The Stolen Gold Affair

13 Quincannon

Quincannon had no great liking for jails, and he actively detested the one in Patch Creek. One reason was that it was the only one he had ever been locked up in as a suspect in a crime of any sort. Another was that the cell’s stone walls and floor were cold, damp, unclean, and smelled about as sweet as a backyard privy. And the third was that his jailer, Micah Calder, was even more simple-minded than James O’Hearn had led him to believe.

“No, I ain’t gonna send for Mr. O’Hearn,” the sheriff kept saying in a voice like the scrape of a rusty pump handle. “He’s an important man, he ain’t got time to bother himself with a murderin’ timber hauler.”

Quincannon felt like strangling him; since that wasn’t possible, he strangled two of the rusty bars that separated them instead. An audience with the mine superintendent would set him free of this hellhole, but nobody was willing to grant him one. Not Walrus Ben Tremayne or Pat Barnes; they’d turned deaf ears to his pleas when they tied him up, escorted him out of the Monarch, and put him into one of the mine wagons under guard for the run to the Patch Creek jail. And not this dunderheaded lawman, half a century old and the owner of a face the approximate hue and texture of a dried chili pepper, with a brain to match.

“How many times do I have to say it?” he said. “I did not murder Frank McClellan.”

“Evidence says you did. Witnesses say you did.”

“There weren’t any witnesses to the shooting.”

“That ain’t what I was told. Four witnesses say it was you done it, else you wouldn’t be in here charged with a capital crime.”

Quincannon pointed to his temple, wincing when his fingertip touched the weal there. “Hell, man, do you think I gave myself this knot?”

“Could have. I knew a fella once hit himself on the head with a hammer so hard he near busted his skull.”

“And I’ll wager I know who it was.”

“Think so? Who?”

“You.”

“Hey, now,” Calder said in offended tones, “ain’t no call for you to get personal.”

Quincannon gave vent to a blistering six-jointed oath, quit strangling the bars, and flung himself down on the cell’s lone cot. The fact that the mattress was as thin and hard as a slat, it and the blankets no doubt a-crawl with vermin, urged him to unleash another lengthy oath. The sheriff shook his head twice as if pained by the outbursts, then stomped out of the cellblock and locked the door after him.

Quincannon allowed himself a calming five-minute sulk, after which he commenced cudgeling his brain for an explanation to McClellan’s murder. The motives for it and for the frame he found himself in were not difficult to surmise; the identity of the slayer and the methods by which he’d committed the deed and vanished afterward continued to elude him. Damnation! If only his head would stop aching long enough so he could think clearly again.

Time passed at a sluglike crawl. Calder didn’t come back. The other three cells were empty; the only sounds were those that penetrated the windowless stone walls from outside. Quincannon’s headache finally eased, as did most of his anger, and he resumed his brain cudgeling, this time with glimmerings of success.

The day was waning into dusk before he had company again, not the sheriff but a fat deputy bearing a tray of something resembling food. A renewed demand for an audience with O’Hearn fell on deaf ears; the deputy went away without saying a word, not even when Quincannon unleashed his frustration again in a blistering assault on the man’s lineage.

Night fell. Quincannon alternately paced the cell, lay on the cot, and brooded. Where the devil was O’Hearn? He must have heard the news about McClellan by now; he should have come of his own volition. Well, it was still early. Mayhap he would.

But he didn’t.

And so Quincannon spent his first and what he hoped would be his last night in durance vile.