6

HANG HIM!”

Isaac Bell had vaulted up the steps just as the grieving crowd of the victims’ friends and families exploded into a savage lynch mob howling for Jim Higgins’s blood.

“Hang him high!”

“Murderer!”

“Spy!”

“Hold it!”

Bell had a big voice, and when he filled his chest and let it thunder, it carried to the farthest man in the mob and echoed off the mountain. He raised both hands high above his head and it seemed to double his height. He spoke slowly, clearly, and loudly.

“Jim Higgins is no spy. Jim Higgins is an honest workingman just like every one of us.”

“Spy!”

Bell pointed a big hand at the miner who had shouted.

“Who told you Jim’s a spy? Come on, man, tell us. Was it anyone you know? Any man you trust? Who?”

The miners looked at one another and back at Bell.

“Jim Higgins is no more a company man than you or me.”

The men in front were looking confused. But from far in the back, Bell heard shouting. “Murderer! Murderer!”

He could not see who was shouting in the failing light. A shadowy figure in a slouch hat flitted behind the mob. A dozen throats picked up the cry “Murderer! Murderer!” and from where Bell stood on the steps he could see a wavelike ripple of motion, and hundreds began to surge closer.

The company police guarding the jailhouse door edged aside.

“Stand fast, you men!” Bell shouted down from the steps.

“Murderer!”

The cops broke and ran. Some fled straight into the crowd, some around it, and when they had gone nothing stood between the lynch mob and the union organizer but a young Van Dorn detective on his first case.

Isaac Bell drew a single-action Colt Army from his coat and leveled it at the crowd. Then he delivered a cold promise.

“I will shoot the first man who steps near.”

Those in the front row, close enough to see his eyes, believed him.

They hesitated and started to fall back.

• • •

JOE, you self-righteous son of a bitch! Henry Clay shouted in the confines of his mind, taunting Joseph Van Dorn as if the great detective was glaring across his desk. Or down a gunsight. Goodness fetches goodness. Fools fetch fools.

He reached inside his voluminous coat.

Fool or not, young Bell cut a brave figure. The mob, teetering moments before on the cusp of violence, had been sidetracked by his commanding voice. Clay had fired up the back ranks again. But now the young detective had a gun in his hand and it was time to stop Bell before he ruined everything.

The marksman’s weapon in Clay’s shoulder holster was a top-notch Colt Bisley .45 single-action revolver smithed to a fare-thee-well. In the right hands, at this range, it was as deadly as a rifle. And Henry Clay, who had been trained by a master gunfighter and had drilled with the Bisley as religiously as he had with shotgun, rifle, knife, and fists, had no doubt that his were the right hands.