The last rays of light were gleaming behind Mount Davidson when the crowd of 30 or so men and women, half-angry, fully drunk, decided Silver City had to pay for what was happening in Manhattan, New York. Soon the sound of trucks and cars turning over in the chilled evening echoed through the small town of Virginia City.
South they headed, three miles downhill to their Comstock neighbors. They planned to burn down every home in the burg and send all the men, women, and children packing into the desert sage.
The crowd was hostile, angry at the indictment of the 45th President of the United States by an east coast grand jury on bogus charges of paying hush money to a pornstar who told the grand jury she never slept with Trump. It was more than the crowd could take after witnessing how the Biden campaign had come to power three years earlier.
Now their progressive neighbors would pay for not standing with them.
As they rounded the bend leading to Devil’s Gate, they could see the tangle of vehicle headlights that crowded the granite passage. It was this reporter’s nightmare, this reporter’s dream.
Having come down the mountain trailing the crowd, I stood off in the background, ready to eat dirt. when the shooting and burning commenced. Scant traces of words from raised voices echoed through the widened canyon but became lost to the hearing.
Then the crowd from Virginia City started returning to their vehicles, backing up, turning around, and heading back to the town beneath Davidson. Then I saw what had repelled the vigilante crowd, an o.d. green M48 Patton tank that one of the reclusive Marshall brothers had procured during their four-year stint in the Army during Vietnam and managed to smuggle home.
Being the last to leave the uphill side of the stand-off, I felt my blood chill a bit as the old beast rumbled to life as I sped toward supposed safety.
It was easy to find them, crowded together at the Red Dog Saloon, ordering pizza and more drinks. That’s where I also found one of the instigators.
“Figger if that crazy sum-bitch is crazy enough to still have that tank hid out in one those old mine shafts,” hold man Critner said. “Prolly has a nine-mill shell to go with it.”
“Takes await to get one of them bastards warmed up, so the question is, who the hell tipped them off?” he asked.
Not liking how he looked at me when he asked the question, I quietly sidled across C Street to the Union Saloon for safety’s sake.
The Old Blog in the Desert 