Velasquez was surprised; if he had noticed Quincannon's warbag, he had attached no significance to it. He said something in response, but at that moment the locomotive's whistle sounded, and the words were lost in its bleating cry. Great puffs of steam hissed out from under the car, mingling with the black, cinder-laced coal smoke from the stack to form a noxious haze along the platform. Velasquez again began to cough. O'Hare took his arm and assisted him onto the train, Quincannon following.
They made their way along the corridor to a center compartment. A frosted-glass lamp, mounted in a bronze sconce, had already been lighted; its glow reflected in sharp little gleams off the handsome rosewood paneling. Velasquez shook free of O'Hare's grip and sat down near the window. The coughing spell had subsided, but it was plain that his chest continued to bother him.
O'Hare asked solicitously, “Would you like some water? A brandy, perhaps?”
“No, nothing. Be so good as to leave Senor Quincannon and me alone. We have business to discuss.”
“Oh, yes, certainly.” O'Hare glanced at Quincannon, murmured, “A pleasure,” and immediately left the compartment.
“A puppy, that one,” Velasquez said. “His tail wags as often as his tongue.”
“Puppies can sometimes bite,” Quincannon observed.
The rancher made no response to that; the subject of Barnaby O'Hare was of little importance to him. He said, “Well, senor? What of Luther Duff?”
Quincannon told him what he had learned, without explaining how he had learned it. Then he asked, “Is the name James Evans familiar to you?”
“No. I know of no hombre named Evans.”
“You're certain?”
“Am I an old man with a poor memory? Yes, I'm certain.” Velasquez frowned. “How could the statue have been in Santa Barbara all those years with no word of it reaching my ears?”
“Perhaps the statue wasn't in Santa Barbara all those years. Evans might have obtained it elsewhere.”
“You say ‘obtained.’ You mean stolen.”
“Probably. I'll be a better judge of Evans and his profession after I've met him.”
Outside on the platform, the conductor's voice rose in a shout: “All aboard! Last call for embarking passengers! All aboard!” The whistle sounded again, several more times. After less than a minute the car jerked, couplings rattled, and the train began its clattering movement. The smell of coal smoke was thick even in the closed compartment.
“Trains,” Velasquez said. “Bah. A man was made to ride live horses, not poisonous iron ones.”
Quincannon spent another ten minutes with him, to no benefit whatsoever. Velasquez's travel sickness and dislike of trains had put him in an irascible, contentious mood; and the fact that Quincannon was not Mexican only added to it. When the train neared the sleepy community of San Mateo, he left Velasquez to suffer his own company and sought out his accommodations.
He read for a time from a volume of poems by Wordsworth. He had three-score volumes of poetry in his rooms in San Francisco, given to him by his mother, and he habitually took one with him whenever he traveled; poetry relaxed him, helped keep his thoughts sharp and orderly. At eight o'clock he went to the dining car, where he ate a huge meal-raw oysters, roast beef, vegetables, sourdough bread, cheese, fresh-churned ice cream. If he had inherited his genteel Southern mother's love for cultural pursuits, he had also inherited his Scottish Presbyterian father's lusty appetites. There was in him a curious mixture of the gentle and the stone-hard, the sensitive and the unyielding. He sometimes thought that was why he had become a better detective than Thomas L. Quincannon, the pride of the nation's capital, the rival of Pinkerton, the founder of the once-respected Quincannon Detective Agency. He knew his limitations, his weaknesses; he had the ability to look at things in different ways, from different points of view. His father had never in his life been wrong, never once changed his mind, was invincible-and had died foolishly, from an assassin's bullet on the Baltimore docks, when he should have been home in bed like other stout, elderly, and gout-ridden men. That would not be his son's fate. John Frederick Quincannon had vowed that he would die in bed, and none too soon, either.
After supper he made his way to the saloon car, with the intention of smoking his pipe out on the observation platform behind. But he spied Barnaby O'Hare sitting alone, nursing a snifter of brandy, and stopped instead at the historian's table.
“Mr. Quincannon, good evening. Will you join me?”
“If you wouldn't mind.”
“Not at all. A brandy?”
“Thank you, no. I no longer indulge.”
“Oh? Medical reasons?”
“Personal ones. I happen to be a drunkard.”
O'Hare seemed taken aback, as much at Quincannon's candor as at the fact itself. “Oh, I see. Well…” His voice trailed off, and he studied the contents of his snifter, as if in consultation.
In vino Veritas, Quincannon thought, but he did not smile even to himself.
He sat down, produced his pipe and tobacco pouch, and proceeded to load the Turkish latakia mixture he favored into the briar's bowl. When he had the tobacco tamped down to his satisfaction, he lighted it with a sulfur match and said between puffs, “Will you be stopping in Santa Barbara, Mr. O'Hare?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. I still have people to see in connection with my book.”
“A history of los ranchos grandes, isn't it?”
O'Hare nodded. “A comprehensive one, I think. I have gathered a wealth of information thus far. Everyone I've spoken to, especially Senor Velasquez and his wife, has been most helpful.”
“His wife? I wasn't aware he was married.”
“Oh yes. To a woman much younger than he-not that that matters a whit, of course. She also comes from an old Mexican family.”
“I see.”
“A beautiful woman, Olivia Velasquez,” O'Hare said, a trifle wistfully. “Quite intelligent, quite strong-willed.”
She would have to be strong-willed, Quincannon thought, to put up with a man of Velasquez's temperament and attitudes toward women. But he said, “I understand you're a teacher by profession,” to bring the subject back to O'Hare.
“Yes. A professor of history at the university in Los Angeles. I have a grant to fund my research and writing and a leave of absence from my teaching duties.”
“Fascinating topic, history.”
“Very. Are you interested in California's past?”
“Indeed I am.”
“Any particular facet?”
“The temperance movement,” Quincannon said blandly.
“Ah.” O'Hare seemed nonplussed again. He lapsed into silence.
Quincannon leaned back with the briar clamped between his teeth, listening to the steady whispering clatter of steel-on-steel. Outside the saloon car windows, the night's blackness was broken now and then by the appearance of individual lights, like fireflies moving through the silky dark, and by strings and blobs of illumination that marked some settlement or other.
At length he said, “Tell me, Mr. O'Hare, how did you happen to come upon the Velasquez statue?”
“Senor Velasquez didn't explain?”
“None of the particulars,” Quincannon lied.
“Well, one of my hobbies is visiting curio shops. I find them intriguing; and occasionally one can find old books, maps, journals, and other items of historical interest. San Francisco has many such shops, as I'm sure you know. Luther Duff's was one of several I visited last week.”
“What made you examine the statue?”
“Curiosity; nothing more. It is quite a handsome piece. You've seen it?”
“Velasquez showed it to me in my offices.”
“Well, you can imagine my surprise,” O'Hare said, “when I discovered his father's name engraved in the base. Actually, surprise is too mild a word; I was flabbergasted. I recognized it immediately as one of Don Esteban's long-lost artifacts.”