The Last Gunfighter Hell Town

Frank pondered that. He had thought in the back of his mind that Munro might have something to do with the problem developing here at the Lucky Lizard, but it appeared that wasn’t the case.

He nodded toward the other miners and asked Fowler, “Are you saying these fellas should go to work for the Alhambra?”

Fowler made a face. “Wouldn’t do ’em any good if they tried. Hammersmith’s got a full crew over there. What I think they should do is get Woodford to pay them right and treat them better.”

“Has anybody talked to him about that?”

A disgusted snort came from Fowler. “We tried. He won’t listen to reason. Just says that he can’t afford to pay us any more than he already is, and he claims the mine is safe. All he’d do is promise to think about cutting back on the number of hours in a shift, but thinkin’ about it ain’t gonna get it done.”

Tip hadn’t told Frank all those details, and hearing them just made the situation more troublesome. The wages that Tip was paying seemed fair enough to Frank, but he wasn’t the one working for them. A twelve-hour shift was pretty common, but gouging ore out of the earth was pretty hard work. As for the mine’s safety, Frank couldn’t say about that, because he hadn’t taken a good look at the inside of the Lucky Lizard. Maybe there were some improvements that should be made.

“If you don’t get what you want, what do you plan to do?”

Red Mike crossed his arms over his chest and glared at Frank. “We’ll do the only thing we can do to make Woodford listen to us. We’ll call a strike.” He looked around at the others. “Ain’t that right, boys?”

Frank noticed that some of the miners looked pretty dubious about that idea, but the rest gave enthusiastic nods and one man said, “Damn right we will!”

Strike. It was a word Frank didn’t want to hear. There had been miners’ strikes before, as well as strikes in other businesses, like the railroads. They nearly always led to violence. Back East, there had been riots and bombings connected with strikes. The business owners usually brought in armed men to break the backs of such work stoppages. The Pinkertons had come to specialize in such work. Because of that, these things were seldom if ever resolved in a peaceful manner.

Folks usually had to die first before anything got done.

Frank didn’t want to see that happen here. He liked Tip Woodford too much for that, and besides, it was his job to keep things as peaceful as possible.

“I think you ought to try to talk to Woodford again,” he began, not knowing if it would do any good or not. “If you want, I’ll say something to him—”

A sudden rumble from somewhere nearby interrupted Frank’s words. He felt a faint vibration in the floor under his feet and knew it couldn’t have come from anything good. Thunder sometimes sounded like that and shook the earth….

But this wasn’t thunder.

Fowler’s eyes widened with shock as the other miners bolted up from the bunks. The bearded man’s exclamation put into words what whey were all thinking.

“Oh, my God! Cave-in!”

Chapter 23

Frank whirled around and headed for the doorway at a run. Fowler and the other miners were right behind him. They burst out of the barracks building and turned toward the mine entrance, where a cloud of dust boiled out of the dark mouth of the shaft.

They weren’t the only ones who had heard the rumble and felt the earth shake. Anyone who had worked around mines for very long had experienced those sensations, and once experienced, they were never forgotten. Men came running out of the stamp mill and the office to stare toward the shaft with stricken looks on their faces. Someone began to ring an alarm bell.

Frank ran toward the mine entrance. So did most of the other men.

“Gib!” Fowler shouted. “My brother’s in there!”

So were probably a dozen other men, maybe more. Although Frank was no expert on such things, it seemed to him that the cave-in must have occurred fairly close to the entrance for the dust to be coming out like that so soon after the collapse. Of course, there was no telling what might have happened deeper in the mine, but Frank’s hope was that even if the shaft was blocked, the tunnels were all right. In that case, they would have at least a chance to get any trapped men out of there before they ran out of air.

The choking dust kept men from reaching the entrance right away. They tried to penetrate it but staggered back, coughing and hacking. Frank pulled a bandanna from his pocket and tied it over his mouth and nose like a bandit, then started forward into the dust. He took off his wide-brimmed hat and waved it back and forth in front of his face, trying to clear the air a little as he pressed ahead. He heard some of the other men following him, but didn’t look back.

Blinded, eyes stinging from the dust, Frank knew he had reached the cave-in only when he ran into it. He barked his shins against something hard and stopped. Clapping his hat on, he reached out with his hands and felt a jumbled barrier of rock, dirt, and broken timbers. “Hello!” he shouted. “Anybody hear me?”

No response came from the other side of the cave-in. Men crowded around Frank on this side. Fowler said, “We’ve got to get these rocks out of here and see how bad it is!”

That made sense. Frank grasped a chunk of rock so big and heavy that he needed both hands to carry it. Turning, he stumbled under the weight and headed back toward the mouth of the shaft. The dust was beginning to thin a little, and now he could see that the cave-in was about thirty yards inside the shaft.

As he emerged and dropped the rock to one side of the tunnel mouth, more men rushed past him carrying picks and shovels. A couple of men trundled wheelbarrows into the mine. The foreman Frank had spoken to earlier rushed up carrying a lantern.