Baker was right. It was war. A war with nearly a thousand angry, riled men. There was no stopping them from their course of action.
He climbed the hill with the pickets with an exuberance he did not feel. When they reached the mine, his suspicions were confirmed. The Bunker people had indeed been warned and had retreated. The mine was a ghost town. He scanned the surrounding hills, wondering whether the roughly two hundred remaining faithful workers were hiding there, armed and ready to defend the mine, their livelihood.
"The place's deserted! Them cussed scabs deserted!" The man next to him yelled. Without warning he drew his gun and raised it into the air, firing a shot to signal all clear before Tonio could stop him.
"Fool!" Tonio reached for the man's gun arm. "The mob doesn't know—"
Before Tonio could finish his sentence, a volley of gunfire erupted. As Tonio had feared, the mob below wrongly interpreted the shot, thinking that the pickets were under attack. In their frenzy, they fired ahead into the mine area at their own men. The panicked pickets shot back, fueling the battle. Tonio was completely without cover.
As he ducked for the meager cover of a stack of wooden crates, a bullet struck him. His left shoulder seared with burning pain. He fell to the hard packed dirt, cupping his shoulder and suppressing a groan. The first few drops of blood soaked his shirt and wicked out. He cursed beneath his breath. The bleeding wasn't overly heavily. He flexed his arm and wiggled his fingers. Flesh wound.
The volley continued. A man Tonio recognized fell to the ground dead. Stupid devil! Tonio couldn't chance running out into the line of fire to recover the body.
The mob streamed up the hill. As suddenly as it had begun, the volley halted. It were as if the mob had recognized its mistake all at once, and acted with one mind. Tonio watched as a group of men carted the dead man down the hill. Tonio struggled to his feet and made it to the shade of a nearby building. He collapsed on the ground and leaned back against the building, clutching his shoulder to stem the bleeding. He didn't want to be discovered and packed off to the hospital. Somehow he had to get back to the depot and help Angelina.
The blood pounded in Angelina's head as she watched a select group of the mob detrain and race up the hill. They whooped and hollered what could only be described as a war cry. The look in the eyes of the men all around her and those that streamed by frightened her beyond measure. Brown, blue, green, or hazel, each eye blazed with the same insanity. They were part of an uncontrollable, unstoppable presence, a force of a magnitude not often seen. The power of their unity was an opiate in which the sanity and reason of the individual was lost.
Moments later she heard what she thought was a blast of dynamite. Almost simultaneously, Al pushed her to the floor and whispered in her ear. "Gunfire. Keep low."
The volley that followed lasted only minutes, but the terror it wrought in her reverberated on and on like an unstoppable echo.
Men streamed off the train in a tide of black and flowed up the hill. Minutes later they carried a bloody corpse back down. The man's eyes were blank, the violent glint absent, and his mouth hung open, slack and limp.
She watched frantically, but no more bodies were retrieved.
The union men worked with feverish enthusiasm unloading the crates of blasting powder stolen from the Frisco. They unloaded carton after carton and shuttled them up the hill with no more concern for the contents than if the explosive powder had been powdered sugar.
Angelina shuddered, remembering the dissertation Tonio had once given her on explosives. One errant spark and they could all be blown up. She didn't know enough about the workings of a mine to know exactly what would cause the most damage to the mine's operations. The crowd she was among would know and would go after it.
What were these men thinking? Surely the law would eventually catch and punish the perpetrators.
A hard, cold gun barrel in her ribs brought her back to reality. "Time to lock you up while we finish our work here," Clell said.
"Swine!"
He dug the barrel deeper into her ribs. "Move."
He grabbed her arm and thrust her out the engine door. Al went for his gun arm but two