“Well…I’ll be…damned.”
Frank doubted that. The men who were responsible for what had happened tonight were the ones who would be damned. In fact, his bullets had already sent some of them to hell.
But he wasn’t finished yet. Not by a long shot.
Chapter 19
“Hold it right there,” the guard said in a low, menacing voice from the trees. His tone made it clear that he had the rider approaching the Alhambra Mine covered, probably with a rifle.
But that tone changed right away as he continued. “Oh, sorry, Boss, I didn’t realize it was you. Didn’t know you’d ridden out earlier.”
“It’s all right,” Gunther Hammersmith said from the back of his horse. “Everything quiet around here?”
“Yeah,” the sentry answered. “Well, I guess so. I heard some shots in the distance a while back, and then what sounded like the biggest clap of thunder I ever heard. Couldn’t have been thunder, though. The sky’s clear tonight. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that somebody was doin’ some nighttime blastin’ at one of those other mines.”
“Maybe that’s what it was,” Hammersmith said. He lifted the reins and heeled his horse into motion. “Stay alert.”
“You can damn sure count on it,” the sentry promised as Hammersmith rode past, heading for the stamp mill and the office.
When Hammersmith reached the office, he dismounted and tied his mount to a hitching post. He would unsaddle and tend to the horse later. Right now, he needed a drink.
He went into the office and lit the lamp on his desk. A bottle and a glass were inside one of the drawers. Hammersmith opened the drawer, looked into it for a moment, and then lifted out the bottle, leaving the glass where it was. Sometimes a man didn’t want to bother with niceties, and this was one of those occasions.
He lifted the bottle to his mouth, tilted his head back, and swallowed a long, healthy slug of the whiskey. It burned all the way down his throat, a cleansing, purifying fieriness, and then kindled a warm glow in his belly. As he lowered the bottle and sank into the chair behind the desk, that warmth began to spread through his body, counteracting the chill of the blood that ran through his veins.
In his life, Gunther Hammersmith had killed four men with his fists, and he had done for another one with an ax handle, crushing the gent’s skull with one blow. All of those deaths had occurred during fights. Maybe not fair fights, mind you, since Hammersmith knew he was bigger and stronger than most men he would ever encounter. But at least the men he’d been battling with had had a chance to strike a blow in return. Because of that, he had never lost a minute’s sleep over what happened to those men.
Tonight was different. That sorry son of a bitch tonight was in too bad a shape to fight back. He’d been mauled by Morgan’s wolf, or whatever it was, and the marshal had also clouted him over the head with a six-gun. Perry was hurt, and he thought that Hammersmith had come to help him.
It hadn’t taken him long to figure out otherwise. Then he had begged and whimpered and pleaded for his life.
Hammersmith knocked back another drink of whiskey, then set the bottle on the desk and reached for a leather sheath on his belt, just behind his right hip. He pulled out the heavy, long-bladed knife and laid it on the desk next to the whiskey bottle. The blade was clean; Hammersmith had used Perry’s shirt to wipe off all the blood. It glittered in the lamplight, cold and hard and deadly-looking.
Tonight was the first time Hammersmith had ever killed anyone with a knife, the first time he had killed somebody in cold blood, without the heat of combat to mitigate the violence. But Perry had to die. That bastard Morgan had stuck his nose in and knew that the four men had been hired to blow up the stamp mill at the Crown Royal. But Morgan didn’t know who had hired them; Hammersmith had made certain of that before he cut Perry’s throat.
It would have been a lot simpler if Morgan had gone ahead and killed all four of the saboteurs. The fact that he had left Perry alive told Hammersmith that Morgan intended to come back and ask the man more questions, after failing to prevent the explosion. Hammersmith couldn’t allow that.
He had thought about bringing Perry back to the Alhambra with him. But if he had done that, some of the miners might have seen him, and as chewed up as Perry was, they would have remembered. Not only that, but Morgan had gotten a look at Perry and might go around describing him. Somebody could have recalled seeing Hammersmith helping an injured man who fit that description.
Hammersmith had been careful not to meet with Perry and the other three hired gunmen where anybody could see them. There was nothing to connect him to the four men. With Perry dead, there was nobody to testify, no evidence that Hammersmith had anything in the world to do with the blast at the Crown Royal. Once Hammersmith had figured that out, there was no real question about what he had to do.
Other than the fact that he had never before gotten his arm around a man’s neck, jerked his head up, and pulled a knife across his throat, cutting deep so that the blood shot out like a black fountain in the shadows.
Hammersmith took another drink to steady his nerves. Munro wanted production slowed down at the other mines, by whatever means necessary. He didn’t care about the details, just the results.
Well, tonight’s action would bring production at the Crown Royal to a grinding halt. Without the stamp mill, they couldn’t process the ore, and there was no telling how many men had been killed in the explosion. They could still ship out the raw ore, but that was a lot slower and less lucrative.
Now if something could happen to cause problems for the Lucky Lizard too, Munro would be happy. Or as happy as he ever got, Hammersmith amended. The man was driven, filled with a ruthless bitterness. Hammersmith wondered how much of that came from being married to a woman like Mrs. Munro, a beautiful woman so much younger than him, who probably wasn’t satisfied by him and would therefore turn elsewhere for her pleasure….
To a man like Gunther Hammersmith.
A smile spread across Hammersmith’s rugged features. He took another long pull on the bottle, but the attack of nerves he had experienced earlier had been eased by thoughts of Jessica Munro. She would be enough to make a man forget anything he had done in the past….
Even cold-blooded murder.
All Hammersmith had to do was bide his time.
As Frank had told Garrett Claiborne he would do, he rode to Virginia City the next day and sent a telegram to Conrad to let him know what had happened. He wired his own lawyers in Denver and San Francisco too, to let them know that he was throwing his considerable financial resources behind the Crown Royal Mine near Buckskin, Nevada. Some minor sabotage was one thing; this attack on the mine was an act of war as far as Frank was concerned. Hammersmith and Munro had made this personal.
Frank stayed in Virginia City for several hours, burning up the telegraph wires. When he started back to Buckskin that afternoon, he brought with him his son’s assurances that new equipment for the stamp mill would be on its way to the Crown Royal as soon as Conrad could arrange to have it freighted out there. He would send some professional armed guards to beef up the mine’s security too.
In the meantime, Frank would see about having the mill rebuilt, so that it would be ready when the new equipment arrived. Conrad had considered having the men who were all right continue to mine the raw ore, but in the end he had decided it would be better for them to devote their efforts to repairing and rebuilding the mill.
Frank was torn between wanting to help out at the mine and taking care of his duties as the marshal of Buckskin. He had promised Tip Woodford and the other citizens that he would enforce the law, and he couldn’t do that if he was out at the Crown Royal all the time. He couldn’t dump all the responsibility for law and order in the settlement on Catamount Jack and Clint Farnum. He would talk to Claiborne and get his advice on which of the men might be able to handle the job of temporary superintendent.