The Last Gunfighter Hell Town

of canvas. The mangled remains were taken from the rocks as carefully as possible and wrapped in the canvas. A few minutes later, they found the second body and accorded it the same respectful handling.

“We’ll put them in one of the wagons and take them to town,” Tip said. “Reckon the coffins Langley makes will have to be closed at this funeral.”

Frank nodded. Tip looked very upset, and Frank couldn’t blame him. Despite his insistence that the mine was safe, Tip had to be wondering if maybe, in some way, these two deaths were his fault.

As the bodies were being carried out, something in the rubble caught Frank’s attention. He bent and pried it loose from the rocks that were piled around the object. It was part of one of the shoring timbers that had been holding up the ceiling before it collapsed. The jagged edge showed where it had snapped. Frank inspected it intently, holding it up and bringing his face close to it as he studied it in the light from the lantern.

“Well, how about that?” he said in a soft voice, more to himself than to any of the others. They weren’t paying attention to him anyway. The men were all too upset and grieving over the deaths of the two miners.

They would be even more upset if they knew what the broken piece of timber had told Frank.

But he was going to keep that knowledge to himself for now, until he figured out what to do with it.

Chapter 24

It was well after nightfall before Frank got back to Buckskin. He rode straight to the office and tied Goldy at the hitch rail outside. When he came in, he found Clint Farnum behind the desk, leaning back in the chair with his booted feet propped on top of the desk.

Clint sat up and said, “Sorry, Frank. Didn’t mean for you to catch me loafing.”

Frank waved a hand and said, “Don’t worry about it. Everything all right here in town?”

“Yeah. I did the rounds a while ago, then came back here and sent Jack to get himself some supper. We heard about what happened out at the Lucky Lizard. One of the townspeople came by and said two bodies had been brought in, claimed they were men who’d been killed in a cave-in.”

Frank nodded. “That’s right.”

Clint stood up and came out from behind the desk so that Frank could sit down. “Better take it easy for a while,” Clint advised. “You look like you’ve been rode hard and put away wet. I reckon digging out a collapsed mine tunnel must be pretty hard work.”

Thinking about what they had found in that tunnel, Frank nodded and said, “Yeah. Really hard work.”

“Why don’t I go over to the cafe and get the girls to fix up something for you to eat? I’ll bring it back here.”

With every muscle and bone in his body screaming their weariness, Frank settled down in the chair. He figured Clint’s offer had something to do with the deputy wanting to see Becky Humphries, but either way Frank appreciated it.

“That would be fine,” he told Clint. “You might take my horse down to Amos’s place too while you’re at it.”

Clint nodded. “Be glad to.” He hurried out of the office, leaving Frank there to lean back in the chair and close his eyes for a moment.

As tired as he was, his brain was racing. In his saddlebags was a piece of the broken timber he had slipped out of the mine shaft. The wood wasn’t just broken, however. It showed signs of some other sort of damage, as if something had eaten away at it, and when Frank had brought it close to his face to inspect it, he had caught a whiff of a vaguely familiar odor. It had taken him a few seconds to identify the reeking smell.

Sulfuric acid.

The impact of that realization had hit Frank almost like a physical blow. He didn’t know much about mining, but it seemed to him that the only logical way sulfuric acid could have gotten on that timber was if somebody put it there. The stuff was highly corrosive. A concentrated application of it could have weakened that support beam.

If the acid had been applied to several of the beams, that might have weakened the whole structure enough to bring part of the ceiling crashing down—which was exactly what had happened. If the theory forming in Frank’s mind was correct, then the death of those two miners hadn’t been a tragic accident after all.

It was murder.

He would check with Garrett Claiborne to be sure, but it seemed likely to him that sulfuric acid could be found pretty easily around a mine. The Lucky Lizard had a small assayer’s laboratory adjacent to the stamp mill, and such places were full of chemicals that the assayers used in their tests on the ore. For all Frank knew, the acid might be used in some other process too.

The details weren’t all that important. What mattered was that the cave-in had been caused deliberately, and when Frank asked himself who would benefit from such sabotage, his mind went right back to Hamish Munro and Gunther Hammersmith. With the Crown Royal pretty much shut down because its stamp mill had been destroyed, and now with work stopped at the Lucky Lizard because of the miners’ strike, that left the Alhambra as the only producing mine in the area of any significance.

Would Munro go that far to gain an advantage on his competitors? A normal businessman wouldn’t.

But who was to say that Munro was normal?

By the time Clint Farnum came back in carrying a tray full of food from the cafe, Frank had poured himself a cup of coffee and was standing in the doorway of the office drinking it. Clint said, “I thought you were going to take it easy.”

“Compared to what I was doing earlier today,” Frank said, “this is taking it easy.”