Sliphammer by Brian Garfield Read Free Book Online

people here. It’s a new mining region but it’s rich as hell. If you’ve seen the town, and you couldn’t have helped that this morning, then you’ve seen that -it’s a spectacular monument to what unlimited money and baroque bad taste can achieve. That ought to tell you something about the kind of men who built this town—the men who still own it. There are about fifty of them all told—strike-it-rich millionaires. Two years ago almost every one of them was a down-and-out prospector. They’ve got all the money in the world but they’ve got no traditions, no education, no taste, and not a hell of a lot of good sense. I’ve seen two of them sit in the lobby of the Inter Ocean Hotel during a cloudburst and bet fifty thousand dollars on which of two raindrops would first reach the bottom of a windowpane.”
    The sheriff sipped coffee and cleared his throat. “Now, these old boys made their strikes just in the past couple of years, and big-money mining’s changed a good deal since the old days when they used to pan and sluice. The fortunes that are being made in these mountains are coming out of deep shafts in the ground, not out of creek-bed gravel. It takes a lot of manpower to dig a thousand-foot mine shaft and drag ore out by the thousands of tons and wagon it down into the smelters and mill it down into pure metal. A hell of a lot of manpower. For every overnight millionaire in Gunnison there are a couple of hundred hardscrab-ble miners working for day wages. Or more—some of these mines carry payrolls of six or eight hundred men. Nowadays a lot of these miners think they aren’t getting paid enough or looked after well enough. We’ve got a troublesome little bunch of loudmouthed agitators frdm back East calling themselves Knights of Labor trying to form strike unions. Maybe you’ve heard what happened in Leadville and Creede when they tried the same thing—a lot of heads were smashed.”
    â€œI heard,” Tree murmured, lulled by the rambling run of the sheriff’s voice. “What’s this got to do with me?”
    â€œI’m coming to that. Let’s look and see what we’ve got here. We’ve got a handful of lucky millionaires who want to stay rich and get richer, and we’ve got thousands of unhappy miners being stirred up by radical agitators, and into the middle of this comes a big man with handlebar mustaches and two revolvers and a big-gun reputation that’s made him as much of a legend as Wild Bill Hickok. This is the man who licked the Clan tons in Tombstone, the man the dime novels call the Lion of Tombstone.”
    McKesson paused to see what effect his speech had taken. Tree was lighting his pipe. He was thinking about Wyatt Earp, a man he had never met, wondering how it would be, not liking the possibilities.
    McKesson said, “The people who own this town gave him the key to the city.”
    It made Tree look at him. “What?”
    McKesson nodded. “They’re treating Wyatt Earp like visiting royalty. Given over the whole Inter Ocean Hotel to him and his wife and his brother.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œTwo reasons. First, these ore barons of ours are like kids when it comes to celebrated visitors—they’d do the same thing for an actress or a senator. And second, these Yankee millionaires of ours know it was the Earps who whipped hell.out of the Johnny Reb Texans in Kansas, and they respect a case-hardened man above all ethers. They’ve got a good use for Wyatt - Earp, you see. Just the fact that he’s holed up in the Inter Ocean is enough to give pause to these radical agitators. The miners know Earp’s on friendly terms with the owners, and nobody wants to get into a fracas where he may find himself staring down the wrong end of Wyatt Earp’s gunbarrels. Do you begin to see what I’m driving at?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œGood. The point is,