Hell Town

Chapter 24

It was well after nightfall before Frank got back to Buckskin. He rode straight to the office and tied Goldy at the hitch rail outside. When he came in, he found Clint Farnum behind the desk, leaning back in the chair with his booted feet propped on top of the desk.

Clint sat up and said, “Sorry, Frank. Didn’t mean for you to catch me loafing.”

Frank waved a hand and said, “Don’t worry about it. Everything all right here in town?”

“Yeah. I did the rounds a while ago, then came back here and sent Jack to get himself some supper. We heard about what happened out at the Lucky Lizard. One of the townspeople came by and said two bodies had been brought in, claimed they were men who’d been killed in a cave-in.”

Frank nodded. “That’s right.”

Clint stood up and came out from behind the desk so that Frank could sit down. “Better take it easy for a while,” Clint advised. “You look like you’ve been rode hard and put away wet. I reckon digging out a collapsed mine tunnel must be pretty hard work.”

Thinking about what they had found in that tunnel, Frank nodded and said, “Yeah. Really hard work.”

“Why don’t I go over to the café and get the girls to fix up something for you to eat? I’ll bring it back here.”

With every muscle and bone in his body screaming their weariness, Frank settled down in the chair. He figured Clint’s offer had something to do with the deputy wanting to see Becky Humphries, but either way Frank appreciated it.

“That would be fine,” he told Clint. “You might take my horse down to Amos’s place too while you’re at it.”

Clint nodded. “Be glad to.” He hurried out of the office, leaving Frank there to lean back in the chair and close his eyes for a moment.

As tired as he was, his brain was racing. In his saddlebags was a piece of the broken timber he had slipped out of the mine shaft. The wood wasn’t just broken, however. It showed signs of some other sort of damage, as if something had eaten away at it, and when Frank had brought it close to his face to inspect it, he had caught a whiff of a vaguely familiar odor. It had taken him a few seconds to identify the reeking smell.

Sulfuric acid.

The impact of that realization had hit Frank almost like a physical blow. He didn’t know much about mining, but it seemed to him that the only logical way sulfuric acid could have gotten on that timber was if somebody put it there. The stuff was highly corrosive. A concentrated application of it could have weakened that support beam.

If the acid had been applied to several of the beams, that might have weakened the whole structure enough to bring part of the ceiling crashing down—which was exactly what had happened. If the theory forming in Frank’s mind was correct, then the death of those two miners hadn’t been a tragic accident after all.

It was murder.

He would check with Garrett Claiborne to be sure, but it seemed likely to him that sulfuric acid could be found pretty easily around a mine. The Lucky Lizard had a small assayer’s laboratory adjacent to the stamp mill, and such places were full of chemicals that the assayers used in their tests on the ore. For all Frank knew, the acid might be used in some other process too.

The details weren’t all that important. What mattered was that the cave-in had been caused deliberately, and when Frank asked himself who would benefit from such sabotage, his mind went right back to Hamish Munro and Gunther Hammersmith. With the Crown Royal pretty much shut down because its stamp mill had been destroyed, and now with work stopped at the Lucky Lizard because of the miners’ strike, that left the Alhambra as the only producing mine in the area of any significance.

Would Munro go that far to gain an advantage on his competitors? A normal businessman wouldn’t.

But who was to say that Munro was normal?

By the time Clint Farnum came back in carrying a tray full of food from the café, Frank had poured himself a cup of coffee and was standing in the doorway of the office drinking it. Clint said, “I thought you were going to take it easy.”

“Compared to what I was doing earlier today,” Frank said, “this is taking it easy.”

He stepped aside so that Clint could carry the tray into the office and set it on the desk. The food was covered with a clean cloth.

“Miss Stillman asked after you,” Clint said as he stepped back.

“Did she now?”

“That lady might be a little interested in you, Frank,” Clint said with a grin.

That was an intriguing possibility, except for Frank’s less-than-stellar history with women. Too many of them wound up dead because he was a famous gunfighter, and he wouldn’t wish that fate on Lauren Stillman. Anyway, he had plenty of his plate already, what with all the trouble that had cropped up since Hamish Munro came to Buckskin.

“Lauren’s a fine woman,” Frank said, keeping his voice expressionless.

“Used to be a madam, from what I hear. Of course, I never hold it against a woman what she had to do to get along in the world.”

“Neither do I. But I’m too tired tonight to think about things like that. I think I’ll eat this supper and then get some shut-eye. You can go home, Clint. I’ll stay here on the cot tonight.”

“You sure?”

Frank nodded. “I’m sure.”

Clint thumbed his hat back. “All right. Maybe I’ll mosey on back over to the café. They were getting ready to close down for the night, and Miss Becky might need somebody to walk her home.”

“You do that,” Frank said with a smile.

Clint left the office, and Frank sat down behind the desk with his cup of coffee. He took the cloth off the tray, found a platter full of steak, potatoes, gravy, and biscuits. Simple fare, but mighty good.

At least, it would have been if he’d been able to pay any attention to what he was eating. Instead, he took the chunk of wood from his pocket and placed it on the desk where he could see it. The acid wasn’t the only thing that had been put on it.

To Frank’s eyes, it was also stained with the blood of two innocent, murdered men.

The next morning, Frank told Catamount Jack he was going to be gone for a while, then fetched Stormy from the stable and rode out to the Alhambra.

Earlier in the morning, he had stopped by Dr. Garland’s house to talk to Garrett Claiborne, and the engineer had confirmed Frank’s suspicion that quantities of sulfuric acid could be found around most mines. He also agreed that it was corrosive enough to eat deeply into a wooden beam such as the shoring timbers, especially if it was applied in a highly concentrated form.

“I heard about what happened at the Lucky Lizard,” Claiborne had said. “Diana was here last night and told me all about it. She’s very upset, and she says that her father is too.”

“I’m not surprised,” Frank had replied. “Tip Woodford’s a good man, and despite what those no-good Fowler brothers are claiming, he cares about the men who work for him. Mining is dangerous work and everybody knows it, but I don’t think Tip would take reckless chances with anybody’s life.”

“You think that cave-in was caused deliberately?”

“That makes the most sense to me,” Frank had said. “Not only did it cause physical damage to the mine that will have to be repaired, but it made Tip look bad and bolstered all the troublemaking talk that the Fowlers had been doing. After the cave-in, all Red Mike had to do was point at Tip and yell that it was all his fault, and the rest of the men went along with that strike.”

“Which stopped work completely at the mine.”

Frank had shrugged. “Tip’s foremen are still doing what they can, I reckon, but they won’t be able to accomplish much without some help. And that’s going to be hard to come by as long as the rest of the crew is on strike and claiming the Lucky Lizard is such a dangerous place to work.”

“A diabolical scheme, if ever I heard of one,” Claiborne had said. “You lay it at the feet of Munro and Hammersmith?”

“They benefit more than anybody else. And Red Mike and his brother used to work at the Alhambra.”

“They claim that they were fired and implied that they have a grudge against Hammersmith and Munro.”

Frank had smiled at that, but there wasn’t any genuine humor in the expression. “They could be lying to throw me off the trail. Could be they’re still working for Munro, and have been all along.”

“If history is any indication, you’ll have a devil of a time proving it.”

“I know,” Frank had said with a nod. “But that’s not going to stop me from poking my nose into it anyway.”

Now, as he approached the Alhambra, he didn’t forget his visit to the mine a couple of days earlier, when he had attempted to prod Munro and Hammersmith into doing something rash, like trying to bushwhack him. He kept his eyes open, figuring that they weren’t likely to have him ambushed this close to the Alhambra but unwilling to bet his life on it. Experience had taught him that it always paid to be careful.

He came within sight of the mine. No stagecoach was here today, so he supposed Munro was back in Buckskin. That was all right. Hammersmith was big and brutal, but he wasn’t as smart as Munro. It would be easier to get him off balance and maybe get him to say something that he shouldn’t.

A man stood on the porch of the office building with a rifle cradled in his left arm. Frank pegged the man as a sentry, and sure enough, the hombre went inside the office a second later, no doubt to let Hammersmith know that a rider was coming.

By the time Frank drew rein in front of the building, Hammersmith was stepping out onto the porch, an unfriendly frown of recognition on his face. “You’re getting to be a regular visitor out here, Morgan,” he said, “but not a welcome one. What the hell do you want today?”

Frank leaned forward in the saddle. “I reckon you heard about what happened yesterday over at the Lucky Lizard?”

Hammersmith gave a harsh laugh. “Yeah. It seems like you’re always bringing bad news for somebody else when you come out here.”

“You have to ask yourself why I think of you every time something bad happens at one of the other mines,” Frank said.

Hammersmith glared at him. “It’s because you’ve got it in for us,” he said. “You’ve got to blame somebody, so you try to make it look like me and Mr. Munro are responsible for everybody else’s problems.”

“The Crown Royal and the Lucky Lizard are both shut down right now,” Frank pointed out. “The Alhambra is the only big mine that’s producing any ore.”

Hammersmith sneered and waved that off. “Coincidence. It’s not our fault the Lucky Lizard ain’t so lucky after all, and we didn’t have anything to do with hiring those men to blow up the Crown Royal.”

“One of these days I’ll prove otherwise.”

His face flushing with anger, Hammersmith demanded, “Is that a threat?”

“No, just a promise,” Frank replied. “Somewhere out there is the proof I need to tie you and Munro to what’s been going on around here, and I’m going to find it, Hammersmith. And when I do, both of you will wind up behind bars where you belong…or dancing at the end of a hang rope, since men were killed at both of those other mines. That makes it murder as far as I’m concerned, and I’ll bet a jury would go along with that verdict.”

Hammersmith’s big hands clenched into fists. “Get the hell off this property,” he said. “You got no legal authority out here, Morgan. You know it and I know it.” He turned to the guard and snatched the rifle out of his hands. “Gimme that gun!”

Frank tensed. If Hammersmith made to shoot him, he would have no choice but to draw. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want to be forced to kill Hammersmith now, not until he had uncovered the evidence he needed to bring Hamish Munro to justice too.

Hammersmith swung back around toward Frank, but he didn’t raise the rifle. Obviously struggling to control his anger, he said, “Are you leavin’?”

“I’m going,” Frank said, “but that won’t save you and your boss from what’s coming to you. It’s only a matter of time, Hammersmith.”

Frank turned Stormy, well aware that by showing his back to Hammersmith, he was providing a target. Hammersmith cursed in a low, furious voice, but he kept the rifle pointed toward the ground, Frank saw when he glanced back over his shoulder.

He didn’t think Hammersmith could take too much more prodding. The man’s temper was too hair trigger for that. And now Frank had put Hammersmith on notice, as he had done with Munro, that he wasn’t going to stop investigating until he had the evidence he needed against them.

Now it was just a matter of time.