Quincannon

Chapter 20

For the next two days, the main topics of conversation in Silver City were the fight at the Rattling Jack, the unmasking of Bogardus and his crew as koniakers, the arrest of Helen Truax as an accomplice and co-conspirator, and the twin revelations that Quincannon was a Secret Service operative and Sabina Carpenter a Pinkerton detective. The excitment was such that a kind of carnival atmosphere prevailed. Quincannon, Sabina, and Marshal McClew were accorded the mantle of heroes and greeted effusively wherever they went.

Quincannon, however, had little time for socializing. He was kept busy sending wires, questioning prisoners and making arrangements for their transportation to Boise, and coordinating the activities of the other federal officers — among them Samuel Greenspan — who had arrived in Silver. Boggs, who had been both pleased at Quincannon’s success and disgruntled that he hadn’t waited for official sanction before raiding the Rattling Jack, issued telegraphic orders that all the counterfeiting equipment found at the mine be photographed and itemized in detail for Secret Service files. The Milligan printing press also had to be dismantled, and it and the rest of the equipment shipped to Boise for transshipment east to Washington.

The details of the coney operation that Quincannon did not already know or suspect were for the most part supplied by Helen Truax; she was more than willing to cooperate in order to save her own neck. She also filled in the missing pieces concerning Jason Elder and Whistling Dixon.

The boodle game had been Bogardus’ brainchild, in league with Elder, Conrad, and one other man, James Darby, who was now in custody. When the last silver-bearing vein at the Rattling Jack began to peter out, Bogardus and Darby had schemed up the bogus coin idea; Darby had worked as a diemaker and was responsible for the counterfeit eagle and half-eagle molds. Bogardus, meanwhile, had made arrangements through old criminal contacts in Portland and Seattle for the passage of the finished coins.

Bogardus had also, by this time, rekindled his affair with Helen Truax, who had turned up in Silver City as the wife of Oliver Truax. She was bored with Truax, if not with his money, and more than willing to take up with her former lover. She claimed that she hadn’t known of his counterfeiting activities until just recently, but Quincannon suspected Bogardus had confided in her almost at once.

The success of his coney coin venture had stirred Bogardus’ greed and made him determined to branch out into greenbacks. For that he needed an expert printer and engraver, but not one known to the authorities as a counterfeiter — and the word in Silver was that Jason Elder was such a man. The corruption of Elder had not been difficult; the promise of large sums of money and an unlimited supply of opium had been the bait that landed him. As it turned out, Elder had had the hand of a master and his ten- and twenty-dollar plates were among the best of counterfeits.

While Elder was designing the plates, Bogardus’ contacts in Portland and Seattle rounded up the necessary equipment and supplies, mainly through eastern channels, and had them freighted in to Silver City. Their first press had been one of the old single-plate, hand-roller types, but Elder’s plates were so good that the press itself didn’t matter except in terms of speed of production. The first batch of currency shipped to Portland had excited the gang members there and led to an increasing demand for more queer, which in turn led to the importation of the Milligan press. By this time the Rattling Jack was a factory, with its full attention devoted to the manufacture of bogus notes; the silver-coining end of the game had been abandoned some three months before.

The increased production schedule meant that more men were needed at the mine, and recruits were carefully solicited. One of those recruits, brought in by Conrad, was Whistling Dixon. But he had been a poor choice. Conscience had got the better of him; he had tried once to leave Bogardus’ employ, only to be persuaded otherwise by the promise of wealth and by thinly veiled threats. Word of Dixon’s skittishness leaked out through the network of boodle carriers and coney dealers and finally reached the ears of the informant Bonniwell in San Francisco.

But the red-haired man, Griswold, had been in San Francisco to meet with a local coney dealer and had gotten wind that Bonniwell was asking questions. He’d gone to Bonniwell’s rooming house that night, and murder had been the end result of his visit. His only mistake had been overlooking the piece of paper clenched in Bonniwell’s hand, the paper with Whistling Dixon’s name on it that had led Quincannon to Silver City.

Meanwhile, in Silver, Jason Elder had also begun to give Bogardus problems. He not only neglected his cover job with Will Coffin’s newspaper, but also neglected his work on the production of queer; more and more of his time was spent adrift in the dreamworld wrought by the opium poppy. Bogardus threatened him as a result, and the threat worked only too well: frightened, Elder appropriated the plates as a measure of self-protection and gave them to Yum Wing.

This shut down the production of counterfeit, of course, and sent Bogardus into a panic. At first he tried to buy back Elder’s confidence and thus the plates; Elder was given cash, and when there wasn’t enough of that on hand to satisfy him, Bogardus induced Helen Truax to sign over her stock in the Paymaster Mining Corporation. Still Elder balked at returning the plates, thereby signing his own death warrant. Bogardus lost patience and had Elder beaten, then tortured — rough handling that had gone too far, for the printer had died “of a seizure” before revealing the whereabouts of the missing plates.

Desperate then, Bogardus had ordered searches of Elder’s shack, the newspaper office, and Will Coffin’s house. The second search of the Volunteer ’s premises had been a reckless and just as futile measure.

With the location of the plates still unknown, the redhead, Griswold, had returned to Silver City with news of what had taken place in San Francisco. The fact that Whistling Dixon was a potential threat to the operation had spurred Bogardus — a murderer already — to order the death of Dixon. Griswold had carried out the order, having accompanied the old cowboy to Slaughterhouse Gulch on a ruse; but he had neglected to search the body afterward, or he would have found the watch Dixon had earlier appropriated from the corpse of Jason Elder.

Then Sabina had found the stock certificate in Elder’s shack, and Quincannon had drunkenly given away that fact to Helen Truax. Neither Bogardus nor Mrs. Truax cared that her husband might find out she had signed over her stock; what they were afraid of was any sort of incriminating link between her and Elder. And they were also highly suspicious of Sabina’s motives. Mrs. Truax was unaware of her husband’s pyramid swindle; it never occurred to her that Sabina’s interest might be in him, not her.

It was not until Bogardus read Coffin’s second editorial excoriating the Chinese in general and Yum Wing in particular that he realized where the plates must be. Their eventual recovery by Conrad and Darby and the resumption of production at the mine had not completely relieved him, however. He remained suspicious of Sabina, and with his planned departure from Silver City coming imminent, he sought to eliminate all possible threats. He had killed twice; murder no longer bothered him, not even that of a woman.

And now it was finished. Bogardus was dead; Darby and Helen Truax were in jail. So was Griswold, who had been captured on the outskirts of Boise and his wagonload of queer confiscated. Quincannon had been given the names of gang members in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco — one of the names that of the man who had murdered the boodle carrier in Seattle and dumped his body in Puget Sound — and had telegraphed those names to Boggs. The men were now being systematically rounded up. Boggs’ estimation was that the final arrest total would exceed two dozen.

Sabina, too, had been busy. News of his wife’s arrest had reached Oliver Truax before dawn on Friday morning and he had fled immediately for fear that his swindling activities would come to light. Armed with this fact, Sabina had persuaded her Pinkerton chief and their clients to press immediate charges of fraud against the mine owner. Truax, who had expected to have plenty of time to clean out his various bank accounts and then find sanctuary, had been arrested in Nampa late Friday afternoon.

Quincannon and Sabina did find time, on Saturday evening, to have a quiet supper at McClew’s home. They talked of their work, and tentatively of personal matters; but he did not mention Katherine Bennett’s name. He would have liked to tell Sabina about that day in Virginia City, and perhaps someday he would have the opportunity. But not now, not yet.

She observed once that he seemed not to be drinking. He said, “I’ve been too busy to think about whiskey.”

“Then perhaps you don’t need it so badly after all, John.”

“Perhaps not,” he said. “No, perhaps not.”

Changes had been wrought inside him; he was not the same man who had arrived in Idaho one week ago. He felt as if he were just emerging from an abyss, one that blind, senseless guilt had dropped him into. He had begun to see things differently now that he was coming out of that abyss. One life had been destroyed, yes, through tragic accident. His guilt and his dependence on alcohol had almost allowed a second — Sabina’s to perish. If he allowed those factors to continue governing him, they would destroy a third life — his own this time. What was the sense in that? There were things to be done with his special skills, good things over many years of public service. And weren’t those things a proper memorial to the short and tragic life of Katherine Bennett?

On Saturday morning he and Sabina left on the stage for Boise; she had only been leasing the millinery shop and all that went with it, so the closing of it had presented no problem. There was fanfare at their departure — a brass band, the mayor offering an eloquently worded speech — but neither of them paid much attention. Nor did they pay much attention to their fellow passengers on the long ride out of the Owyhees and across the plains.

They said goodbye at the new rail depot in Boise. “Will we see each other again, John?” she asked.

“Would you like it if we did?”

“I would. And you?”

“Yes. I’ve worked in Denver many times; I’ll be sent there again soon, I’m sure.”

“And I to San Francisco.”

“It won’t be long, then,” he said. But he was thinking that in truth it had been two years since his last visit to Colorado; and that Sabina was an attractive woman with too much to offer to remain an unattached widow for long. There was a sadness in him as he watched her board an eastbound Central Pacific car — a sadness born of something he suspected was much more profound than simple kinship.

Two weeks after his return to San Francisco, following a great deal of deliberation, Quincannon sent a wire to Sabina care of the Pinkerton Agency, Denver. It read:

I AM CONSIDERING RESIGNATION FROM SERVICE TO ESTABLISH PRIVATE PRACTICE STOP WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN MOVE TO SF TO JOIN ME THIS VENTURE QMK BUSINESS ONLY OF COURSE

He waited anxiously, but not long, for her reply. It came the next afternoon.

YOUR OFFER A PLEASANT SURPRISE STOP YES I WOULD CONSIDER IF EQUAL PARTNERSHIP WHAT YOU HAVE IN MIND STOP BUSINESS ONLY OF COURSE STOP IF YOUR ANSWER AFFIRMATIVE I WILL REQUEST LEAVE OF ABSENCE TO COME YOUR CITY FOR PERSONAL DISCUSSION

Quincannon wired his affirmative. Then he went to the Palace Hotel, and because he had not had a drink of alcohol in nineteen days, he did his celebrating with a pot of black coffee and a fifty-cent cigar.