Soldier of Discontent and Other Stories

By Richard Quarry

A scintillating, action-packed anthology of crime throughout history.

Soldier of Discontent

When the mayor of a turn-of-the-century logging town investigates an arson blamed on an IWW agitator, she risks becoming a target herself as she uncovers a desperate scheme of seduction, revenge, and murder. 

The Horns of Hathor

The Pharaoh Akhenaten has just decreed that in place of Hathor, Isis, and all the other traditional gods of Egypt, only one divinity shall now be worshipped — him. Accordingly he directs Chenzira the Scribe to Thebes, the holiest city of the empire, to cancel the largest religious festival of the year. A mass celebration where hundreds of thousands gather to seek Hathor's blessing on next year's harvest.

Akhenaten's directive hardly incites the priests and the people to worshipful acceptance. More like murderous rage. In fact even the gods are getting into the act, since the last man the Pharaoh sent to shut down the festival got himself murdered right in the Temple of Karnak — by none other than Hathor herself

Can Chenzira and his faithful baboon Mouse survive vengeful priests, a howling mob, and of course the wrath of Hathor?

The Blue Ibis

The Blue Ibis, created by the Egyptian god Thoth, promises heaven to whoever who can read the inscription within. Two government agents, one from the Justice Department and one from the Egyptian Council of Antiquities, endure some cross-cultural snarkiness while trying to track down the mysterious statue. But an old-money sybarite and a fast-talking tech wunderkind, bitter rivals equally desperate and equally ruthless, are also hot on the trail of the blue bird. The approaching clash promises to be — cosmic.

Angry Angel

In turn-of-the-century San Francisco, Donaldina Cameron earned the name "the Chinatown Angel" for her daring rescues of Chinese girls forced into prostitution. To the tongs and brothel owners, however, she became Fahn Quai — the White Devil. They placed a price on her head, and made several attempts to collect it with bullets and dynamite.

Now Donaldina journeys to Seattle's ill-famed Restricted District to rescue another girl. Here she must recruit the help of a hard-bitten labor organizer, for the brothel they mean to invade is guarded by the tongs, the police, and a kung-fu killer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Devray Publishing
• Release date: Apr 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224113392

Book preview

Also by Richard Quarry

a Nat Frayne mystery

The Dread Men and Other Cases of Nat Frayne

The Dread Men

And Make Not Dreams Your Master

Lord Under London And Otther Cases of Nat Frayne

Lord Under London

The Case of Dancing Kali

The French Medium

Perfidious Albion

Further Adventures of Odysseus

Odysseus and the Eye of Odin

Man Of Many Turnings

The Evolved

The Big Empty

Point Of No Return

The Outcasts

Holobrain

Grinder

The God Machine

The Evolved

Standalone

Beer Run

All You Ever Have To Do

Midnight Choir

Geneslide

Blue Dread

The Horns Of Hathor

Flameout

What Rough Beast

Absent From Felicity

The Homecoming of Lucian Wren

Mary's Hell

The Sound of Snowfall

The Fires of Beltane

Devolution Day

Beer Garden

The French Fries of Freedom

Soldier of Discontent

Clearance Sale

The Treasure of the Endless Scrub

Star Mole

Questing Song

Board Games

Miss Kittenses

String Theory

Tea Party

No Boobs, No Kardashians

The Blue Ibis

Soldier of Discontent and Other Stories

Soldier of Discontent and Other Stories

Richard Quarry

Copyright © 2024 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.

Cover art: steveheap

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Contents

Soldier of Discontent

The Horns of Hathor

The Blue Ibis

Angry Angel

About the Author

What Rough Beast

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 the fire, and more particularly, the dead man.

As I climbed the porch steps I nodded to Elsie Farnham, Charles’ daughter, who stood a little way off watching the fishhook needle Doc wielded loop in and out of the wounded man’s skin. She was too dazed to respond. As my sensible shoes clopped down the porch Farnham and the Sheriff looked up from their pow-wow.

Mayor, said McKinnon.

Jane, Farnham acknowledged sourly.

Terrible thing, Charles, I said. What happened here?

He struck the white-painted corner post with the bottom of his fist. Goddamn Wobbly sonuvabitch tried to burn me out. I’d like to take every one of those red bastards and—

But I never learned just what he’d like to do to them because just then he shivered, his bloodshot eyes rolled in his head, and he sagged against the post. A bull-necked, bull-shouldered, and generally bull-headed man, his already weather-beaten face flushed red as his velvet smoking jacket under a peppering of soot. He would have been up all night and most of the morning fighting the fire, and judging from the bottle of Old Overholt gasping its last on the porch railing, drinking ever since.

I’ll fill the mayor in, Mr. Farnham, offered McKinnon. He nodded a fleshy chin toward the marshalling yard. Sabotage, he pronounced. IWW, looks like.

I gave McKinnon a skeptical look. Well over six feet tall and built like a bear just settling in for a good long hibernation, the sheriff excelled at dealing with rambunctious loggers on a Saturday night, but struck me as rather less well suited to deduction.

What evidence have we got?

Take a look.

He stepped over to a folding card table. A fire-blackened hatchet, its wooden handle burned away, lay next to a similarly blackened peavey with a couple of feet of charred pole still remaining. A misshapen lump of bronze I took to be the remains of a lamp base held down a piece of red cardboard.

Sheriff McKinnon tilted the melted lamp and handed me the card in one sausage-fingered hand. Found this in the dead man’s wallet.

I read the card, embarrassed at having to hold it well away from my eyes.

Slanting across the top of the red cardboard in big bold letters I read Industrial Workers of the World. And below in smaller print: An Injury To One Is An Injury To All. Three stars crossed the center in a shallow pyramid, highlighting the words Education, Organization, Emancipation.

I handed back the card. There must be hundreds of these floating around the woods.

Not near so many of these, though. McKinnon handed me a small notebook. I glanced through the crinkled pages and saw pre-printed columns filled with dates leading month by month to November, 1909. Next to each was a sum, anywhere from twenty-five cents up to two dollars.

His dues book, said McKinnon.

Then he hasn’t paid up for eleven months, I pointed out. Hardly a very active member.

If Kaylin — that’s the name in the dues book, Jeff Kaylin, though he was hired on as Jim Morrow — was planning sabotage all along, he’d likely stay clear of the union halls or Wobbly organizers.

But if he didn’t want to be pegged for a Wobbly, why carry this around with him?

The sheriff shrugged shoulders thick as a cask of cider. I figure that last night he meant to burn out the yard and skedaddle. Probably thought the red card and the dues book might get him help from other Wobblies while he tried to put distance between himself and the fire.

I stared out at the yard while I chewed this over.

These days the Wobblies are little more than a memory, but back before the Great War the IWW occupied the same place in the dark closet of the nation’s fears once held by anarchists, with their imagined black beards and sparkling bombs. Though unlike the anarchists they had no interest in shooting presidents, the Wobblies had long been urging loggers, sawyers, harvest workers, and the whole vast itinerant army whose labor built the West to band together in the One Big Union.

Which to the timbermen was far worse than assassinating Garfield and McKinley together.

I’d expected Charles Farnham to blame his losses on the IWW. It made it a lot easier to answer any demand from the loggers to be treated at least as well as a mule with the charge of Red. But I had not expected so much evidence to back him up.

At the far end of the yard, four blunt-topped mounds of unpeeled logs stood intact, near on to thirty feet high and sixty or more wide at the base. Closer to, logs from what must have been the middle rank of mounds lay scattered and pointing every which-way. A thick layer of ash lodged in their bark, and several had been partially burned.

But the piles nearest the house had been reduced to a sea of ash with here and there a blackened, jagged stump poking out. A few pieces still smoldered, crackling occasionally as yellow flames sprang briefly to life then flickered out again.

I wouldn’t have thought it all that easy to set fire to a log pile, I said. Let alone four.

Not usually, no, McKinnon acknowledged. But if they’re not wetted down, heat can build up in the center. It’s been known for them to catch fire all by themselves. With the warm weather we’ve been having, it wouldn’t of took much to set them off.

I looked at the donkey engine still trying to shake loose its bolts. Why weren’t these piles wetted down?

Usually no need, this time of year. The rains should start soon. Mr. Farnham wanted to log off his holdings and get the timber in before the ground got too muddy for the horses to haul it. Get the logs all piled nice and neat, then lay off the crew till the spring melt comes and it’s time to put the wood in the water.

And this ... Jeff Kaylin? How did he come to end up dead?

McKinnon nodded toward the space behind me. Turning, I saw Doc Mayhew finish the last stitch in the sitting man’s forearm, then knot and snip the thread and step back.

That would be me, said the wounded man.

Mayor, said McKinnon, this is Floyd Alvin, camp foreman. Floyd, this is our mayor over to Elawah, Jane Clearwater.

The wounded man bowed his head politely. Miss Clearwater.

It was still Mrs. but I let it go. I was already beginning to feel like an old spinster lady at thirty-six, while I waited for the passing days to ebb enough of the hurt off to where I could putter about the hardware store I’d run with Bill and never suddenly clutch myself in grief and fear.

Floyd caught Kaylin lighting the fuses, McKinnon explained. They fought. Kaylin ripped Floyd’s arm open with that peavey you see on the table there. Then Floyd got in a couple of licks with the blunt end of that hatchet.

Didn’t mean to kill him, Floyd Alvin explained. He was a big man, square-shouldered and square-faced, with the well-muscled neck one would expect of a logger, and especially a camp foreman. Only I didn’t want to get stuck again, either. Then the far pile went up and it started looking way too much like hell, so I high-tailed it away from the fire. Guess I walloped him harder than I meant to.

Hah! roared Charles Farnham, bearing down on us, whiskey in hand. Only thing Floyd did wrong was not using the sharp end to start with. Come on, Lyle, he said to the sheriff, this man deserves a reward, not any foostering from Jane just ‘cause she’s got a soft spot for every anarchist and incendiary that comes down the pike.

Nobody’s said anything about foostering, Mr. Farnham, McKinnon returned patiently. It’s my job, me and the mayor’s here, to get to the bottom of things.

My opinion of the Sheriff rose.

He turned to me. The first pile fair exploded. Guess the kerosene had longer to soak in. The other three started flaming while Floyd and Kaylin fought. Floyd carried him out, hot as it was. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been nothing left of Kaylin or his dues book.

Must have been hard work, with that arm, I observed. To me the wound looked terrible, a good eight inches of skin puckered up like a kicked rug. An ugly line of raw flesh, visible even through the red disinfectant Doc had slathered over the cut, still protruded from the stitches. And dangerous, with the fires breaking out. Why take the risk, for a dead man?

I didn’t know he was dead, said Alvin. Couldn’t just leave him there.

I heard the first pile go up, Charles Farnham said, with a dazed look like he was speaking more to last night than to us. Then Floyd started clanging away on the fire bell. I threw on whatever came to hand and ran out just in time to see another pile explode. Shot flaming chunks of wood all to hell and gone. Soon as some of the men got out of the bunkhouse, Floyd ran straight as a plumb line back into the teeth of the fire, wounded arm and all. It was him collapsed the middle piles so’s to keep them from going up the same way. Just called out follow me! and damn if the men didn’t follow.

He gave Alvin an admiring look. Not many had ever seen such from Charles Farnham.

I noticed that Elsie too, though she stood a little apart where no one would notice her, could hardly take her eyes off the foreman.

A mix of sweat and soot had wrapped itself around his face. Some attempt had been made to wipe the mixture off with a towel, but that only swirled it into a deep gray plaster. I made out strong features and a prominent nose that had once, or maybe more than once, been broken and set back not quite straight.

He’d never uttered a sound as Doc ran the needle through his flesh. But he was a logger, and they’re a tough breed. He sat in his undershirt, revealing thick arms with muscles stark from lack of extra flesh. He still wore a logger’s tin pants. Layers of blood and ash had cemented themselves over the rough fabric until his lower body looked like it had been tarred and feathered.

How did you chance to come upon this Kaylin? I asked.

The last couple of nights, Alvin replied, I’ve been walking the yard from time to time. There have been, oh, incidents, you could call ‘em. Sand in the pump filter when we rigged up the donkey engine. A slash fire that got out of hand, so we had to spend a whole day getting it under control instead of doing our work. A choker chain snapping that had either worn more than it should have or maybe been filed partway through. That kind of thing can kill a man. So once, twice a night I wandered around. Didn’t really expect to find anything, tell the truth. But I toted the hatchet just in case.

I see.

Farnham took a step toward me, reeling a little. He put a hand on the table to steady himself. What’s all this about, Jane?

You know how it is with these Wobbly scares, Charles. All panic and Vigilance Committees. Let’s get beyond rumors before we start waving pick handles around.

I turned toward the sheriff. This, ah, Kaylin, or Morrow or whoever. Where is he now?

In the icehouse. Me and Doc were just gonna have a look at him.

Let’s go, then.

McKinnon raised his eyebrows, ironing a few wrinkles of fat out of his jowls. You sure you want to see this?

I want it more than I want someone asking if I even bothered to view the body.

As I started to follow him something on the table caught my eye. A lumpy mass of tarnished silver about the size of a walnut. I picked it up and turned it in my fingers.

What’s this? Part of a fire bomb?

Don’t know, said McKinnon. Floyd showed me where he caught Kaylin. I got a couple of the boys to sift around with rakes and pitchforks, and we kicked this up.

I licked my finger and wiped off a bit of soot. Then tried to scratch the metal with my thumbnail. Looks like real silver.

Could be, said the sheriff. I don’t know much about bombs and incendiaries and whatnot. Never had to, before this.

I put the puddled bit of silver back down. Doubt it matters.

But as we set off toward the icehouse I wondered why an itinerant logger would carry around an object with that much silver in it, instead of converting it into whiskey first chance he got.

Looking back, I can’t pinpoint exactly what nagged me most. Partly the fact that a man taking the chance of getting caught in an act of arson would carry his IWW dues book on him. Wobblies generally made no secret of their membership; indeed, they tried to stir up the men to demand better conditions from the moment they arrived in the bunkhouse. But they steadfastly denied employing sabotage.

And why had