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.”
3
Quincannon
Icehouse Road, obviously named after a native-stone building with ICE painted on its facing wall that squatted alongside a broad creek, serpentined away from town into the hilly countryside. The buggy that Booker had had waiting for them bounced through chuckholes and over thick-grassed hummocks. A grim-visaged C. W. Cromarty sat up front with the express agent, Quincannon on the backseat with Newell. All four kept their own counsel on the quarter-mile ride.
Around a bend, a broad meadow opened up near where the road forked ahead. Scrub oak and manzanita, and outcroppings of rock, spotted the high grass. A buckboard and a saddled chestnut gelding partially blocked the road, and under one of the larger oaks some twenty rods away, a group of three men stood waiting.
One of the men, a leaned-down gent with a handlebar mustache, detached himself from the others and hurried out to meet the rig. The star pinned to his cowhide vest identified him as the local constable, George Teague. He said to Cromarty, “Damnedest thing you ever saw, Mr. Cromarty. Just the damnedest thing. I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes.”
“Who found the safe?”
“Ben Higgins. He’s a dairy rancher lives farther out this way.”
Quincannon asked, “Has anything else been discovered in the vicinity?”
“Just a line of trampled grass,” Teague said. “Looks like the safe was carried in from the road.” He paused, studying Quincannon with his head cocked slightly to one side as if he suffered from a stiff neck. “You the detective from San Francisco?”
Cromarty answered the question and introduced them. Then he said in bleak tones, “Very well. Let’s have a look at it.”
They trooped through the grass to where the other two men — the rancher, Higgins, and Teague’s deputy — waited. The safe lay tilted on its side in the oak’s shade, one corner dug deep into the grassy earth. The black circular door, bearing the words SIERRA RAILWAY EXPRESS in gold leaf above the manufacturer’s name, was open and partially detached, hanging by a single bolt from a bent hinge. Cromarty and Newell stood staring down at it, mouths pinched tight. Quincannon stepped past them, lowered himself to one knee for a closer examination.
“She wasn’t blowed open,” Teague said behind him. “You can see that plain enough.”
Quincannon could. There were no powder marks on the door or other evidence that explosives had been used, nor did the center hold for the dial and spindle show any damage. Yet the door had clearly been forced somehow; the bolts were badly twisted. There were small gouge marks along the bottom edges of the door, the sort a wedge or chisel struck by sledgehammers would make, but a safe of this construction could not have been ripped open in that fashion, by brute force.
A whitish residue adhered to the steel along where the wedge marks were located. Quincannon scraped it with a thumbnail, rubbed it between thumb and index finger. Hard, flaky.
“What’s that?” Newell asked.
“Dried putty, from the look and feel of it.”
“Putty? What the devil could that have been used for?”
Quincannon gave no response. He was looking at another substance that had dried on the safe, on a corner of the door and on one of the outer sides — brownish smears of what was certainly dried blood.