Fleharty’s Great Northern Saloon was an old building; old-timers on the Laramie Plains recalled it as having been a log fort, a trading post, and later a military stockade. There was the barroom, which was long, and two smaller rooms off the bar-room, one at each end of the bar itself. Johnny had used the northernmost of these rooms as a combination storeroom and office. The southerly room had a bed and dresser in it; sometimes Fleharty stayed in that room, and, being a bachelor, it was sufficient for his needs.
The cellar beneath the Great Northern had originally been excavated by troopers when the Indian troubles were at their height upon the plains, and several regiments had been billeted at old Fort Laramie. Neither Parker Travis nor Lew Morgan knew the size of that cellar.
When they came to the saloon, they paused outside, looking along the easterly wall. Large old fir logs lay close to the ground here. There was no cement foundation under Fleharty’s saloon, or for that matter under any other building in Laramie that had been erected at the same time as the saloon.
After studying this condition for a while, Parker said: “If there’s a hole under this building, it was dug long after the saloon was put up.”
Morgan said that this was so; he said other cellars under other old structures in Laramie had been dug the same way.
They moved carefully along that east wall. Behind Fleharty’s place was a refuse-laden alleyway running north and south, from the upper beginning of town to the southward limits. Morgan touched Parker’s arm and pointed over where a slanting, weathered door lay low against the ground.
“That’s it,” he murmured. “All we have to do is walk over, throw back that door, and…” Morgan looked up sardonically. “All hell will bust loose.”
A man appeared up the alley northward. He stepped out, stared, then stepped back beyond sight again. Parker saw the man and looked inquiringly around. Morgan, who had also seen him, said indifferently, his gaze going back to that cellar door: “Mike Pierson. There’s bound to be others. In fact, I rather imagine every man who backed you against those four cowboys will be around here somewhere.”
Parker nodded. “With guns,” he dryly said, also returning his gaze to the door. “Tell me something, Morgan. Just how good is Swindin with guns?”
“He’s good. There are faster men, but he’s accurate.” Morgan shrugged. “He’ll probably have a Winchester down there with him. We can hope he doesn’t have a shotgun. If he has, and if he gets a chance to use it, no two men alive could go into the cellar and come out walkin’ upright.”
Parker started onward. When Morgan came up even, he said: “If that damned door is our only way in, we’ve got a real problem.”
“There’s another way down. Inside the saloon behind the bar is a trapdoor. But it goes down a ladder, I’ve heard, and you know what that means. The second anyone opens that trapdoor and pokes his shanks downward, Swindin blows them to kingdom come.”
They made a quiet circuit of the saloon and ended up back where they’d originally stood, looking at the door. Morgan wagged his head. “Rush him,” he growled. “Rush him or starve him out. That’s all I can see to do.”
Parker made no comment. He walked over a little closer to the building, leaned on Fleharty’s water pump there, and furrowed his brow. Behind him, back where Lew Morgan stood, several townsmen silently drifted up. Parker could hear them speaking in a hushed manner to Lew. The entire atmosphere around Fleharty’s saloon was quiet. It reminded him how men acted down in Arizona when they were stalking a rattlesnake den. They tiptoed to avoid alerting the rattlers by footfall reverberations. They spoke in whispers. They looked constantly about them on the ground.
Unexpectedly, out of this very similarity, came the answer to Parker’s riddle. Rattlesnakes in Arizona, especially during the fierce summers, had a habit of slithering into towns, into cool garden patches, under houses and sheds and woodpiles, seeking relief from the murderous heat. Arizonans, for generations accepting the summertime invasion of these deadly reptiles, had long since learned the folly of poking around with sticks, of trying patiently to wait out snakes that could slumber for days on end when they had a stomach full of baby birds or mice. Trial and error had long since provided them with a never failing method of getting the snakes out where they could be killed.
This method occurred to Parker now, as he stood there, considering Swindin’s dark, cool den under Fleharty’s building. He twisted, beckoned to Lew and the townsmen standing back there with him. Morgan and the others walked softly forward.
Lew searched Parker’s face. “You’ve got it, haven’t you?” he asked, when he halted beside the pump.
“Maybe. I hope so.” Parker ran his gaze over the half dozen heavily armed inert behind Morgan. “You fellers mind sweating a little?” he asked. The silent townsmen, understanding none of this, nevertheless shook their heads. One of them, an older man, short and squatty and wearing a miner’s flat-heeled boots and suspenders, looked suddenly pleased, as though he’d perceived Parker’s attention.
“Dig him out,” this man said triumphantly.
Parker shook his head. He considered those solemn, waiting faces. “We’ll need more men, though, maybe twenty, thirty more. This won’t be hard work with that many. They can spell one another off.”
Lew Morgan said: “What won’t be hard work?”
Parker laid a big hand upon the handle of Fleharty’s pump. He partially lifted that handle and pushed it down. A trickle of well water ran over the spout and fell upon the hard earth. Lew looked at that water; the others also looked at it. Some seemed more mystified than ever, but not Lew Morgan.
“I’ll be damned,” he croaked, then at once began to scowl. “Like you said, though, it’ll take a lot of work.”
Parker nodded. To those mystified men he said: “Drown him out. Push a hose down under that door and flood him out. Pump in relays.”
An old man with a long-barreled rifle turned this over in his mind as he stood there calmly chewing a cud of tobacco. He looked at the cellar door, spat, and said: “Mister, that there the cellar’s six feet deep an’ near twenty feet long. It’ll take a heap o’ pumpin’ to flood it.”
Another man agreed with this, but he also said: “How else do we get him out o’ there? Danged if I got much stomach for rushin’ over there, flingin’ that door back, and chargin’ down in there.”
A third man said: “Are you boys plumb certain Swindin’s really down in there?”
Parker nodded at this man. “He’s down there, all right. Unless I miss my guess, your express company’s twelve thousand dollars in gold is down there with him, too.”
“Well,” exclaimed a big, hard-eyed bearded man, “what we standin’ around here for? Let’s go fetch some hoses and get to pumpin’.”
“Bring more than one hose,” Lew Morgan directed. “As soon as that water starts gushing in there, Swindin’ll figure what we’re trying to do. He’ll plug the hoses if he can, or cut them off. He’ll do whatever he can, you can bet money on that.”
The short, burly miner spoke up now, warming to the plan. “He’s only one man, ain’t he? All right, we’ll fix a hose to the pump next door, too. There’s another pump south o’ us behind the general store. Relays o’ men workin’ each of those pumps, and extra hoses, so as fast as Swindin plugs one hose, we can shove another one into the cellar, and…” The old miner made a gold-toothed, triumphant smile and said no more, but beamed upon his crowding-up companions. Everyone understood. Some of the men started away. Parker called to them to bring back more men. He then turned and looked at Lew Morgan, waiting.
Morgan pursed his lips. He swiped sweat off his face with a shirt sleeve. He lifted his shoulders and let them fall. “It might work. I never saw it done before, but it might work. One thing. Charley’s going to be the coolest of the lot of us, down there.”
“Yeah, especially when the water gets up around his ears.”
“That’ll take all night.”
“Which is better…working all night and being alive in the morning, or trying to rush him down there?”
Morgan sighed, saying: “Yeah.” He would have said more but Todhunter and Pierson came swinging up. They asked if what they’d heard about drowning Swindin out was true. Parker said that it was. Mike Pierson made a thin smile.
“It’s probably better than my idea to make a dynamite bomb an’ blow him out of there.”
“It is,” Parker stated. “Your town is tinder dry. A bomb would fire the saloon and probably burn your whole
