Dwight stood and looked around his office. Ten men stood leaning against the outer walls of the small room. Behind the desk the two cells of the town’s jail held only one inmate. Obviously a cowboy by his dress, the man was sprawled on the iron bunk, snoring loudly.
‘Frenchy get a little frisky?’ Howard Glendenning, owner of the hardware store inquired.
Dwight smiled slightly. ‘Not really. Just too drunk to know what he was doin’. I figgered he’d be better off sleepin’ it off in here.’
‘So what’s on your mind, Marshal?’ Sven Carlsen interrupted. ‘I take it something big is going to happen?’
Dwight sized up the men he had asked to be there. There was Frank Singler, the gunsmith; Harvey Frieden, owner of the livery barn, Soren Swenson, owner of the feed store, Isaiah Formisch, furniture maker, David Lowenberg, owner of the mercantile store, ‘Dane’ Andersen, the blacksmith, Virgil Zucher, the carpenter, and Ralph Humbolt, sometimes clerk in the mercantile store, sometimes hostler at the livery barn, sometimes anything for which someone wanted to hire an honest and hardworking man.
Dwight leaned back against the front of his desk. ‘I’m guessin’ you all read this week’s paper.’
Every man there either nodded his head or mumbled his affirmation.
‘Is that what this is about?’ Harvey asked.
It was Dwight’s turn to nod his head. ‘I’ve known about it for quite a while. It’s been in the works for several months, actually. I don’t know how we managed to keep it from the professional nosy neighbor this long, but he finally got wind of it. The more I’ve thought about it, the more concerned I’ve become. It’s better than even money that somebody’ll try to hit that stage before it gets here.’
A murmur of agreement came from nearly a dozen throats.
‘You wantin’ a posse to ride out an’ meet it?’ Soren Swenson asked.
‘No,’ Dwight said with a flat finality in his voice. ‘Whatever happens to it outside of town isn’t really any of my business. I care, of course, but I don’t have jurisdiction anywhere but in town.’
‘You think they’ll hit it in town?’ Harvey’s voice was incredulous.
Again Dwight nodded. ‘I do. Think about it. Even if they stopped the stage somewhere else, what are they going to do? The guards inside are behind steel plates. There are eight outriders. And if they managed to kill off all the guards, then what would they do? There’s no way they’re going to get that strongbox open. Not even with dynamite. There’s no way they can carry it off. Without a block and tackle or something they couldn’t even lift it off the stage. So even if someone tries to rob it on the way here, it won’t do them any good.’
He paused to let what he had said soak in, then continued. ‘So the reasonable thing to do would be to wait until it’s unlocked at one of the banks. Then they can just take the money and run.’
‘But right in town, that’d be awful risky,’ Isaiah observed.
‘Unless they had enough men to overpower the guards, hit fast, grab the money, and ride out. Couple that with the idea that once they’re in town, the outriders and such will let their guard down.’
‘Do you think somebody’d actually try that?’ Harvey Frieden pondered.
‘If you were an outlaw and had enough men to do it, wouldn’t you?’
‘How much money are we talking about?’ Sven asked.
‘On the way into town, over ten thousand dollars.’
‘That’s a lot, but not if you had to divide it up between a gang of, say, ten or fifteen men,’ Howard Glendenning opined.
‘That’s true,’ Dwight conceded. ‘But what if they hit it on the way out of town, when it’s loaded, before it’s locked. Then we’re talking about more than one hundred thousand dollars in gold and paper money put together.’
Stunned silence filled the room, saturated the air, and spilled out into the night. It weighed down on the assembled group as if it were a physical force, stifling any latent attempt to respond. It was finally Dane Andersen who dispelled the oppressive silence with, ‘Are you serious?’
‘Now you know why I’m scared,’ Dwight assured them.
‘Now I’m scared too,’ Frank Singler admitted.
‘So what do you want of us?’ Sven asked, for the second time inside half an hour.
‘I want to deputize the ten of you, have you positioned and well armed, and ready to fight a war if we have to.’
‘How will we know who we are fighting against?’
‘Oh, they’ll make that perfectly clear,’ Dwight surmised. ‘They’ll either cover their faces or they’ll just be wavin’ their guns around, or shootin’ at us.’
‘Shotguns would be good,’ Frank said. ‘Twelve-or ten-gauges. Double-ought buckshot. That way you can’t miss at close range.’
‘Rifles are better to just hit who you wanta hit,’ Lowenberg argued. ‘There’ll be folks on the street.’
‘For a few minutes, probably,’ Dwight agreed, ‘but after the first shots are fired everybody’ll scramble for safety except the bad guys and us.’
Ralph’s eyes reflected the trauma of too many other battlefields. ‘I’d really hoped I’d seen the last of war that I’d ever see,’ he bemoaned.
‘So did we all,’ Sven agreed, shadows of the same phantoms in his own eyes.
Virgil Zucher spoke for the first time. ‘That war is over. But as long as there are evil people who prey on others there will be wars and rumors of wars, as the Good Book says. We will either stand like men and war against evil as the need arises, or we will cower from its threats and be its victims. If there are those who would attack even in the heart of town, we have no choice but to stop them.’
It was probably the longest speech any of them had ever heard from the normally laconic carpenter. None seemed willing to disturb the thoughtful silence his words evoked.
When the silence became too long, Dwight said, ‘Can I count on all of you?’
A chorus of solemn and quiet responses ranged from ‘Yes,’ to ‘Count me in,’ to ‘Danged right.’
‘The paper said the stage was due Thursday. That’s four days from now.’
Dwight nodded. ‘It’ll be in Thursday, along about mid-afternoon or later. We’ll want to be ready by noon, then I’ll have each of you get in place when we get word that it’s a couple miles out. Then on Friday it’ll start loadin’ up about six in the mornin’. It’s supposed to be loaded an’ outa town by eight.’
‘They’re gonna load all that gold an’ money in less’n two hours?’
‘They’re supposed to do it in less than an hour. The most dangerous time’ll be when it’s just about all loaded, before they get ready to lock the strongbox.’
‘What do they do with the keys?’ Frank wondered suddenly. ‘They sure don’t carry ’em along, do they?’
Dwight shook his head. ‘Wells Fargo keeps ’em. The Wells Fargo office in Cheyenne has keys that match.’
‘Ah! That makes sense, then.’
A dozen other questions were asked and answered. Then each man went home to decide whether to explain it all to his wife or keep it to himself.
Dwight had the same decision to make when Belinda arrived, shortly after the last man left.
She hugged Dwight briefly and kissed him lightly. ‘It looked like some kind of meeting just broke up,’ she observed. ‘I was coming to see you, and then I noticed all the men going into your office, so I went across the street and drank coffee at Helga’s until they left.’
That oppressive silence settled uncomfortably between them for a long moment. Dwight cleared his throat. ‘I … we … I’ve been gettin’ a little worried,’ he fumbled.
‘I saw the newspaper,’ Belinda said. ‘Is that what’s worrying you?’
He took a deep breath. If this woman was going to be his wife, share his life, bear his children, she certainly deserved his trust. ‘I’d just as soon it doesn’t get noised around too much, so be sorta careful what you say. I’m worried someone’s gonna try to rob that stage.’
‘Are you serious? Why in the world would anyone try to rob the most difficult to rob stage ever made?’
‘Because it’ll have more money than’s ever been put on one stage. Ever. More’n a hundred thousand dollars.’
Belinda gasped. ‘My word! Are you serious? But how would they rob it?’
‘By hittin’ it right here in town, before the strongbox gets locked.’
Belinda gasped. ‘Really! Do you know somebody’s going to do that?’
‘Nope. Just a guess. And I’d guess we both know some of the ones that are in on it.’
‘Are you kidding me? Who?’
He glanced at the jail cell, verifying that Frenchy was still passed out. ‘How many guys that are really too smart and educated to be range bums or boom-town drifters have come into town the past three weeks or so?’
She thought about it. He could count how many she thought of, because every time she thought of another one who fit his description her head jerked up and her eyes met his.
‘The printer,’ she said softly, ‘McCrae, because the newspaper office is where information is.’
‘The carpenter, Goode, because they’re working on the bank,’ Dwight suggested. ‘He even finagled to get me to suggest he ask for a job there.’
‘That new guy who’s a teller at the other bank. I don’t even remember his name, but nobody seems to know where he came from.’
‘What about the little guy, at the hardware store?’Dwight said, his voice telegraphing his uncertainty.
Belinda frowned. ‘I don’t know. Isn’t he the one that beat McCrae up for hitting the Humbolt boy?’
‘Yeah, and I don’t think that was something to distract me. He worked him over so fast and so good it was like something you’d go to one o’ them travelin’ circuses to see.’
‘I heard about it.’
‘There’s another thing,’ Dwight said, deciding to lay all his cards on the table. ‘That guy – Val Lindquist he says his name is – stopped in a couple days ago. He said when I needed to know it, he wanted me to understand that he’s on my side.’
‘On your side? Whatever did he mean by that?’
‘I don’t know. That’s about all he’d say. I sure have the feeling he ain’t what he seems to be, though.’
‘Do you really believe he’s on your side?’
Dwight thought about it a long moment, then said, ‘Yeah. Yeah I do. I really can’t tell you why, but yeah. I do.’
He would fret about whether that was a smart decision before long.