The Bags of Tricks Affair

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Behind the long, brass-trimmed bar in McFinn’s Gold Nugget Saloon and Gaming Parlor, Quincannon drew two more draughts from the lager spigot, sliced off the heads with the wooden paddle, and slid the glasses down the bar’s polished surface. The Cornish hardrock miner who caught them flipped him a two-bit piece in return.

“Keep the nickel change for yourself, lad.”

Quincannon scowled as he rang up the twenty-cent sale. Lad. Bah! And a whole nickel for himself, finally, after six hours of hard work in a noisy, rowdy atmosphere. He debated leaving it in the register, but his Scot’s blood got the best of that; he pocketed the coin. The lot of a bartender was neither an easy nor a profitable one, a fact he hadn’t fully realized until the past two days. Nor was it a proper undertaking for a man who no longer drank strong waters of any kind.

He cursed himself for a rattlepate. Adopting the guise of a mixologist had been his blasted idea, not Amos McFinn’s. Not that serving beer and hard liquor to Grass Valley’s constant stream of Cornish miners known as Cousin Jacks and other denizens tempted him to resume his formerly bibulous ways, as the perfume of Golden State Brewery’s steam beer had during his undercover work in the Plague of Thieves Affair the previous January. Having successfully resisted that temptation made resisting this one easy enough. No, it was the hard work combined with the penny-pinching ways of the Gold Nugget’s customers, and the insults they hurled at him when he failed to serve them quickly enough, that made this undertaking difficult.

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