While labbing this game on an old computer, I happened upon a skip that I was unable to reproduce successfully, but it did work once.
Might have been due to lag, but essentially how I think it works is that when you click the difficulty selection, the scene selector can flash for a frame or two, allowing you to pick a scene instead of talking to the prospector. It's worth looking into, but I haven't been able to reproduce it. Should save maybe 30 seconds to a minute? The lag might let the frame flash long enough to click, so potentially that has something to do with it.
Otherwise, bugs are harder to find in a game like this, and likely any WR runs in the future will involve even faster reflexes, good RNG, the "machine gun" strategy, and prefiring.
I got the skip you mentioned to work. I cant get it to reliably repeat, though. And the worst part of it was it happened when I selected Deputy difficulty and it took me to the Sheriff's office prior to the saloon, so it wasted as much or more time than just listening to the prospector. But if you can get it to work while selecting Gunslinger...
Oh wow nice. I guess now it's time to see if it can be done reliably, and to get us to the right scene. I originally dubbed this the 'corral skip' since it went to the corral scene for me.
