It wouldn’t be her, Frank thought. Tip was right—Diana needed to get inside one of the buildings where she would be safe in case trouble broke out. Three of Tip’s foremen were on hand, and Frank figured they would back their boss, but there were a couple of dozen angry, resentful miners crowding around them.
It was time for him to step in.
Raising his voice so he could be heard over the hubbub, Frank called in a powerful, commanding tone, “Everybody just settle down!”
That brought a moment of surprised silence, but the respite didn’t last long. Mike Fowler said, “This is none of your business, Marshal. We ain’t in town! You’ve got no right to interfere.”
“I’m making it my right,” Frank snapped. His right hand rested on the butt of his Colt. Men eyed him warily and began to move back. Everybody here knew that before pinning on the badge as marshal of Buckskin, Frank had been the famous gunfighter known as The Drifter.
“This don’t have anything to do with you,” Red Mike insisted.
“Tip Woodford’s my friend, and so is Miss Diana. If you think I’m going to stand by while they’re threatened, mister, you’re dead wrong.”
“What are you gonna do, Morgan? Shoot all of us?”
“No,” Frank said, “but I can damn sure shoot
Fowler’s face tensed and turned pale at the cold menace in Frank’s voice.
“Tip,” Frank went on, “you and Diana both get out of here. Go on back to town.”
“The Lucky Lizard is mine, blast it,” Tip said. “I’m as upset about what happened as anybody, but I still don’t think it was my fault.”
“You just don’t give a damn about the people who work for you,” Fowler accused. “Well, we won’t work for you anymore, will we, boys? We’re on strike!”
“Strike! Strike!” the other miners began chanting.
Tip looked sick. “You can’t strike,” he said. “That’ll shut the mine down!”
“That’s right,” Fowler said with an ugly grin. “We’re shuttin’ you down, Woodford. We won’t work for you again until you agree to meet all our demands!”
“I…I’ll hire more men!” Tip shot back. Frank wished that he hadn’t. Under the circumstances, that was one of the worst things he could have said.
“You try it and you’ll be sorry,” Fowler threatened. “So will anybody who tries to work for you.”
One of the supervisors said, “We need to finish getting that shaft cleaned out….”
“Clean it out yourself!” Fowler said. “Come on, boys. Back to the barracks!”
With angry scowls and muttered, defiant curses, the miners tramped off toward the barracks building. “God,” Tip Woodford said. “What am I gonna do now?”
Frank nodded toward the mine entrance. “I’m no expert, but I’d say you need to finish getting that shaft cleaned out, like this fella said, so you can see how bad the damage is.” Frank’s voice grew more solemn as he added, “And there are a couple of bodies in there that need to be gotten out too.”
Tip sighed and nodded, then said, “You’re right. With only a handful of us, it ain’t gonna be an easy job. I won’t blame you fellas if you don’t want to stick.”
The foremen looked at each other, then one of them said, “We signed on to do a job. We’ll do it.”
“Let’s get to work then,” Tip said. “Frank, if you’d take Diana back to town—”
“Town, hell,” she said. “I can handle a wheelbarrow.”
“Now, blast it—”
“Haven’t you learned by now, Pa, that you’re wasting your time arguing with me?”
For the first time in quite a while, Frank felt like smiling. Diana Woodford was one stubborn young woman, living proof of the old saying about the apple not falling far from the tree.
“All right,” Tip growled after a moment. “But when I tell you to get out of the tunnel, you get out, hear?”
Frank knew what he was getting at. As they cleared away the debris from the cave-in, they were bound to come across the bodies of the two men who had been trapped in the collapse. Tip didn’t want his daughter to see that gruesome sight, and Frank couldn’t blame him for feeling that way.
Diana must have understood what her father meant too, because she nodded and sounded uncommonly agreeable as she said, “Of course.”
They all set to work. Mike and Gib Fowler watched them from the door of the barracks, but they didn’t try to interfere. Progress was slow with only a half-dozen people working now, but gradually Frank began to see that only about ten feet of the ceiling had collapsed. The two men who had been caught in the cave-in had just been unlucky. A few yards either way in the tunnel, and they would have been able to avoid being crushed.
Tip Woodford had been swinging a pick, loosening the fallen rock, but he suddenly straightened from that task and said, “Go on out of here, girl.” His tone made it clear that he wouldn’t put up with any argument.
Diana didn’t try to give him one. She just said, “All right,” and left the tunnel.
“Here’s the first one of those fellas,” Tip said when she was gone. The men gathered around to remove the rocks from the body.
Frank had seen plenty of gory sights in his life, but the body of an hombre crushed by tons of falling rock was right up there with the worst of them. One of the men went to a storage building and came back with some sheets
