Soldier of Discontent

By Richard Quarry

When the mayor of a turn-of-the-century logging town investigates a lumberyard arson believed set by a labor agitator, she risks becoming a target herself as she uncovers a desperate scheme of seduction, revenge, and murder. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Quarry
• Release date: Mar 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215472972

Book preview

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Soldier Of Discontent

Richard Quarry

Copyright © 2022 by Richard Quarry

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

Soldier of Discontent

About the Author

Blue Dread

Soldier of Discontent

By the time I jounced out to Charles Farnham’s marshalling yard on Icicle Creek, fearing for the surrey’s axles at each pothole, the fire had died down to ash and embers.

Slump-shouldered, smoke-blackened men patrolled the yard with shovels and water buckets. At intervals I heard a hisssst! and a plume of steam spurted up as another hotspot was doused. A donkey engine pumped water up from the creek. The engine shook and rattled, rickity-rickity-clack like a man with bad lungs. The air reeked of burned wood, with an undercurrent of pitch.

I saw no sign of the dead man.

Charles Farnham had built a showy two story house replete with pink and blue fishscale siding and gingerbread trim on a small rise above Icicle Creek. The front faced not toward the water and the lush green woods beyond, but the bare dirt lumber yard, so that Farnham could sit on the porch of an evening and watch his wealth accumulate log by log.

Now he stood hang-dog at the end of the verandah, clad in a quilted burgundy smoking jacket, whiskey glass in hand as he conferred with Sheriff McKinnon.

Hopping down from the surrey I hitched Winsome to a post, bracing myself for what I expected to be a rancorous exchange. Back before the 19th Amendment, not too many women served as mayor. And not too many mayors of either sex anywhere in the Olympic Peninsula dared stand up to the timbermen. During the election Farnham had repeatedly stated that I was trying to ride my husband’s coattails into office, when what was needed was a hard-headed man who understood business. Having placed the flowers on Bill’s grave only five months before, I had not yet forgiven him, nor made any plans to.

I hadn’t driven out to offer sympathy, but to keep Charles Farnham from whipping the town into a lather against labor organizers, which could all too easily become a club-swinging free-for-all against any logger who dared complain when he had to eat beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Doc Mayhew stood bent over a soot-stained man in a rocking chair, methodically stitching up a long, ugly gash in his forearm. He and the sheriff had ridden out on horseback when news first came in of