The Last Gunfighter: Hell Town

by William W. Johnstone

  Frank pressed on toward the mine as a thick cloud of black smoke billowed up from the stamp mill. Shattered boards and other bits of debris pelted down around Frank, Stormy, and Dog. The debris had been thrown high in the air by the explosion, but what had gone up was now coming down.

  A large piece of machinery crashed to the ground no more than ten yards to Frank’s left. He hoped none of the wreckage had his name on it, because he couldn’t see the stuff falling in order to avoid it.

  The fire inside the stamp mill lit up the night for a long way around. In its hellish glare, Frank saw that the miners were scattered around the clearing between the mill and the barracks like ninepins. Some of them were moving around, crawling and trying to struggle to their feet, while others just lay there motionless. But at least not all of them had been killed.

  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 t
wisted 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.

  Frank reached into his pocket and found the little tin box where he kept matches. One-handed, he shook one loose from the box and put the wooden shaft between his teeth while he tucked the box away again. Then he took the match in his left hand again and used his thumbnail to snap it into life.

  “Son of a bitch,” Frank said as the glare from the match revealed a huge crimson stain on the front of the man’s shirt. Blood appeared to have flooded down from his throat. That could mean only one thing.

  Frank pouched his iron and reached forward with his right hand to grasp the man’s hair. He jerked the man’s head back. In the light from the match, Frank saw the gaping wound in the saboteur’s throat. It looked like someone had taken a bowie knife or a similar weapon to him and nearly sliced his head clean off.

  Remembering what the man had said about the guards at the Crown Royal having their throats cut, Frank thought this hombre’s death was pretty appropriate. He still wished it hadn’t happened, though.

  The match burned down to Frank’s fingers. He shook it out and dropped it in the creek, then lowered the dead man’s head. The saboteur wouldn’t be answering any questions, and Frank was sure that was exactly why he had been killed. Whoever had hired the men to blow up the stamp mill had come along to check on them and found all of them dead except for this one.

  Frank straightened. There was no point in brooding over missed opportunities. He would come out here again in the morning and have a good look around, see if he could find anything that might lead him to the man who had hired the saboteurs.

  Gunther Hammersmith. That was the name uppermost in Frank’s mind. At the moment, though, he had nothing even faintly resembling proof that would tie Hammersmith to what had happened tonight.

  In the meantime, now that he was a lawman, it went against the grain for Frank to leave a bunch of corpses littering the countryside. He mounted up and went looking for the dead men’s horses, hoping that they hadn’t wandered off too far.

  He would take the bodies into Buckskin, he thought. Maybe someone there would recognize them.

  * * * *

  Frank never did find one of the mounts he was looking for, so one of the other horses had to carry double in the grim procession back to the settlement. It was almost midnight by the time Frank rode into Buckskin, leading the three horses with the dead men lashed facedown over their backs.

  The saloons were still lit up and doing some business. So were the doctor’s office and Claude Langley’s undertaking parlor. Frank wanted to check on Garrett Claiborne and the other injured men, but he figured it would be best to drop off the corpses with Langley first.

  He rode around back, where a lantern was burning. Langley was hammering coffins together in the work area behind the building. He looked up as Frank came around the corner leading the three horses with their grisly burdens.

  “More work, eh?” the little Virginian said.

  “That’s right. You’re going to wind up the richest man in town, Claude.”

  “Who are these?”

  “The men who blew up the stamp mill at the Crown Royal,” Frank answered.

  Langley nodded. “I heard about it, of course. That fellow Claiborne and several of the other men are over at the doctor’s office. The men who brought them in stopped by and told me that they would be returning later with the bodies of the miners who were killed in the explosion.”

  Frank jerked a thumb at the dead saboteurs. “Need a hand with these?”

  Langley reached for the reins and said, “No, I can handle them. Roy’s inside. I’ll call him to help me get them off their horses.”

  Frank handed over the reins and turned Stormy around. He rode at an angle across the street toward the doctor’s office. All the windows in the building glowed yellow with lamplight.

  “Stay,” Frank said to Dog as he dismounted and looped Stormy’s reins around the hitch rail. He stepped to the door and didn’t bother knocking, just opened it and went inside.

  He had met Dr. William Garland briefly when the man came to Buckskin and hung out his shingle, but hadn’t spent any great amount of time with the medico. Garland was young, probably no more than thirty, and slightly built with a shock of brown hair, a thin face, and intense brown eyes. When Frank came in, he was winding a bandage around the arm of a shirtless miner. The miner also had bandages around his torso.

  Several other men sat around the doctor’s front room, all of them sporting bandages and taped-on plasters in various places. Frank didn’t see Garrett Claiborne among them.

  “Hello, Doctor,” he said.

  Garland glanced up from his work. “Marshal Morgan,” he said. “I understand you were there when these men were injured.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The way they described that explosion, I’m surprised there weren’t more serious injuries…and more fatalities.”

  “Where’s Garrett Claiborne? How’s he doing?”

  Garland leaned his head toward the door into another room. “He’s in bed in there. I’ve given him medication to ease his pain and help him rest.”

  “How bad is he hurt?”

  “Well, if you saw him, you know his left arm is broken.”

  Frank nodded. “Yeah, that was pretty obvious.”

  “He has burns on the back of his neck from the explosion itself and in other places on his back because his clothes were set on fire. None of those are too bad, though. He has at least one cracked rib. I can’t be certain yet if there are any other internal injuries. I’m hopeful that there’s not.”

  “What about the others who were hurt bad?”

  “I have four beds for patients,” Garland said, “and they’re all full. I’m pretty sure that one of the men has a fractured skull. I don’t know if he’ll pull through. He hasn’t regained consciousness, and he may not. He’s the worst of the lot, though. One of the other men has a broken leg, the other one a dislocated shoulder and a possible broken ankle. They’ll be laid up for a while.”

  “I sure appreciate what you’re doing for them.”

  Garland gave Frank a thin smile. “That’s why I came to Buckskin, to help the sick and injured.”

  “Can I see Claiborne?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know if he’ll be awake enough to talk to you.”

  Frank went into the other room and stood beside the bed where Garrett Claiborne lay. A single lamp burned in here, and it was turned low. But there was enough light for Frank to see how pale and drawn the engineer’s face was.

  “Claiborne,” he said. “Garrett, can you hear me?”

  After a second, Claiborne’s eyes flickered open. He seemed to have trouble focusing on Frank, who remembered what Dr. Garland had said about giving him something for the pain. Laudanum, more than likely, which meant Claiborne’s brain would be pretty foggy.

  “F-Frank…” Claiborne whispered.

  “You’re at the doctor’s in Buckskin,” Frank said. “You’ll be well taken care of. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  “The…mine. The stamp mill…”

  “It’s gone,” Frank said, “but we’ll rebuild it, better than before.”

  “Mister…Browning…will be…upset…disappointed in…me…”

  “Not hardly. This wasn’t your fault, Garrett. If anybody’s to blame, it’s me for not taking the threat seriously enough.”

  But t
hat wasn’t really true either, Frank thought. The only people really to blame for such evil destruction were the ones who had carried it out—and the one who had paid to have it done.

  Hammersmith. The name rang in Frank’s head again.

  “Mister…Browning…” Claiborne began.

  “Let me worry about him,” Frank said. “I’ll ride to Virginia City and wire Conrad to let him know what happened.”

  Even in his drugged state, Claiborne frowned. “C-Conrad…?” he said.

  “Yeah. He’s my son. You didn’t know it, Garrett, but you’ve been working for me, too.”

  “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.