The Dangerous Ladies Affair

21 Quincannon

It was a long, cold ride from the Rideout ranch back to Kennett’s Crossing. But a dry one, at least, the rain continuing to hold off and saving him the misery of traveling muddy levee roads without a slicker to keep from being drenched. Not that the return trip was without discomfort. It had been some time since Quincannon had sat a horse and he was feeling a touch rump sprung by the time he neared Dead Man’s Slough.

Sounds carried far in the delta, particularly on days such as this one; even before he reached the ferry landing he could hear, strangely enough, loud music rolling out over the swampland from Kennett’s Crossing — a rusty-piped calliope playing an off-key rendition of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

The calliope stopped its atonal caterwauling just before Quincannon reached the ferry landing. He took advantage of the respite to ring for the closemouthed ferryman and then board the scow, which was still moored on this bank. While he and the bay were being winched across, the calliope started up again. He could tell from mid-slough where the music, such as it was, was coming from — an old, weather-beaten steamer moored at the town wharf. Doubtless Gus Burgade’s store boat, the Island Star.

The wind was an icy breath on the open water. Overhead, darkening clouds moved furtively; the smell of rain had grown heavy in the late-afternoon air. The coming storm would break long before whichever Stockton packet Noah Rideout had booked passage on arrived at Kennett’s Crossing. There were possible benefits in a stormy night, Quincannon thought, but none where his first meeting with the wealthy rancher was concerned.

When he clattered off the barge’s landing apron, he had a better look at the store boat. The calliope was anchored to her foredeck, still giving forth, monotonously, “The Girl I Left Behind Me” — evidently intended as a clarion call to potential customers. If its piping had drawn many, there was no evidence of them now; the Island Star likely had been here for some time.

He rode to the livery, turned the bay over to the hostler, then allowed the wind to push him past the inn and along a grassy branch of the levee road toward the wharf. As he drew abreast of the gangplank at the battered little steamer’s waist, the old Civil War veteran, Dana, came hurrying out of the lamplit cargo hold, clutching a bottle of forty-rod whiskey. Dana glared at him in passing, muttered something, and scooted off to find a place to do his solitary drinking. He was evidently the last of the store boat’s initial wave of customers. No one was visible in the hold and the decks were deserted except for a kanaka deckhand lounging near the rusty calliope.

Quincannon sauntered across the plank, entered the hold. It had been outfitted as a store, with cabinets fastened around the bulkheads, a long counter at one end, and every inch of deck space crammed with a welter of sacks, bins, barrels, boxes, tools, and other loose goods. A barrel of a man outfitted in what looked to be a new linsey-woolsey shirt was perched on a stool behind the counter, a short-six cigar clamped between yellowed teeth.

“Afternoon,” he said around the stump of his stogie. His steady gaze was appraising. There seemed to be no recognition in it, but it was difficult to tell in the dim lantern light. “Help you with something, friend?”

“Would you be Gus Burgade?”

“I would. Owner, captain, and pilot of the Island Star.”

And the man who had spent the night in Pauline Dupree’s stateroom on the Captain Weber and sent her the message at the Yosemite Hotel yesterday afternoon. There was no mistaking the short, stubby arms, small head, powerful torso, and rough-hewn features.

“Flint,” Quincannon said, “James Flint.”

“Well, Mr. Flint. What can I do for you?”

“A tin of Navy Cut, if you have it.”

“Don’t. Never had a call for it.”

“Cable Twist?”

“Nor that, neither.”

“What kind of pipe tobacco do you stock?”

“Virginia plug and Durham loose.”

“The plug, then.”

Burgade produced a sack of cheap tobacco and named a price that was half again what it would cost anywhere else. Quincannon paid without protest or comment.

“Seems I’ve seen you somewhere before,” Burgade said.

“This is my first visit to Kennett’s Crossing.”

“Elsewhere, then. Walnut Grove, maybe. Or Stockton.”

Quincannon said cautiously, “Mayhap. Though I haven’t been to either town in several years.”

“Big gent like you, nice dressed, kind of hard to forget. Well, no matter. What brings you here?”

“Business. With a Schyler Island farmer, Noah Rideout.”

No reaction to the name. “What kind of business, you don’t mind my asking?”

“It concerns a lady friend he met in San Francisco.”

Nothing changed in Burgade’s expression. “Lady friend, eh? Who would she be?”

“I’m not at liberty to say. Do you know Mr. Rideout?”

“Heard of him, never met him.”

“I was supposed to meet him at his farm today,” Quincannon said, “but he has been away on business in Stockton and isn’t expected back until late tonight.”

“So you’ll be staying over at Kennett’s Inn, will you?”

“No. Mr. Rideout will be met here when he arrives by packet and I expect to return to his farm with him.”

No reaction to this, either. Give the rogue credit for unflappability, if nothing else. “Storm due any time now. Bad night for a buggy ride all the way to Schyler Island.”

“Worse day tomorrow if the rains continue. The levee road will be a quagmire. You’ll be weathering the storm here yourself, I take it?”

“Be a fool not to.”

Quincannon had taken the cat-and-mouse conversation to its limit. In fact, he may have taken it too far. It depended on whether Burgade and Pauline Dupree had made contact and, if so, they had settled their differences and divvied up the Rideout extortion money and where she was now and what her plans were. For all Quincannon knew, she was tucked up in a cabin right here on the Island Star. Or, worse, a prospect that grated on him like sandpaper, she’d concluded her business with Burgade last night and was on her way to Sacramento, perhaps already there and on board an eastbound train.

“Was there anything else, friend?” Burgade asked him.

He said, “No, friend, nothing,” and took his leave.

Restlessly he prowled the meager settlement, but there was nothing there to enlighten him. Shadows had formed and lengthened among the collection of shacks and the surrounding swampland, and with the coming night the heavy concentration of storm clouds began to break open. The first drops of wind-flung rain, cold as ice crystals against his skin, drove him back to the inn.

Rich aromas greeted him as he entered, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten since a doughnut on board the Delta Queen that morning. The common room was deserted except for Adam Kennett, who was closing the potbellied stove after having added more firewood. Quincannon welcomed the heat this time. He said, “I’d like a room, Mr. Kennett. Whether for a few hours or for the night has yet to be determined,” and went to stand warming his backside in front of the stove.

“Price is the same either way. Six bits.”

“Including dinner?”

“Quarter extra for meals.”

High prices in this tawdry backwater, Quincannon thought grumpily as he paid. Already this chase after Pauline Dupree was costing him dearly, what with steamer passage, hansoms, bribes, tips, meals, and now a night’s lodging. Such a continuous outlay without a client to reimburse him would have the lingering effect of an embedded splinter if he failed to locate Pauline Dupree and the money she’d extorted from Titus Wrixton and, likely, from Noah Rideout.

“Supper any time you want it,” Kennett said. “Liquor buffet’s still closed, sorry to say.”

“No matter. I’m not a drinking man.”

The bushy-whiskered innkeeper sighed. “I wish I wasn’t. Night like this, whiskey’s a man’s best friend. This man’s, anyhow.”

Sufficiently warmed, Quincannon found his way down a central corridor at the rear. The room he’d been given was not much larger than a cell, windowless, furnished with a narrow bed and a rust-stained washstand. He deposited his valise on the sagging mattress, drew his Navy Colt to check the loads for the fourth or fifth time the past two days, then went back out to the common room and into what passed for a dining hall.

Guests had no choice when it came to the fare at Kennett’s Inn. Supper, served by a Chinese waitress, was a plate of fried catfish, potatoes, and corn and a cup of bitter coffee. Barely palatable, though that didn’t stop him from wolfing it all down and requesting a second helping of catfish (another dime, confound it) and a thin slab of peach pie. His appetite had always been prodigious. He had inherited all of his father’s lusty appetites, in fact, along with his genteel Virginia-born mother’s love of poetry.

Sabina had once remarked that he was a curious mixture of the gentle and the stone hard, the sensitive and the unyielding. He supposed that was an accurate assessment. And the reason, perhaps, that he was a better detective than Thomas L. Quincannon, the rival of Pinkerton in the nation’s capital during the Civil War. He knew his limitations, his weaknesses. His father had never once admitted to being wrong on any subject whatsoever but considered himself invincible — and had been prematurely and ignominiously dispatched while on a fool’s errand on the Baltimore docks. John Frederick Quincannon intended to die in bed at the age of ninety. And not alone, either.

No one else entered the dining room during his meal. If there were any other guests at the inn, they were forted up in their rooms. The rain was squall heavy now, hammering on the roof, rattling shutters. A night for neither man nor beast. Would the foul weather change Noah Rideout’s mind about venturing home tonight? Possibly, though he had already made arrangements with his aide-de-camp to meet him here and had no last-minute way of canceling them.

In his room, Quincannon lit his pipe and tried to read from the volume of May Day and Other Poems and then from a second volume of poetry he’d brought with him, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But he was too keyed up to relax tonight. And the verses by Emerson and Whitman made him yearn for Sabina. Only two days away from her and already he missed her company...

He’d never felt this way about a woman before, never believed he was capable of that nebulous emotion called love. A confirmed bachelor, that was John Quincannon, taking his pleasure with as many comely wenches as were willing to provide it — neither a rake nor a monk, but a red-blooded Scot who had always considered marriage a state of entrapment to be avoided at all costs. A lusty loner was how he’d thought of himself before he met Sabina and for some while afterward.

In the beginning his personal interest in her, he now admitted with a sense of shame, had been simple seduction. Her refusal to succumb had been both a challenge and a source of mounting frustration. He couldn’t quite pinpoint when having her as a bed partner ceased to be a primary objective and his feelings for her began to evolve to their present state. The process had been gradual, brought about by a deepening respect for her as a woman as well as a detective partner and a desire to spend more and more time in her company outside the confines of the agency. Now he couldn’t imagine life without her, personally or professionally.

It was a marvel that she had begun to feel the same. And she must have, else she wouldn’t have finally relented and permitted him to squire her about on an increasingly frequent basis. Squiring was all she’d permitted thus far, but that was fine with him. For the nonce, anyway. The greater intimacy he craved was only partly sexual now. His longing went deeper than that, perhaps as deep as a proposal of marriage. But her late husband had been the love of her life, and she had been faithful to his memory in the years since his death. What if she had no interest in marrying again and were to say no to the proposal? What would he do then?

A knock on his door put a merciful end to these thoughts. He opened it to find Adam Kennett. “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Flint,” the innkeeper said, “but the storm and the temporary temperance have got me twitchy as the devil. You happen to play chess?”

“Chess? I do, yes...”

“Care for a game or two? Help pass the time on a long night?”

That it would, Quincannon agreed. The fact that the bearded giant played a cerebral game was no less surprising than his proficiency at various gambits. Quincannon played excellent chess himself under normal circumstances, but his attention kept slipping away to Pauline Dupree, Gus Burgade, and Noah Rideout. Kennett won three matches and they stalemated the fourth. Outside, rain continued its furious pounding on the inn’s tin roof and the wind moaned and chattered ceaselessly.

It was a few minutes past eleven by Quincannon’s watch when they finished the last game. Time to venture out and await the arrival of the Stockton packet. After returning to his room for his valise, he said as much to Kennett, explaining briefly that Noah Rideout was supposed to be arriving on one of the night boats and that he had business with the farmer.

“Supposed to be?” Kennett said as Quincannon donned his chesterfield, muffler, and cap. “You’re not sure?”

“Not positively, no.”

“Your business with him must be urgent.”

“That it is. Very urgent.”

The innkeeper made no further comment, though his expression indicated that he thought any man who went out into a fierce late-night blow like this one on an uncertain errand, no matter what his purpose, was something of an addlepate.