The Plague of Thieves Affair (20 page)

Likely it was. “Is Mrs. Draycott still living at the farm?”

“Sure is. Wouldn't hear of moving into town. Said she didn't want to put nobody out.”

“Alone, or is there a hired hand to help her with the chores?

“No, sir, just her now. Sam had to let their last hired man go two months before he died.”

“Well, I believe I'll pay a call on the widow. How do I get to her farm, Mr. Gilford?”

“It's about four mile out Oak Creek Road,” the hostler said. “Easy enough to find.” He went on to give directions to Oak Creek Road, and described a landmark that would identify the wagon trail leading in to the Draycott property.

Quincannon paid in advance for the claybank, left his grip in the hostler's care, and rode out of town to the northeast, following Gilford's directions. The claybank was spirited and wanted to run; Quincannon held him down for a while, because it had been some time since he'd sat a saddle and the one Gilford had rented him was old, worn, and of an unfamiliar design. But he was used to it by the time he reached the cutoff for Oak Creek Road and he gave the horse his head, letting him canter for a mile or so before hauling him down again.

The road wound through rich farmland, much too fallow and dry-looking for this time of year. The creek paralleling the road was little more than half full. San Francisco had had only a small share of rain this winter, likewise this region—not nearly enough to put an end to the long dry spell.

A sharp wind made the ride a cold one, even bundled as he was in his chesterfield, his hands gloved, a scarf tied chin-high around his neck. A farm wagon drawn by two horses and piled high with crates of eggs clattered by; otherwise the road was deserted. The only people he saw aside from the wagon driver were men working here and there in the fields. He passed two poultry ranches, identifiable as such by rows of long, low, shedlike henhouses. The wind carried the faintly audible clucking of innumerable chickens.

The landmark the hostler had told him about—a lightning-struck live oak—appeared ahead. Quincannon slowed the claybank. The rutted wagon trail was visible beyond the tree, angling away across a short meadow; but a low, grassy hill hid the farm from the road. That suited him. He wanted a look at the place from a safe distance before he went near it, and that hill might do. There was cover along its brow; more live oaks, manzanita, and some bare rocks jutting up through the green and brown grass.

He turned onto the trail, but left it after a short distance and walked the horse across the meadow and up along the backbone of the hill. Near the crown he dismounted, ground-reined the animal, then moved up among the rocks to where he could see what lay on the far side.

The farm was there, tucked into a little hollow, flanked on two sides by alfalfa fields. From where he stood, the farm buildings were better than three hundred yards away. He could see a flock of brown and white hens pecking the ground behind chicken-wire fencing alongside one of four henhouses, a couple of horses inside a pole corral with a lean-to shelter at the near end. There was no sign of human habitation, but a buckboard was visible under the lean-to, and someone was inside the farmhouse. A thin column of chimney smoke spiraled up into the gray sky.

The property did in fact have a gone-to-seed look. The small farmhouse and chicken coops were in need of whitewash; the remains of the burned-out barn sat off to one side, all but a single wall collapsed into rubble and that one leaning like a collection of fire-blackened bones; the small windmill had lost two of its blades; the unplowed fields showed their neglect. Only a vegetable garden alongside the house appeared, at least from a distance, to have been tended to by the widow Draycott.

A place that was dying, that would be as dead as Samuel Draycott in less than a year if someone didn't take it in hand. There was something sad and lonesome about it—a blighted, tragic place. The only sounds that reached Quincannon's ears were the squawking of the chickens and the irregular, rhythmic scree of the windmill's remaining blades turning in the wind. Like the beat of a bad heart. Like the beginnings of a death rattle.

Why was Elias Corby interested in buying it? Quincannon wondered. The bookkeeper hadn't struck him as the type who secretly yearned to be a farmer, or would be willing to indulge in the sort of hard physical labor it would take to make this place productive again. Surely he'd seen it before, met its surviving owner … Ah, that was the answer. It wasn't the farm he coveted so much as it was the widow Draycott. Obsessive designs on her as well as her land was the likely impetus for his transformation from reasonably honest bookkeeper into thief and murderer.

Quincannon continued to watch the farmhouse, considering his options. If his quarry had arranged to stay there, he couldn't very well ride in openly; Corby would have armed himself, and a man who had already killed twice wouldn't hesitate to make an ambush try for number three in order to save himself. The safest course of action, then, was to make a covert approach and utilize the element of surprise. Safe, that was, unless Corby was not holed up here and the widow herself was armed—a likelihood for a woman living alone—and had keen eyes and no qualms about shooting a trespassing stranger.

He studied the surrounding terrain. The hill he was on spread out to the south, sloping down gradually to a shallow gully where the creek flowed. The gully ran along two hundred yards or so to the rear of the farm buildings, through humped-up meadowland and a stand of willows. To the west, beyond the untilled alfalfa fields, the land rose again into a series of short, rolling hillocks. There was no cover in that direction, none anywhere within a fifty-yard radius of the buildings. The only reasonably safe way to make his approach was on a diagonal from the rear, from where this hill leveled out at the gully—and at that, it meant crossing those two hundred yards of open ground to either the remains of the barn or the nearest of the chicken coops.

The cold wind gusted, causing the screech of the ungreased windmill blades to rise in volume. Quincannon's jaw clenched; that noise, constant on windy days, would fray a man's nerves raw. Just a few minutes of it had put an extra twist of tension between his shoulder blades.

He backed down below the crown of the hill and went laterally along its backbone, descending toward the gully. The windmill shrieks weren't as loud here, mercifully. When he reached the gully he followed its westward progress to where a lone willow drooped its branches down over the bank. He stopped there because he could see the farm buildings again. Still no sign of anyone out and about.

Quincannon opened his coat to allow free access to his holstered Navy Colt, then followed the gully a ways farther before cutting away from it across the rocky meadow, running with his body bent low. He kept his eyes lifted as he ran, his gaze steady on the farmhouse; a shaft of sunlight shining through a rift in the cloud cover glinted off the glass in its rear windows, so if there was movement behind them he couldn't detect it. The back door remained closed, the farmyard empty.

The first of the henhouses was the closest structure; he veered toward it, putting the coop between himself and the house. When he reached its back wall he eased along it and around the far side, along the chicken-wire fencing in front. Some of the hens scratching inside the yard set up a minor ruckus, but he judged it wasn't enough to alert whoever was inside the house. He continued at an angle through the vegetable patch, still watching the house's backside. He could see into the windows now, past faded muslin curtains. No one was there to look back at him.

Dry cornstalks crunched under his feet; he sidestepped onto clear ground, slowing. The back stoop was straight ahead, but he bypassed it, went to the near corner and along the side wall. Toward the front was another window, its sash raised a few inches. He stopped alongside it and half squatted so that his ear was on a level with the opening.

The murmur of voices came from inside, a man's and a woman's, but they were in another room and he could only make out a few of the words—not enough so that there was any sense to them, or to tell if the man's was familiar. He eased his head up and around for a quick look through the glass. The room, a sparsely furnished front parlor, was empty. Until he was certain of the man's identity, he was loath to take the risk of entering. He stayed where he was, listening, watching, waiting.

Better than five minutes passed. The voices halted briefly, grew in volume when they began again. A few moments later, the woman came into the parlor through a rear doorway—tallish, spare, wearing a calico traveling dress and bonnet. Behind her was the man, and as soon as Quincannon had a clear look at him, his lips peeled back into a dragon's grin.

Elias Corby, no mistake.

 

21

QUINCANNON

Corby, dressed in farm clothing, was saying to the woman, “… and you can wait here, Ella, while I hitch up the buckboard.” Without waiting for an answer, he strode quickly to the front door.

Quincannon was upright and moving by then, his fingers tight around the butt of his Navy Colt. He heard the door slam shut, then Corby clumping down off the porch. When he reached the corner of the porch and stepped around it, the little man was on his way across the yard toward the lean-to at the corral's near end. He wore no sidearm and his hands were free, but that did not have to mean he was unarmed. Quincannon let him get another ten paces away from the house, so that he was in the middle of the yard with nothing around him for cover and no easy avenue of escape. Then he stepped out around the porch with the revolver up and thumbed to cock.

“Elias Corby!”

Corby jerked to a halt, spun on his heels. His hands came up the way a prizefighter's will, held still in that position. He blinked, staring; disbelief slackened his jaw when he recognized Quincannon. His eyes goggled with the onset of panic.

“Stand fast! Hands up over your head!”

Corby did the opposite: he spun again and ran.

The movement was so sudden that Quincannon hesitated a second or two before shouting, “Stop, Corby, or take a bullet!” But the blasted fool kept on running, heading on a line for the corral.

Quincannon could have fired at him, aiming low for the legs, but he had a strong aversion to shooting any man from behind. Even if he'd felt differently, firing a shot to bring Corby down would not have been necessary. The little man tripped in his haste and fell sprawling, hurting himself enough in the process so that he was unable to haul himself upright. Quincannon, running, saw him roll the last couple of yards to the corral fence, then under the bottom rail into the corral. The two farm horses were plunging in there, frightened by the commotion. Corby avoided them, scrambling crabwise into the lean-to.

Again Quincannon held his fire. Behind him he could hear the widow Draycott screaming, but he didn't turn his head. For a couple of seconds he lost sight of Corby in the shadows alongside the buckboard; he was almost to the fence when the little bookkeeper reappeared, upright now in an awkward stance.

In his hands was a double-barreled shotgun.

An instant before he cut loose with the first barrel, Quincannon threw himself sideways to the hard ground. The load of buckshot blew away part of one fence rail and peppered the yard harmlessly. Still on his belly, Quincannon steadied the Navy and fired twice. Both reports were lost in a second boom from the shotgun, but one of his bullets had struck Corby in the upper body, the impact jerking the shotgun's long barrel skyward so that the pellets came hailing down forty yards from where he lay.

Corby collapsed to his knees, let go of the shotgun, and toppled over on his back. The horses were half mad with terror now, neighing and snorting and pawing the ground, but they shied away from Corby's twitching form. As Quincannon scrambled to his feet, he saw Ella Draycott in a rigid stance halfway across the yard behind him. Screaming words now in a shrill voice, “You killed him! Murderer, murderer!”

That he is, madam. Twice a murderer.

He went ahead to the fence, leaned against it for a few seconds to steady himself before he climbed through. Corby lay still on the straw- and manure-spattered earth, the shotgun near one outflung arm, his thin, long-nosed features twisted into a grimace of pain. There was a spreading stain of blood on the front of his linsey-woolsey shirt, but the bullet wound was above the left nipple and the slug seemed not to have severed a major artery. Not only still alive, but apparently in no imminent danger of succumbing to his wound.

Quincannon picked up the shotgun and tossed it aside, even though it was no longer a threat. Then he bent and ran his free hand over Corby's clothing to satisfy himself that the felon carried no hideout weapon. Only then did he holster his Navy. Corby stared up at him with pain-dulled eyes that had lost none of their disbelief.

“How … damn you, how did you find me?”

“With less effort than you might suppose. It was blind luck you got away from me in the city, and no man escapes John Quincannon twice, no matter where he goes to hide.”

The widow Draycott was no longer shrieking. She approached warily, her hand fisted at her mouth, and stopped near the fence to peer in at Corby. “Elias?” she said.

Quincannon said, “Not dead, Mrs. Draycott, as you can plainly see.”

“Elias?” she said again, but Corby turned his head away and closed his eyes. Her gaze shifted to Quincannon. “How do you know my name? Who are you?”

“John Quincannon. Detective from San Francisco.”

“Detective? But … I don't … Why did you shoot Elias?”

“My investigations led me to believe he could be found here and I came to take him into custody. He is wanted for theft and two murders in San Francisco.”

Shock caused her to gasp, then to wag her head brokenly. “Elias Corby, a murderer? It can't be. He … he and I…”