The Dangerous Ladies Affair

19 Quincannon

It was midafternoon on Sunday when the Southern Pacific steamboat Delta Queen whistled for her arrival at Kennett’s Crossing. Quincannon, standing at the deckhouse rail with his valise in hand, had a clear view of the sorry little backwater as the packet drew up to the landing.

The hamlet’s buildings were all on the southwest side of a wide body of brownish water colorfully and no doubt accurately named Dead Man’s Slough. On both sides of the slough, a few hundred yards from where it merged with the broad expanse of the San Joaquin River, a raised levee road ended at a cable-operated ferry landing; the barge was presently anchored on this bank, next to a ramshackle ferryman’s shack built close to the edge of a thin rind of mud and cattails. A pair of large bells on wooden standards, one at each landing, were what travelers used to summon the tender when the ferry barge was on the opposite bank.

On this side the inn, a long, weathered structure built partly on solid ground and partly on thick pilings, stood next to the levee road. The rest of Kennett’s Crossing ran upward in a ragged line to where the slough narrowed and vanished among tangles of swamp growth and stunted oaks choked with wild grapevine. Its sum was approximately a dozen buildings and several shantyboats and houseboats tied to the bank alongside a single sagging wharf.

Quincannon was the only passenger to disembark. As soon as he stepped off, deckhands raised the gangplank and the Delta Queen’s whistle sounded again and her stern buckets immediately began to churn the river water to a froth. There was no sign of anyone abroad as he strode up the road to the inn. Scuds of dark-bellied clouds gave the place an even bleaker aspect, like a bad landscape painting done in chiaroscuro. The smell of ozone was sharp in the air. There would be rain by nightfall.

Two men were in the inn’s common room, a giant with a black beard twice as bushy as Quincannon’s and an old man with a glass eye and fierce expression, who slouched with hands on hips before a minimally stocked liquor buffet. They appeared to have been engaged in an argument, which ended abruptly upon Quincannon’s entrance. His deduction that the giant was the innkeeper proved to be correct; the gent’s name was Adam Kennett.

“Is it food, lodging, or both you’ll be wanting, mister?”

“Neither at the moment. It’s information I’m after.”

“What information would that be?”

It was overly warm in the room; heat pulsed from a glowing potbellied stove. Quincannon opened his chesterfield and unwound his muffler before speaking. “Did a woman arrive on one of the night boats from Stockton last night?” he asked. “Young, handsome, blond haired.”

“Young? Handsome? Phooey!” This came grumblingly from the old man. “Ain’t nobody like that in this miserable excuse for a town. Never has been, never will be.”

“I’ll have no more of that, Mr. Dana,” Kennett said.

Dana glared at him with his good eye. “An outrage, that’s what I call it. A damned outrage.”

“Watch your language. I won’t tell you again.”

“I’m a veteran, by grab, I served with McClellan’s Army of the Potomac in the War Between the States. I’m entitled to a drink of whiskey when I have the money to pay for it.”

“The buffet is temporarily closed,” Kennett explained to Quincannon. “And for good reason.”

“Good reason my hind end. Not a drop of spirits sold on account of religion, and me with a parched throat. It ain’t right, I tell you. I ain’t Catholic. I ain’t even a believer.”

“Well, I am.”

Quincannon said, “If the woman I described did arrive by steamer last night, would you be aware of it, Mr. Kennett?”

“No. I don’t stand down at the landing in the middle of the night, or the middle of the day, neither. Folks come to me if they want food or lodging. I don’t go looking for them.”

“Do you know a local man given to wearing a long buffalo coat?”

“That’s like asking if I know a local man wears galluses. Buffalo coats ain’t what you’d call uncommon around here.”

“Short, squat, large head, hardly any neck. Thirty-five or so.”

“That sounds like Gus Burgade,” the old man said.

Kennett shrugged. “Could be.”

“Who is Gus Burgade?” Quincannon asked.

“Runs a store boat, the Island Star. Puts up here sometimes when he’s not out making his rounds.”

Store boats, small in number, prowled the fifteen hundred square miles of sloughs and islands between Sacramento and Stockton, peddling everything from candy to kerosene to shantyboaters, small farmers, field hands, and other delta denizens. More than one of their owners were reputed to be less than honest. “Was the Island Star here night before last?”

“Sure it was,” Dana said. “Gone yestiday morning, though.”

“Due back when, do you know?”

“Later today or tomorrow, likely,” Kennett said. “You got business with Burgade?”

“I may have. With Mr. Noah Rideout, too. I take it you’re acquainted with him.”

“The high-and-mighty farmer?” The innkeeper’s voice took on a truculent edge. “I know him to speak to, not that he’ll have much truck with the likes of me.”

“Goddamn teetotaler,” Dana said. “Phooey!”

“I told you before to watch your language, mister. And keep your voice down, too, or out you go.”

“Throw me out with foul weather comin’, would you? And without so much as one little drink of whiskey to warm my bones.”

“One little drink is never enough for you.”

“How much whiskey I swallow ain’t nobody’s business but mine.”

Kennett sighed. “Burgade’ll have a jug of forty-rod for sale, if you’re willing to pay his price.”

“I’ll pay it, right enough, if he comes today. But I suppose I can’t bring the jug back here to sip on where it’s warm?”

“No, you can’t. Kennett’s Inn is a temporary temperance house.”

“Temporary temperance house. Phooey.” Dana moved away from the buffet, then stopped abruptly to give Quincannon a closer one-eyed scrutiny. “You a Johnny Reb?”

“Johnny Reb? Hardly.”

“Southerner, ain’t you? Tell by your accent.”

The old man must have ears like an elephant to detect what was now only a faint trace of a southern accent. “Born in Baltimore,” Quincannon admitted, “but I’ve lived in San Francisco for fifteen years.”

“Once a Johnny Reb, always a Johnny Reb. Spot one of you graybacks a mile away. Only good Reb’s a dead one, you ask me.”

“The Civil War has been over for thirty years, Mr. Dana.”

“Tell that to my right eye. It’s been pining for the left one for more’n thirty years. Damned Reb shot it out at Antietam.”

He clumped over to a long puncheon table and sat down with his arms folded and mouth downturned into a lemony pucker.

“Don’t mind the old coot,” Kennett said to Quincannon. “He’s only like that when he’s sober and getting ready for a trip to the doctor in San Francisco. His bark’s worse than his bite.”

“About Noah Rideout, Mr. Kennett. Have you ever seen him in the company of a woman such as the one I described?”

“Can’t say I have because I haven’t. He minds his business; I mind mine.”

“How far is his Schyler Island farm from here?”

“Six, seven miles.”

“How do I get to it?”

“You figure on going out there today?”

It was one of two options, the other, less desirable one being to wait here on the chance that Gus Burgade and his store boat would put in an appearance. Action was always preferable to passive waiting. If Pauline Dupree wasn’t to be found at the Schyler Island farm, Rideout himself might have returned there by this time.

Quincannon said, “Yes, if I can rent a horse.”

“Prob’ly can. Livery’s right across the road, Mr. — What’d you say your name was?”

“I didn’t. But it’s Flint, James Flint.”

“Take the ferry across Dead Man’s Slough, Mr. Flint, and follow the levee road till you come to another ferry at Irishman’s Slough. That one’ll take you to Schyler Island.” Kennett paused and then advised, “I’d get a move on if I was you — we’re in for a blow tonight.”

The livery was a barnlike building diagonally up-road from the inn. One of the doors was open and a buttery lamp glow shone within. Entering, Quincannon discovered four horses in stalls and the hostler asleep in the harness room. He woke the man up and questioned him. No, he hadn’t rented either a wagon or a horse to a woman answering Pauline Dupree’s description — “Never seen anyone looked like that around here, more’s the pity” — or to anyone else in the past few days. He’d seen Noah Rideout a few days ago when one of his employees had delivered him to the steamboat landing in a carriage, hadn’t seen him since. Quincannon haggled with the hostler from a distance of two feet — he had a mouth half-full of as many black teeth as white and a rancid breath that would have gagged a goat — and emerged astride the best of the available horses, a ewe-necked bay, his valise tied to the saddle horn.

The last traveler or travelers to use the ferry had been headed west; the barge was moored on the opposite bank of the slough. Quincannon yanked the bell rope on the landing stage and the bell’s sharp notes brought the ferryman, a muscular gent of some fifty years, from his shack. He seemed none too happy to be summoned out once again into the chill afternoon; he answered Quincannon’s questions about the identity of recent travelers with nothing more than a series of grunts and monosyllables as he winched the scow across. It was held by grease-blackened cables made fast to pilings on a spit of north-side land a hundred yards upslough. The current would push the ferry across from shore to shore, guided by a centerboard attached to its bottom and by the ferryman’s windlass.

When the barge nudged the plank landing, the ferryman quickly put hitches in the mooring ropes, then lowered the approach apron so Quincannon could lead the horse aboard. As soon as the ferryman collected the toll, he set the cable to whining thinly on the windlass drum and the scow began moving again, back across. A taciturn cuss, he said not a word the entire time.

The levee road was well graded and fairly well maintained, in order to accommodate wagons, carriages, and stagecoaches, and the bay handled easily; Quincannon set a brisk pace. The wind had sharpened and the clouds were low hanging, so low that the tops of some of the taller trees in the flanking swampland were obscured by their drift. But the ozone smell was no stronger than it had been and there was no moisture in the air yet. The storm was still two or three hours off.

The road was flanked on both sides by streams of sluggish brown water, swamp oaks, and moss-infested sycamores all the way to the next ferry crossing at Irishman’s Slough. He met no one along the way. The ferry tender there was less taciturn than the one in Kennett’s Crossing; he informed Quincannon as he winched him and the bay across that the only others to request passage today were local farmers. The land on Schyler Island had been cleared and planted with crops; fields of onions and a variety of green vegetables stretched as far as the eye could see. Most of the farmhands tending them were Chinese, so many of which race worked as delta laborers that an entire community had been established at Locke.

A mile or so from the ferry landing, farm buildings appeared in the distance. The entrance to the road that led to them was spanned by a huge, arched wooden sign into which the name RIDEOUT had been carved and then gilded. Quincannon turned in there, rode another quarter of a mile through fenced fields to the farmstead.

There were several buildings, all whitewashed and well-kept. The main house was surprisingly large and elaborate for the delta country, two stories of wood and stone with a galleried porch in front. As soon as he reined up in a broad wagonyard, the front door opened and a burly fellow wearing a butternut coat over gray twill trousers came out and down the steps.

He looked Quincannon over appraisingly before asking, “Something I can help you with, mister?”

“I’d like to speak with Mr. Rideout, if he’s here.”

“He isn’t. He’s in Stockton on business.”

“When is he expected back?”

“Late tonight. If you have business with him, you can tell me what it is. Foster’s my name, Mr. Rideout’s aide-de-camp.”

“Business with him, yes, but of a private sort. Concerning a lady friend of his.”

“And who would that be?”

“Pauline Dupree. An actress at the Gaiety Theater in San Francisco.”

If Foster recognized the name, his face didn’t show it and he didn’t admit it. He said nothing.

“Handsome woman, dark gold hair. Mr. Rideout kept company with her in the city.”

“His business, if so.”

“She wouldn’t happen to be here, would she?”

“The only women here are servants.” Foster’s gaze narrowed. “Who are you? What’s your interest in Mr. Rideout and this Dupree woman?”

“I’d rather discuss that with him.”

“I’ll still have your name, unless you have some reason to withhold it.”

“John Quincannon. Which packet will he be on tonight?”

Instead of answering the question, Foster said, “It’ll be late when he arrives and he won’t want to be disturbed. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see him.”

Not if I have my druthers, Quincannon thought. “Will you be meeting him?”

Foster didn’t answer that question, either. “Tomorrow, Mr. Quincannon. Good day until then.”

He turned on his heel and reentered the house.