Frank shook his head. “No, but I’m going to do my best to keep the townspeople safe. I’m hoping that Starkwell won’t start a full-scale battle right here in the middle of town. That would look mighty bad for the governor, no matter what caused it, and the colonel’s bound to know that.”
Frank had a shoulder leaned against one of the posts holding up the awning over the boardwalk. He straightened from that casual pose as he looked along the street and noticed a rider coming.
“There’s Clint now,” he said.
Jack looked in the same direction and said, “Sure enough is. Wonder where he’s been.”
Clint Farnum rode up and dismounted in front of the marshal’s office. The little gunfighter looped his horse’s reins around the hitch rail and said, “Sorry for disappearing like that, Frank. The wanderlust got me. Had to get out of town and ride around the hills for a while.”
“You need to tell Jack or me where you’re going before you do something like that again,” Frank said. “For all we knew, you’d ridden off and weren’t coming back.”
“No, I’d never desert you boys like that. Wasn’t any trouble while I was gone, was there?”
Jack snorted. “Just the damn militia ridin’ in to bust the hell outta them strikes at the mines.”
Clint’s eyes widened in surprise. “You don’t say! What happened?”
Frank filled him in on the day’s events. Clint shook his head in seeming disbelief.
“So all those miners are coming into town tonight for a showdown with Woodford and Munro?” Clint asked when Frank was finished.
“I wouldn’t call it a showdown. They need to stop fighting and get down to some serious talking.”
“I can see the mayor going along with that,” Clint said, “but not Munro, or that fella Hammersmith who works for him.”
“They’ll have more trouble of their own once I show everybody what I found inside the shaft at the Lucky Lizard.” Frank took the acid-damaged piece of timber from his pocket so that the two deputies could look at it. “Somebody’s bound to have seen one or both of the Fowler brothers hanging around those support beams that gave out. Once they realize they’ve been found out, they won’t take the blame for those deaths by themselves.”
Clint nodded and said, “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out, all right.”
“We’ll have to wait and see,” Frank said. “All three of us are going to be on hand for that meeting, to keep things as peaceful as we can.”
“I’ll go put my horse up.” Clint looked back as he started to lead the animal toward the livery stable. “Again, I’m sorry for disappearing on you like that, Frank.”
“You’re here now,” Frank said. “That’s all that matters.”
He couldn’t have said for sure, but he thought he saw something flicker through Clint’s eyes just then, an unreadable expression that was still somehow troubling, as if Clint were wrestling with some sort of inner demon.
But then the little gunman’s face was as bland and smiling as ever, and Frank wasn’t sure he had even seen anything unusual. He told himself not to worry about it.
With the meeting looming between the striking miners and the mine owners—a meeting that might well turn into a violent showdown despite his best efforts—Frank figured he had bigger problems on his plate right now than whatever was bothering Clint Farnum.
Hap Mitchell walked up to the top of the ridge where Pool was studying Buckskin through a pair of field glasses. “Any sign of the signal?” he asked.
Pool lowered the glasses and glared at Mitchell. “If there was, don’t you think I’d’ve said somethin’ before now?”
“I didn’t mean any offense, Jory,” Mitchell said. “I just figured from the way you were talking earlier that we’d ride right into the settlement and start lootin’ the place.”
“It never hurts to be sure everything’s lined up just right. That’s why we’re gonna wait for Farnum’s signal before we move in.”
Mitchell nodded. “Sure, that makes sense. You know best, Jory.”
“Damn right I do,” Pool said in a harsh tone of voice that was almost a growl.
But despite what he had just said, Hap Mitchell wasn’t so sure about that anymore. There came a time when bad luck caught up to every gang, no matter how careful they were. It had happened to Frank and Jesse James and their cousins the Youngers up in Northfield, Minnesota, and just a couple of years earlier the Dalton boys had run into the same thing in Coffeyville, Kansas.
Mitchell had to ask himself if Buckskin, Nevada, might turn out to be the Pool gang’s Northfield or Coffeyville. If that was the case, he didn’t want to be there for it. He ought to get Lonnie Beeman and slip away from here while there was still time. Hap and Lonnie had been riding together for a lot of years. Maybe they should git while the gittin’ was good.
But if they did that and then the raid went off perfectly, just as planned, then not only would they miss out on their shares of the loot, but they would have earned the enmity of Jory Pool for deserting him. Jory wouldn’t take kindly to that. In fact, he might just track them down and kill them for their disloyalty.
No, Mitchell thought with a sigh, it looked like he and Lonnie were stuck. They would have to join in the raid with the rest of the gang.
As soon as Clint Farnum gave the signal.
Frank was waiting in the back room of the building that housed the Lucky Lizard’s office when dusk settled down over Buckskin. He had already lifted the trapdoor and exposed the ladder that led down to the tunnel from the mine. That tunnel ran for a mile or more into the nearby hills. Frank didn’t know when the miners would be arriving,
