That was small consolation. For all Frank knew, some of the men were dead, and the stamp mill was destroyed. If only he’d been a little quicker getting here….
He reined in and swung down from the saddle while Stormy was still coming to a halt. He ran over to the nearest man and helped the miner to his feet.
“Where’s Claiborne?” Frank asked, raising his voice so he could be heard over the loud crackling of flames from the inferno inside the mill.
The miner looked stunned. Blood leaked from his nose. He shook his head and said, “Dunno. I ain’t seen him.”
The man was still shaky, but Frank left him there anyway and hurried over to the next fallen miner. He wasn’t moving, and as Frank drew closer, he saw why. A jagged piece of wood had been blown all the way through the poor bastard by the blast. The ends of the deadly debris protruded from the front and back of his torso.
The next man was still alive, though. Frank helped him up, and saw that he didn’t seem to be seriously hurt.
“Have you seen Garrett Claiborne?”
The miner waved toward the mill. “He was over that way, the last I saw of him.” The man’s eyes widened in realization. “Oh, hell! I think he ran inside the mill!”
If Claiborne had been in the mill when the dynamite went off, he was dead. No one could have survived such a terrible explosion. The grim possibility crossed Frank’s mind that they might not even find enough left of Claiborne to give a proper burial.
“You two,” he called to the men he had already assisted. “Check on the others. Help the ones you can.”
While they were doing that, Frank headed for the blazing mill. The heat from the fire was so bad he had to throw his arm up to shield his face. He lowered his head and kept going. He thought he had spotted something on the ground, not far from the mill….
“Garrett!” he shouted as he recognized the shape as a body. With waves of heat washing out and battering him like physical blows, he fought his way forward until he reached the side of a man lying facedown on the ground. The man’s clothes were smoldering in places. Frank slapped out those hot spots and then grasped the man’s shoulders to roll him over. As he did so, the man let out a groan of pain. His left arm flopped loosely, and Frank saw the white of a broken bone sticking out through bloody flesh.
Claiborne was alive, though. Mighty scorched around the edges, and he had a broken arm at the very least, but he was still breathing. Frank guessed that Claiborne had been running away from the mill when the blast picked him up and threw him forward like a rag doll. He was lucky his insides weren’t pulverized.
The engineer surprised Frank by opening his eyes and peering up in a bleary, confused fashion. “Where…what…” Claiborne rasped. “M-Morgan…?”
“Take it easy,” Frank told him, leaning close so that Claiborne could hear him over the roar of the flames. Both of them were baking. They had to get farther away from the fire.
Several of the miners ran up, wincing and grimacing from the heat. Frank knew it was going to hurt Claiborne even worse, but he had no choice except to order, “Pick him up! We’ll carry him back to the barracks!”
A couple of men got Claiborne’s legs. Frank and the other miner took his shoulders. Frank tried to be careful of the broken arm, but there was only so much he could do. Claiborne moaned as the men lifted him and moaned again as they started to carry him off.
Frank was glad to see that some of the miners had gotten buckets and were using water from the creek to douse the roofs and walls of the other buildings. As green as everything was at this time of year, he wasn’t too worried about the fire getting out of control, but he didn’t want it spreading to the barracks and the storage buildings. He wasn’t certain where the blasting powder was kept, but he sure didn’t want any stray sparks getting close to it.
As they took Claiborne closer to the barracks, Frank spotted one of the supply wagons sitting there and said, “Hold on. Let’s go ahead and put him in the wagon instead. He’ll have to be taken to town to have that busted arm tended to, and we may have some other men who need medical attention.”
“There are some who need buryin’,” one of the grimfaced miners said.
Frank nodded. “I know, but Claude Langley can take care of that later.” He called one of the other men over and told him to fetch some blankets from the barracks and spread them in the back of the wagon.
As they were placing Claiborne in the wagon, he came to again long enough to say, “Frank?”
“I’m right here,” Frank told him.
“The…the mill…?”
“Don’t worry about that right now. We’ll tend to it. Just take it easy, Garrett. You’ve got a broken arm, and you may have some other injuries. We’ll be taking you to town in a few minutes.”
“The men…?”
“Anybody who needs help, we’ll see to it,” Frank assured him.
Claiborne’s eyes closed and a long sigh came from him, and for a second Frank thought the engineer had just died. But Claiborne’s chest still rose and fell. He had just passed out again.
Frank grabbed the arm of one of the miners who wasn’t hurt at all, just shaken up, and said, “You’re in charge. Gather up all the men who are injured badly enough to need a doctor and put them in the wagon. Then you and a couple of other men take the wagon and head for Buckskin. Make sure you’re armed, just in case you run into trouble along the way. Everybody else needs to stay here and keep that fire under control.”
The miner nodded. “What are you gonna do, Marshal?”
Frank’s eyes narrowed in anger. “I’m going to find out who’s responsible for this.”
As Frank, Stormy, and Dog hurried back toward the scene of the gunfight at the creek, Frank wished he had asked the man he’d knocked out who had hired him and the other three to plant that dynamite, before walloping the son of a bitch. But at the time, he had figured it was more important to find out where the bomb had been hidden so he could still try to stop it from going off.
That hadn’t worked out, but Frank was willing to bet that he could still get the prisoner to talk. All he’d have to do was threaten to turn Dog loose on him.
As he approached the spot, letting his instincts guide him back to it, it occurred to him that the man might have regained consciousness and fled, in which case Frank probably would have to wait until morning to try tracking him.
The fella might be waiting to ambush him too, Frank thought, so he said in a low voice, “Dog. Find!”
Dog took off into the darkness. Frank knew that if the saboteur was hidden somewhere, waiting to bushwhack him, Dog would find him and spoil that plan. Frank reined in and waited for Dog to return.
He didn’t have to wait long. Dog came loping out of the shadows a few minutes later. He let out a whine, then turned, ran off a few feet, and stopped, looking back over his shoulder at his trail partners.
“Want me to follow you, eh?” Frank nudged Stormy’s flanks with his boot heels and sent the Appaloosa forward at a walk.
Frank followed Dog a couple of hundred yards to the creek. He hadn’t followed the stream all the way from the mine because of the way it twisted and looped around. Faster to cut across country. As Frank reached the creek, he saw the dark shape still leaning against the bank.
“Must’ve hit the fella harder than I thought for him to still be out cold,” he muttered to himself as he dismounted. Drawing his gun, he approached the saboteur with care.
Frank’s nerves prickled, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. His gut told him that something was wrong. Keeping the gun trained on the man, he stepped out into the shallow stream and kicked his foot.
“Wake up, mister.”
The man didn’t budge. His head hung forward on his chest, motionless.