The Flimflam Affair

2 Quincannon

The four-car Sierra Railway train chuffed and wheezed into Jamestown just past one o’clock, more than an hour behind schedule. Quincannon was in a grumpy mood when he alighted from the forward passenger coach, traveling valise in hand, and stood vibrating slightly from the constant jouncing and swaying. The overnight trip from San Francisco, by way of Stockton and Oakdale, had been fraught with delays, the car had been overheated to ward off the late fall chill in these Mother Lode foothills, his head ached from all the soot and smoke he’d inhaled, and this was not yet his final destination. Another train ride, short and doubtless just as blasted uncomfortable, awaited him before the day was done.

The town’s long, crooked main street stretched out beyond the depot. Two- and three-storied wood and stone buildings lined both sides — business establishments and professional offices on one, rows of saloons and Chinese washhouses on the other — and the street was packed with rough-garbed men and a variety of conveyances. Behind the saloons, hidden by tall cottonwoods, lay the notorious red-light district known as “Back-of-Town.” Quincannon happened to know this by hearsay, not personal experience; this was his first visit to the Queen of the Mines. If he were fortunate, he thought irritably, it would also be his last.

Jimtown’s long-standing reputation as the “rip-snortin’est, most altogether roughest town in the mines” was evidently justified. It certainly appeared to be far less tamed down than the mining communities of Grass Valley and Nevada City, seventy-some miles to the north, where he and Sabina had had the misfortune of visiting this past summer. A mad cacophony of noises bludgeoned his eardrums — whistles, cowbells, raucous shouts, tinny piano music, crowing roosters, braying mules, snorting horses, clanks and rattles and steam hisses in the rail yards, distant dynamite blasts and the constant pound of ore crushers at the Ophir and Crystalline mines on the southern outskirts. Those mines, and hundreds more within a ten-mile radius, had already reputedly produced some two million dollars of gold in this year of 1897. Little wonder that the small town was wide open and clamorous.

A reception committee of two awaited Quincannon in front of the depot. The middle-aged gent sporting skimpy brown side whiskers introduced himself as Adam Newell, Sierra Railway’s chief engineer. The long and lanky one with fierce gray eyes and a mustache to match was Samuel B. Halloran, Jimtown’s marshal.

The pair ushered Quincannon into a private office inside the depot, where a third man waited — heavyset, clean-shaven, dressed in a black broadcloth suit spotted with cigar ash and overlain with a gold watch chain as large as any Quincannon had ever seen. This was C. W. Cromarty, the railroad’s division superintendent.

Cromarty’s desk was stacked with profiles, cross-sections, and specification sheets for bridges and building materials such as rails, ties, and switches; arranged behind it was a series of drafting boards containing location and contour maps of the area. All of this, Quincannon was to learn, was for the continuation of the road’s branch into Angels Camp. The branch had been completed as far as Tuttletown, where the trouble that had brought him here had taken place three nights ago.

After they had shaken hands, Cromarty said, “We’ll make this conference brief, Mr. Quincannon. A freight is due in from Tuttletown any minute. As soon as it arrives, we’ll leave in my private car.”

That was fine by Quincannon; the sooner the second jolting train ride commenced, the sooner it would end. He produced his stubby briar and pouch of Navy Cut, began thumbing tobacco into the blackened bowl.

“Has any new information come to light on the robbery?” he asked.

“None so far.”

The engineer, Newell, said, “Tuttletown’s constable, George Teague, would have sent word if he’d learned anything. He’s a good man, Teague, but out of his element in a matter such as this. We’ll be relying on you, sir.”

“A well-placed reliance, I assure you.”

“Pretty sure of yourself, ain’t you?” Halloran said around the stub of a slender cheroot. His voice and his expression both held a faint sneer.

“With just cause.”

“That remains to be seen. You may have a fancy-pants reputation as a detective in San Francisco, you and that woman of yours, but you don’t cut no ice up here.”

Quincannon bristled at this — literally. When his ire was aroused, the hairs in his dark freebooter’s beard stiffened and quivered like the quills on a porcupine. He fixed the marshal with an eye fiercer than Halloran’s own. “Sabina Carpenter is my partner, not ‘my woman.’” Not yet anyway. “A Pinkerton-trained detective the equal of any man.”

“So you say. Me, I never put much stock in a man that’d partner up with a female, trained or not.”

“And I put no stock at all in one who blathers about matters he knows nothing about.”

Cromarty said, “Here, that’ll be enough of that. Marshal, this is a railroad matter, as you well know. The decision to engage Mr. Quincannon has been made and will be abided by.”

“I still say I can do a better job than some citified puff-belly.”

Quincannon bit back a venomous retort. A substantial fee to fatten the bank account of Carpenter and Quincannon, Professional Detective Services, had been requested in his reply to Cromarty’s first wire, and agreed upon in his second. It wouldn’t do to indulge in an angry sparring match with a small-town peacekeeper who had no say in the matter and no jurisdiction outside his own bailiwick.

He made a point of ignoring Halloran while he snicked a match alight and fired his pipe. When it was drawing to his satisfaction, he said to Cromarty, “Now then, Superintendent — suppose you provide the details of the robbery left out of your wire. What exactly was the contents of the safe that was stolen?”

“Ten thousand dollars in gold dust and bullion from two of the mines near Tuttletown, awaiting shipment here and on to Stockton.”

“A considerable sum. Why was it being kept in the express office overnight?”

“The shipment failed to arrive in time for the last train that afternoon. The Tuttletown agent felt no cause for concern.”

“Damn fool,” Halloran muttered.

“No, I don’t blame Booker. We all believed the gold was secure where it was. What we overlooked was the audacity of thieves who would carry off a four-hundred-pound burglarproof safe in the middle of the night.”

Quincannon said, “Burglarproof?”

“A brand-new model, guaranteed as such by the manufacturer.”

“I’ve heard such guarantees before.”

“This one has been proven to our satisfaction. Sierra Railway Express now uses them exclusively.”

“What brand of safe is it?”

Cromarty said, “Cannon Berch, with a circular door of reinforced steel. The dial and spindle can be removed once the combination is set, and when that has been done, the safe is virtually impenetrable and indestructible. Not even the most accomplished cracksman was able to breach it in the manufacturer’s tests.”

“And the dial and spindle were removed in this case?”

“Yes. Booker did that before he locked up, took them home with him. He still has them and swears they were never out of his sight.”

“Virtually impenetrable and indestructible, you said? Even with explosives? Dynamite or nitroglycerin inserted in the dial hole in the door?”

“Can’t be done,” Newell said. “You couldn’t open a dialless Cannon Berch with a pile driver.”

Quincannon remained dubious. Ingenuity could be a two-edged sword, as he well knew from experience. If a so-called burglarproof safe could be built, a way to breach it could likewise be found.

“Is this fact common knowledge locally?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t say common knowledge,” Cromarty said, “but we’ve made no secret of the fact.”

Then why had the thieves — thieves, plural, for it would have taken at least two strong men to transport four hundred pounds of gold-filled steel — broken into the express office and made off with the safe? Half-wits who refused to believe “burglarproof” and yielded to temptation? Professional yeggs? The latter seemed unlikely, for how would they have known of the availability of both safe and gold in this remote area?

A large, heavy wagon would have been required to spirit the safe away from the Tuttletown depot, but there was no potential clue in that fact; ore and freight wagons plied the area in large numbers. Nor was there any way to tell in which direction the plunder had been taken, or how far. Two main roads crossed at Tuttletown, one running northward to Angels Camp, the other southward toward Stockton, and there were also a number of intermediate roads connecting with other Mother Lode communities. The town had been the hub of mining activity since placer days, surrounded by a cluster of settlements so close that pioneers from Jackass Hill, Mormon Gulch, and half a dozen others on the west side of Table Mountain could walk into Tuttletown to shop.

These facts had made the town a prime target for thieves before. In the seventies and early eighties, the notorious poetry-spouting bandit known as Black Bart had filched three Wells, Fargo stage shipments of bullion and dust amounting to five thousand dollars from the nearby Patterson mine. Quincannon had been with the Secret Service on the East Coast at that time — it was not until 1885 that he had been transferred west to the Service’s San Francisco office — so he’d had no opportunity to pit his detective skills against Black Bart’s criminal wiles. If he had, he’d once confided to Sabina, he would surely have been the one to put an end to the bandit’s criminal career.

Outside, a distant train whistle sounded. One long, mournful blast, followed closely by a second.

“That’s the Tuttletown freight, Mr. Quincannon,” Cromarty said. “We’ll take our departure as soon as the main tracks are clear.”

The superintendent’s private car waited on a siding at the near end of the rail yards, coupled to a Baldwin 4-4-0 locomotive. Cromarty, Newell, and Quincannon were the only passengers. Halloran had left them at the depot to return to his marshal’s duties, with a parting remark about cocksure flycops that Quincannon pretended not to hear. When he resolved this stolen safe business, he vowed to himself, he would not leave Jimtown until he looked up Samuel B. Halloran and claimed the last word.

The car appeared ordinary enough on the outside, but the interior was well appointed with upholstered chairs and settee, a brace of tables, and a private sleeping compartment. It also contained a ceiling fan and a sheet-iron stove. The comfort, plus a late lunch once they were under way, improved Quincannon’s disposition considerably.

The Angels Camp extension branched off Sierra’s main line in front of the Neville Hotel, bridged a creek at the north end of town, then climbed a steep grade to a cut high on Table Mountain. Over on the mountain’s west side, the tracks swept down another steep grade and curved around a wide valley and several working mines before swinging northward into Tuttletown. The place was a smaller but no less busy and noise-ridden version of Jamestown, its narrow streets, stores, and saloons clogged with off-shift miners and railroad workers from the crews engaged in laying new track and constructing what Cromarty described as a “fifty-foot-high, seventeen-bent wooden trestle” across the Stanislaus River to the north.

A one-man reception committee awaited them here. As soon as the Baldwin hissed to a stop, Quincannon, looking through the window, saw a round, balding man emerge from under the platform roof and hurry over to the car. He was waiting when the three men stepped down, mopping his moon face with a bandana. Despite the fact that the day was cool and overcast, he was sweating profusely.

Cromarty said, “Hello, Booker,” which marked him as the Tuttletown express agent, Howard Booker. “This is John Quincannon, the detective I sent for. Where’s Constable Teague?”

Booker said excitedly, “I got news, Mr. Cromarty. Big news. The safe’s been found.”

“Found, you say? When? Where?”

“About an hour ago. In a field off Icehouse Road. Teague’s out there now with the rancher who found it.”

“Splendid! Abandoned by the thieves, eh?”

“Abandoned, all right, but the news ain’t splendid.”

“What do you mean?”

“Turns out that burglarproof safe’s no such thing,” Booker said. “She’s been opened somehow and she’s empty. The gold’s gone.”