“Did he say what kind of work?”
“Nope.”
“What was his opinion of Bogardus? Dixon’s, I mean.”
“Didn’t seem to have one.”
“What’s your opinion of him? Or don’t you know him?”
“Know of him. Don’t much like what I know.”
“Crooked?”
“Like a dog’s hind leg, some say.”
“How so? Anything specific?”
“None I heard about.”
“Any of the other hands who might have an idea?”
“Doubtful. I’d of heard the idea if there was.” Wheeler took a last drag on his cigarette and pitched the butt away. But his bright old eyes remained fixed on Quincannon’s face. “You ask a heap of questions for a drummer, Mr. Lyons,” he said at length.
“A natural inquisitiveness,” Quincannon said.
“You figure maybe Whistling wasn’t killed by outlaws? That maybe Bogardus done it?”
“I don’t know, Sudden. That’s why I’m asking questions.”
“Marshal’s job, ain’t it?”
“He’s only one man. A lawman in country like this can always use help.”
“No argument there,” Wheeler said. He shrugged. “None of my business anyways, I reckon. My business is cows.”
He turned as he spoke: another group of hands had arrived with more wet stock and was driving the cows and calves into the pens. The foreman began calling for the branding team, raising his voice to a shout to make himself heard above the terrified bawling of the animals.
Wheeler said, “Work to be done. Hope you get what you’re after, son.”
“So do I.”
Quincannon watched the old waddy climb back inside the corral and cross to the sagebrush fire. Then he moved off to where the new hands were dismounting near the barn. None of them could tell him any more than Sudden Wheeler had, except that Dixon’s shirttail cousin, Conrad, was good with a handgun and “a mean little son of a bitch drunk or sober.”
It was past noon when Quincannon rode out of Ox-Yoke. His hangover had faded some at the ranch, but after half an hour in the saddle, under the full glare of the sun, it began to plague him again. The morning’s whiskey and the growling emptiness in his belly made him dizzy. He cursed himself for not buying some beefsteak and sourdough biscuits from the Ox-Yoke cook.
When he reached DeLamar he stopped at the first cafe he saw and forced down a plate of beans and bacon. Afterward he went to a nearby saloon and drank two pints of Gretes’ beer, the home brew, to slake his thirst. He felt better then. Well enough, at least, to face the steady, up-canyon climb to Silver City.
A mile below Ruby City he had to stop and wait while two wagons maneuvered around each other on a ledge where the road narrowed and there was a sheer dropoff on one side. On impulse he asked one of the drivers, who had paused after the passage to check a wheel hub, if he knew where the Rattling Jack mine was located. The man said he did and gave directions. The route would take Quincannon south away from Silver, toward the Ruby Mountains, but the distance was not great. It would mean another half hour of riding, no more. He had enough whiskey left for that.
Between Ruby and Silver, a narrow and badly rutted wagon road cut away to the south and he turned along there. It snaked through a network of hollows and swells, forked twice — he took the left fork each time, as per the wagon driver’s instructions — and finally climbed along a bare shoulder on the south side of War Eagle Mountain. The sun was westering now and the high-plateau wind had picked up; it blew cool against his face, bent the sage and bunchgrass on the slope and made whistling noises among the rocks.
He heard the dull thud of the Rattling Jack’s small stamp mill before he saw any sign of the mine. He put the roan into a slow walk as they started around a sharp turning in the road. Then the mine’s surface works appeared, sitting forward on the slope beyond the ravine he had been skirting, and he drew rein. Black-painted words on the side of the largest of the mine buildings spelled out the words:
RATTLING JACK MINING CO.
Two things about the place struck him immediately as odd. One was the fence that enclosed the compound — a tall, horseshoe-shaped stockade fence, the kind that might have been erected in the days when roving bands of Bannacks and Piutes attacked isolated diggings; now it seemed an excessive precaution, unless Bogardus were hiding something behind it. The second thing was the tailings. The biggest drift of them looked old, evidence of what had once been a large-scale operation here. There was a newer dump, below a tramway that extended out over the stockade fence, but it was small — too small for a mine where a rich new vein had been found and worked for some months. Truax had said Bogardus claimed to be producing ore that assayed at a hundred dollars a ton, which was impossible with a dump that size.
Quincannon dismounted, led the roan back around the turning, ground-reined it, and then made his way up along the side of the slope to its highest vantage point, where he could just see over the top of the fence. But the distance was considerable; he wished he had rented a spyglass along with the horse. He studied as much of the compound as he could see. Its fourth side was a steep, almost vertical bluff. Scaleable? He would have to go up on its rim to determine that. Smoke and steam came from the roof stacks of the main shaft house and the mill at the foot of the grade, and the stamps continued their rhythmic pounding. If there was any above-ground activity, he couldn’t see any of it from here. But no one trundled an ore cart out along the tram, to dump waste rock from its end — not once in the fifteen minutes Quincannon sat watching.
Nothing else happened during those fifteen minutes. Finally he stood and went back downslope to his horse. Mounting, he headed back toward the main road and Silver City.
Something curious was going on at the Rattling Jack; he was convinced of that now. But it was premature to assume that Bogardus and his men were the koniakers. More information was needed before he could make that assumption and take action on it.
Still, what better place for the manufacture of bogus coins and notes than an isolated silver mine?
Chapter 11
The hands on Quincannon’s stemwinder showed a quarter of five when he rode into downtown Silver. He tied up in front of the Wells Fargo office and went in to ask the Western Union telegrapher if a wire had come for him. None had; Boggs was taking longer than he had hoped to reply to his requests for information, doubtless because that information was not easy to come by.
He rode down to Cadmon’s Livery, turned over the roan to the day hostler, Henry, and walked to the War Eagle Hotel. There, he found a message waiting — from Sabina Carpenter, asking him to call on her either at her millinery shop or at Mrs. Farnsworth’s rooming house on Morning Star Street. He was not surprised. Nor was he reluctant to see her; the prospect gave him an odd sense of anticipation.
Upstairs in his room, he washed the trail dust out of his beard and off his skin and brushed it from his clothing. He held his hands up when he was done, watched them for a moment. Steady. But he took a drink anyway, a large one, before he went downstairs again.
It was not yet six o’clock, so he went first to Avalanche Avenue. The street door to Sabina’s Millinery was unlocked. He entered and climbed a flight of stairs that delivered him into a spacious single room with draperies drawn across the rear third of it to create a private compartment. There was no one in the public two thirds of the room.
He paused for a moment to take stock of the place. A display table with four finished hats — two for men, two for women — arranged on little stands. Another, much larger table on which were a bolt of cloth, scissors, and a tape measure. Shelves containing more bolts of cloth in a variety of colors and patterns. Other shelves stacked with artificial flowers, grosgrain and velvet ribbons, black and white veil netting, boxes of hatpins, different kinds of bows and doodads. The shop struck him, unlike the Rattling Jack mine, as a legitimate business operation. He wondered if Sabina Carpenter had purchased the existing stock from a former owner or if she had brought it all with her from Denver or wherever she’d come.