“Well, Mr. Bridges,” the sheriff said. “Where’s this man, Evan Gaunt? Point him out and we’ll have him in irons before he can blink twice.”
Bridges said dolefully, “We don’t have any idea where he is.”
“You don’t— What’s this? You mean to say he jumped somewhere along the line?”
“I don’t know what to think. Mr. Quincannon believes he’s still on board, hiding.”
“Does he now?” Hoover turned to Quincannon, gave him a quick appraisal. “So you’re the fly cop, eh? Well, sir? Explain.”
Quincannon explained, tersely, with one eye on the sheriff and the other on the rolling stock. Through the grit-streaked windows he could see passengers lining up for departure; Sabina, he was relieved to note, was one of them. A porter stood between the second and third day coaches, waiting for the signal from Bridges to put down the steps.
“Damn strange,” Hoover said at the end of Quincannon’s recital. “You say you searched everywhere, every possible hiding place. If that’s so, how could Gaunt still be on board?”
“I can’t say yet. But he is — I’ll stake my reputation on it.”
“Well, then, we’ll find him. Mr. Bridges, disembark your passengers. All of ’em, not just those for Barstow.”
“Just as you say, Sheriff.”
Bridges signaled the porter, who swung the steps down and permitted the exodus to begin. One of the first passengers to alight was Sabina. She came straight to where Quincannon stood, took hold of his arm, and drew him a few paces aside. Her manner was urgent, her eyes bright with triumph.
“John,” she said, “I found him.”
He had long ago ceased to be surprised at anything Sabina said or did; she was his equal as a detective in every way. He asked, “Where? How?”
She shook her head. “He’ll be getting off any second.”
“Getting off? How could he—?”
“There he is!”
Quincannon squinted at the passengers who were just then disembarking: two women, one of whom had a small boy in tow. “Where? I don’t see him—”
Sabina was moving again. Quincannon trailed after her, his hand on the Navy Colt inside his coat. The two women and the child were making their way past Sheriff Hoover and his deputies, none of whom was paying any attention to them. The woman towing the little boy was young and pretty, with tightly curled blond hair; the other woman, older and pudgy, powdered and rouged, wore a gray serge traveling dress and a close-fitting Langtry bonnet that covered most of her head and shadowed her face. She was the one, Quincannon realized, that he’d nearly bowled over out- side the women’s lavatory in the first-class Pullman.
She was also Evan Gaunt.
He found that out five seconds later, when Sabina boldly walked up and tore the bonnet off, revealing the short-haired male head and clean-shaven face hidden beneath.
Her actions so surprised Gaunt that he had no time to do anything but swipe at her with one arm, a blow that she nimbly dodged. Then he fumbled inside the reticule he carried and drew out a small-caliber pistol; at the same time, he commenced to run.
Sabina shouted, Quincannon shouted, someone else let out a thin scream; there was a small scrambling panic on the platform. But it lasted no more than a few seconds, and without a shot being fired. Gaunt was poorly schooled on the mechanics of running while garbed in women’s clothing: the traveling dress’s long skirt tripped him before he reached the station office. He went down in a tangle of arms, legs, petticoats, and assorted other garments that he had padded up and tied around his torso to create the illusion of pudginess. He still clutched the pistol when Quincannon reached him, but one well-placed kick and it went flying. Quincannon then dropped down on Gaunt’s chest with both knees, driving the wind out of him in a grunting hiss. Another well-placed blow, this one to the jaw with Quincannon’s meaty fist, put an end to the skirmish.
Sheriff Hoover, his deputies, Mr. Bridges, and the Limited’s passengers stood gawping down at the now half-disguised and unconscious fugitive. Hoover was the first to speak. He said in tones of utter amazement, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
Which were Quincannon’s sentiments exactly.
“So that’s why he assaulted Old Dan in the baggage car,” Bridges said a short while later. Evan Gaunt had been carted off in steel bracelets to the Barstow jail, and Sabina, Quincannon, Hoover, and the conductor were grouped together in the station office for final words before the Desert Limited continued on its way. “He was after a change of women’s clothing.”
Sabina nodded. “He devised his plan as soon as he recognized John and realized his predicament. A quick thinker, our Mr. Gaunt.”
“The stolen clothing was hidden inside the carpetbag he carried into the lavatory?”
“It was. He climbed out the window and over the tops of the smoker and the lounge car to the first-class Pullman, waited until the women’s lavatory was empty, climbed down through that window, locked the door, washed and shaved off his mustache and sideburns, dressed in the stolen clothing, put on rouge and powder that he’d also pilfered, and then disposed of his own clothes and carpetbag through the lavatory window.”
“And when he came out to take a seat in the forward day coach,” Quincannon said ruefully, “I nearly knocked him down. If only I had. It would’ve saved us all considerable difficulty.”
Hoover said, “Don’t chastise yourself, Mr. Quincannon. You had no way of suspecting Gaunt had disguised himself as a woman.”
“That’s not quite true,” Sabina said. “Actually, John did have a way of knowing — the same way I discovered the masquerade, though at first notice I considered it a coincidence. Through simple familiarity.”
“Familiarity with what?” Quincannon asked.
“John, you’re one of the best detectives I’ve known, but honestly, there are times when you’re also one of the least observant. Tell me, what did I wear on the trip out to Arizona? What color and style of outfit? What type of hat?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with—” Then, as the light dawned, he said in a small voice, “Oh.”
“That’s right,” Sabina said, smiling. “Mr. Gaunt plundered the wrong woman’s grip in the baggage car. The gray serge traveling dress and Langtry bonnet he was wearing are mine.”
Medium Rare
The night was dark, cold; most of San Francisco was swaddled in a cloak of fog and low-hanging clouds that turned streetlights and house lights into ghostly smears. The bay, close by this residential district along lower Van Ness Avenue, was invisible and the foghorns that moaned on it had a lonely, lost-soul sound. Bitter sharp, the wind nipped at Quincannon’s cheeks, fluttered his thick piratical beard as he stepped down from the hansom. A sudden gust almost tore off his derby before he could clamp it down.
A fine night for spirits, he thought wryly. The liquid kind, to be sure — except that he had been a temperance man for several years now. And the supernatural kind, in which he believed not one whit.
He helped Sabina alight from the coach, turned to survey the house at which they were about to call. It was a modest gingerbread affair, its slender front yard enclosed by a black-iron picket fence. Rented, not purchased, as he had discovered earlier in the day. Gaslight flickered behind its lace-curtained front windows. No surprise there. Professor Vargas would have been careful to select a house that had not been wired for electricity; the sometimes spectral trembles produced by gas flame were much more suited to his purposes.
On the gate was a discreet bronze sign whose raised letters gleamed faintly in the out-spill from a nearby street-lamp. Sabina went to peer at the sign as Quincannon paid and dismissed the hack driver. When he joined her he, too, bent for a look.