Chapter 11 #2
"It is nine hundred and forty pounds," he said. "It is a state highway department magazine and it has been padlocked since the third of March that year and I broke the lock in the first winter and looked at it and put a new lock on it myself, and I have not opened that door since."
"Nine hundred."
"Two hundred and eleven sticks of it," Halloran said, "and eight hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate blasting agent in bags, and four boxes of caps in a separate box the way it is supposed to be, and a spool of shock tube and about three hundred feet of det cord."
Stuart put his hand on the doorframe.
"Mr. Halloran, why is that still sitting there."
"Because I am a game warden and not a powderman," Halloran said, "and because in the first winter I had sixty frightened people and a shed full of the only thing in this county that could kill all of them at once,
and I made a decision that the safest place for it was behind a lock that nobody knew about."
"Does anybody know about it?"
"Four people. Now fourteen."
"And it's five years old."
"That is the part I have been chewing on since your girl said the word," Halloran said. "It has been through five winters in an unheated steel building on a north slope."
Ames Pruitt had come up behind them and did not say anything but was listening with his whole body.
"Say the rest," Stuart said.
"The dynamite is going to be bad," Halloran said. "I do not know how bad. It sweats. Old sticks sweat nitro and then the nitro is on the outside of the stick and then a man picks it up wrong and there is no man. I am not letting anybody in this town near it."
"And the bags?"
"The bags are just fertilizer and fuel oil and it does not go off unless you make it go off," Halloran said, "and five years in a dry shed does not hurt it much at all if the bags are whole. That is the eight hundred pounds. That is the part that is probably fine."
Ames Pruitt said, "It needs a booster."
Everyone turned around.
"It needs a booster," he said again. "That is all a stick of dynamite is for in that shed. You do not blow rock with the nitrate. You blow the nitrate with something else and the nitrate does the work."
"You a powderman?" Halloran said.
"I am a blacksmith and my uncle ran a rock quarry at Kooskia for eleven years and I was on his crew four summers when I was young," Ames said, "and I want to be very honest in this doorway that four summers twenty years ago does not make me anything. But I have loaded a face.
I know what a primer is and I know what a stemming column is, and I know that if you put eight hundred pounds in a hole with no stemming you have made a very large campfire and moved no rock at all."
Stuart looked at him.
"Can you do it."
"I can do it if the caps are good," Ames said. "Caps are the whole thing. If the caps are dead we have got eight hundred pounds of expensive dirt."
"And the sticks?"
"I will look at the sticks," Ames Pruitt said, "and I will look at them alone, a half mile from anybody, and Mr. Halloran is going to stand up on that road and not let one single person come down it while I do."
They opened the shed on the twenty-ninth at nine in the morning.
It took three hours and it was the worst three hours of the whole journey out, and Stuart Redman spent the entire time sitting on a rock four hundred yards up the grade with eight people and five dogs and Camille beside him with her arm in a strap.
"You should be down there," she said.
"I would be in the way and you know it."
"That is not why you are up here."
"No," Stuart admitted.
"Then say it."
"I am up here because if that goes off I want somebody left who knows what the plan was," he said, "and I have been telling myself all morning that that is a leader's reason, and about eleven o'clock I worked out that it is also simply that I did not want to be near it."
"Both," Camille said.
"Both."
Ames Pruitt came up the grade at noon walking slowly with his hands held away from his body and his sleeves wet to the elbow, and Ellery Halloran came behind him with a bucket.
He sat down on the rock and did not say anything for a minute.
"Well," Stuart said.
"Fourteen sticks are gone," Ames said. "Crystals on the paper, weeping, the whole business. I have got them laid out in a trench a quarter mile down and Mr. Halloran is going to shoot them from two hundred yards when we are clear of this valley and nobody is going to be anywhere near it."
"And the rest?"
"The rest of the case is chalk," Ames said. "Dry as chalk. It has been sitting on a wooden pallet at the back of a dry shed on a north wall and it never got warm and it never got wet, and there are a hundred and ninety-odd sticks in there that I would use today."
"The caps."
Ames Pruitt opened his hand.
There was a length of shock tube in it, four feet of it, with a cap crimped on the end, and the cap end had been fired and was split open like a little burst flower.
"Number eight," he said. "Fired on the first try with the shooter out of the box. Mr. Halloran's shooter still holds a charge, which is the single luckiest thing that has happened to any of us this month."
Stuart let out a breath.
"And the bags."
"Eight hundred pounds, whole, dry, and two of them had mice in them and I am throwing those two away."
"So we can do it."
Ames Pruitt looked at him.
"We can make something happen," he said. "Whether it is the thing we want to happen depends entirely on the old man's rock, and I have not seen the old man's rock, and I want to say now, in front of everybody, that I am not going to promise anything about a place I have not stood in."
"That's fair."
"You keep saying that," Ames said.
"It keeps being true," Stuart said.
Greer voted that night.
Stuart had not asked them to and did not expect it, and Ellery Halloran called it anyway, in a room over what had been a feed store, with sixty people in it and a plank floor that everybody could hear everybody else's boots on.
He read out the whole of it, the way Davey would have.
Then he said, "I am going to tell you what I want and then I am going to sit down, because I have run this town from a ridge for five years by looking at things through a glass and I am not going to run this from a chair."
"Say it."
"They want the powder. I want to give it to them."
"All of it?"
"Every ounce, and the shooter, and the wire, and Ames Pruitt to carry it," Halloran said. "And I want to send four people with it and I want to be one of them."
That got the room.
They argued for two hours and Stuart sat at the back and did not say one word, because he had learned in four years that the fastest way to lose a town's vote is for a stranger to help with it.
In the end Greer sent three.
Ellery Halloran, who was fifty-eight and had a scoped rifle and had been on a ridge for five years.
A woman of forty named Iris Wendt who had been a heavy equipment operator on the Dworshak road crew and had driven powder trucks for nine years and had not told anybody in that town about it until the meeting.
And a boy of seventeen named Tobin who was Halloran's sister's son and who Halloran did not want and could not stop.
Fourteen people.
They left Greer on the thirty-first with two handcarts and a sledge and five dogs and nine hundred pounds of powder split across the carts on the road, because Iris Wendt stood in the street at first light and said,
"Caps go with me and they go nowhere near the nitrate and if anybody moves that box without telling me I will walk home," and nobody argued with her once.
They went south and east off the Greer grade into the breaks on the first of February.
And on the third, at about two in the afternoon, with the carts down in a draw and the whole party strung out over a quarter mile of bad ground, Pierre Aubert's dogs came up off the trail all at once.
Stuart saw it happen.
Five dogs stopped walking and turned east in the same second, all five together, the way a hand had gone down, and the old man put his own hand out flat behind him and the whole line stopped where it stood.
Nobody moved for eleven seconds.
Then, away off east, faint and thin and coming down the wind over a mile of broken country, they all heard it.
It was a bell.
Not a handbell. A big one, deep, rung slow and even, six times, and then a pause, and then six more.
Josiah Tarp went white to the lips.
"That's the Ninemile," he said.
"You said it was eleven miles up a creek behind a ridge," Stuart said.
"It is."
"Then why am I hearing a bell."
Josiah Tarp turned around and looked at him with his mouth open and nothing coming out of it, and it was Kestrel, from the sledge, who answered.
"Because they are not up the creek," he said. "That bell is at the mouth."
"Say it plain."
"The bell hangs on the scale house at the mouth," Kestrel said, "and it is rung six and six for one thing only, and it is not a warning and it is not an alarm."
"Then what is it."
"It is the count," Kestrel said. "They ring it six and six when everybody is out of the wall and standing in the yard and the numbers are right."
Nobody said anything.
"They are not moving east in nine days," Stuart said.
"They are standing in the yard at the mouth," Kestrel said, "right now, all of them, and they are eleven miles from where the old man's rock is, and we are two days out."