It was dusk when he reached Buckskin. His empty belly reminded him that he hadn’t eaten anything since the middle of the day, and he was tempted to stop at the café and let Lauren, Ginnie, and Becky feed him a good supper.
But he wanted to check on Claiborne and the other injured miners, so he headed for Dr. Garland’s house instead.
Frank reined in and said, “Hell,” as he recognized the wagon parked in front of the doctor’s place. It belonged to Claude Langley. As he watched, Langley and Roy, the undertaker’s assistant, emerged from the house carrying a blanket-wrapped figure. Frank had ridden Goldy to Virginia City, since Stormy had had the hard run the night before. Now he walked the horse over to the wagon and asked, “Who are you picking up, Claude?”
“Oh, howdy, Marshal,” Langley greeted him. As they placed the body in the back of the wagon, the undertaker went on. “This is that poor fella who had the fractured skull. Lambert, his name was. Dr. Garland said he passed away a little while ago without ever regaining consciousness.”
That was one more mark against the man or men responsible for last night’s carnage, Frank thought. One more score to settle.
He dismounted and tied Goldy at the hitch rail while the wagon rattled off toward Langley’s place. When Frank went inside, he found Dr. Garland at a desk in the front room, writing out some notes.
“I talked to Claude Langley outside,” Frank said as the physician glanced up from his work.
Garland nodded. “Yes, I didn’t hold out much hope that poor fellow would pull through, and unfortunately, I was right. He never woke up.”
“How are the rest of your patients doing?”
“As well as can be expected.” The doctor smiled. “In fact, they have some visitors at the moment, if you want to go in and see for yourself.”
“Thanks,” Frank said. “I’ll do that.”
He opened the door to the other room, and stepped in to find Diana Woodford sitting in a ladder-back chair beside Garrett Claiborne’s bed, spooning soup into his mouth from a bowl she held in her other hand. Ginnie Carlson was feeding one of the other patients, the miner with the broken leg, which by now Dr. Garland had enclosed in a plaster cast as he had done with Claiborne’s busted arm. Frank took off his hat and nodded to the two women.
“Hello, Marshal,” Claiborne said after he swallowed the mouthful of soup. “Were you able to get in touch with Mr. Browning?”
Frank was glad to see Diana taking care of Claiborne. That boded well. He nodded and said, “We exchanged several telegrams, and the upshot is, new equipment for the stamp mill will be on its way in a day or two.”
“Excellent! By the time it gets here, we’ll have the building rebuilt and waiting for it. I need to get back out to the mine tomorrow to see about starting work—”
“Dr. Garland said you weren’t going anywhere for at least a week, Garrett,” Diana put in. “Remember, he’s not sure you don’t have some internal injuries.”
“I’m fine, confound it,” Claiborne declared. “This arm of mine hurts, but it’s nothing I can’t put up with.”
Frank pointed his Stetson at the mining engineer and said, “You’d better do what the doctor says. It won’t do any good for you to go back out there and collapse. There’s bound to be somebody on the crew you can trust to supervise the work on the new mill.”
Claiborne frowned and looked like he wanted to argue the matter, but then he glanced at Diana and saw the stern expression on her face. He said, “I suppose Ernest Truman could handle the job. He’s been an assistant superintendent at other mines before.”
“There you go,” Frank said. “I’ll ride out there tomorrow and tell him what’s going on, so he can get started.”
Diana said, “All right, now that that’s settled, no more business talk until Garrett’s finished this soup. It’s getting cold.”
Frank smiled and pulled up a chair to sit down. “Go right ahead,” he told her.
Diana finished feeding the soup to Claiborne, and then he and Frank talked for several minutes about what would need to be done at the Crown Royal to get the mine operating again as soon as possible. Claiborne agreed with the idea that they should get the stamp mill rebuilt right away, but once that was done, if the new equipment hadn’t arrived yet, the men could start stockpiling raw ore to be put through the pulverization and amalgamation process as soon as the mill was running.
Diana looked at Frank and said, “By the way, Marshal, I find it a little odd that you never mentioned you own a considerable interest in the Crown Royal.”
Frank’s eyes narrowed. He looked at Claiborne, who shrugged his right shoulder. The left one wouldn’t move, strapped down the way it was.
“I’m sorry, Marshal. That fact slipped out earlier when Miss Woodford and I were talking.”
She turned her gaze back to him. “I thought you said you were going to call me Diana.”
“Of course…Diana. My apologies to you too.”
Frank said, “Don’t worry about it where I’m concerned. My connection with the mine isn’t a big secret or anything like that. I just happen to have an interest in the Browning Mining Syndicate.”
“That makes you and my father competitors.”
“Not really. I reckon there’s enough silver in these hills to go around.”
“Not everyone feels that way,” Claiborne said. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had all that trouble at the mine. Someone’s trying to put us out of business, Frank.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Frank agreed with a nod, thinking about Hamish Munro and Gunther Hammersmith. “I’ve got an idea who it is, too.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Conrad’s sending a passel of men to serve as guards. Once they get here, whoever was responsible for that blast will have a hard time getting up to any more mischief.”
“What about the things they’ve already done?” Claiborne asked. “What about the men who died?”
“There’ll be a day of reckoning,” Frank said. “You can count on that.”
Chapter 20
Claude Langley had propped up the corpses of the four saboteurs in their coffins out in front of the undertaking parlor so that the citizens of Buckskin could come by and take a look at them. That was an accepted, if grisly, practice in frontier towns. Frank had never cared much for the custom, but in this case he put the word out that if anybody recognized the dead men, he wanted to know about it. He still hoped to find something that would tie the men to Hamish Munro, Gunther Hammersmith, or both.
But while a few people recalled seeing the men drinking in some of the saloons, nobody really knew them or had witnessed them talking to Hammersmith or Munro. No one who would admit it anyway.
Frank went up to the hotel to see Munro. He wasn’t sure what he would say to the mining magnate, but he wanted Munro to know that he wouldn’t rest until he got to the bottom of the explosion that had destroyed the stamp mill at the Crown Royal.
Munro’s secretary, Nathan Evers, opened the door of the suite to Frank’s knock. “Hello, Marshal,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“I want to talk to your boss,” Frank replied. “Is he here?”
“As a matter of fact, he’s not. He and Mrs. Munro have taken a drive out to the Alhambra. Mrs. Munro hadn’t seen the mine yet, and she wanted to.”
Frank nodded. “All right. Say, you haven’t gone by Langley’s undertaking parlor and had a look at the bodies of those four men who blew up the Crown Royal’s stamp mill, have you?”
Evers blanched and said, “Good Lord, no. Why would I want to do a thing like that?”