rick, toward the bunkhouses. The bigger of the two, the one in which he judged the counterfeiting was being done, showed strong light in its single front window. The one farther downhill was also lighted and a man stood in front of it, smoking; the tip of his cigarette making a winking orange hole in the darkness.

Quincannon waited until the man finished his smoke, flicked the butt away, and went back inside. He was torn between two needs: to find out where Sabina was being held and determine if she was all right; and to unlock the gates in preparation for the arrival of McClew and his posse. His concern for Sabina’s welfare was paramount. He hastened back around the uphill side of the stack, paused at its opposite end to reconnoiter the bunkhouses. There was movement behind the window in the near one, then it became a blank yellow eye again. No one was outside that he could see.

The moon came out from behind the scudding clouds, bathed the yard in its brilliance for a few moments. When it vanished again he left the timbers, moving in a crouch, and ran over behind a jumble of discarded machinery, from there into the shadows cast by the stockade fence. That put him behind the nearest bunkhouse, at an angle to its uphill rear corner. He worked his way over there, up on the balls of his feet. At the side wall he flattened his back against the boards and stood listening.

Murmurs from inside, imperceptible. Ten feet ahead, the radiance from within spilled through a side window. Quincannon inched toward it, stopped just before he reached its frame. The murmurs were louder here, but of what was being said he could make out no more than one word in ten. He crouched, moved closer to the window, then raised up until he had a sidewise view through the grime-streaked glass.

The first thing he saw was the printing press. No wonder their counterfeit was of high quality; the press was not one of the old-fashioned single-plate, hand-roller variety, but rather a steam-powered Milligan press that would perform the printing, inking, and wiping simultaneously through the continuous movement of four plates around a square frame. Along with its accessories — bundles of paper, tins of ink, a long workbench laden with tools and chemicals — the press took up most of the forward half of the single room.

Quincannon. dropped low again, duck-walked under the sill, and stretched up on the window’s far side so he could see into the back half of the building. The illumination came from back there, a powerful Rochester lamp hanging above a large round table. The light clearly defined the faces of the two people seated at the table and the two men standing alongside it. One of the standing men was Bogardus. And it was Sabina he was talking to, punctuating his words with sharp, angry gestures.

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?