Chapter 12 #2
"To the ridge above the mouth," the old man said. "Which is a day and a half from here for a person with no cart, and which I can find in the dark, and from which you can see the whole of that yard."
Stuart stood in the draw.
"Then we would be split a hundred miles."
"You would be split nine miles," Pierre Aubert said.
"That is the thing nobody in this draw has understood since the bell, because you have all been holding a map in your heads that had the mouth at one end and the rock at the other. The rock is four miles down the creek from the wall. The mouth is at eleven. The narrow place is between them."
Stuart stopped.
"Say that again."
"The narrow place is between the wall and the mouth," the old man said, and he said it slowly, like a man who had just understood that he had never actually said it.
"Four miles down from the gate and seven miles up from the yard. I have been calling it the road out because I have been thinking for two years about them taking people away east. It is not the road out. It is the only road between the wall and the yard,
and everybody in that place walked down through it this morning, and if they go back up they will walk through it again."
Nobody said anything at all.
"Old man," Stuart said, and his voice was not right. "Have you been sitting above a place for two years working out how to close the only road between a hundred and eleven people and sixty men with guns."
"Yes," Pierre Aubert said.
"And in the wrong direction."
"In the direction I was thinking about," the old man said, "which was them going away, because I have never once in two years let myself think about the other one."
"Which is what."
"Which is what happens to a wall," Pierre Aubert said, "when the men who run it are on the wrong side of a rock fall from it."
Stuart Redman stood in a draw in the breaks and felt the whole of it turn over for the last time.
"That's not closing a road," he said.
"No."
"That is cutting sixty men off from a gate."
"That is cutting sixty men off from a gate," the old man said, "and putting a hundred and eleven people in a yard at the mouth with seven miles of open road behind them and nobody standing on it."
"And the thirty at the mouth."
"There are not thirty at the mouth," Kestrel said, from the sledge. "Not today."
Everyone turned.
"Say it."
"Two of those bunkhouses burned on the twenty-fifth," he said.
"You do not burn a man's bunkhouse in February and leave him standing at the mouth. The outer ring went somewhere on the twenty-fifth, and they either went up behind the wall or they went ahead down the low road,
and either way that yard this afternoon has got the muster in it and whatever guard came down with it."
"How many guard comes down with a muster."
"Eleven," Josiah Tarp said.
Everyone turned the other way.
"Eleven," he said again. "It is eleven and it has been eleven for five years and it is eleven because that is what it takes to walk them down and stand them in rows and walk them back, and I have been in the file for four of them and I have counted every time because I count everything."
"Eleven men," Stuart said.
"Eleven, and one of them is the man with the book, and the rest are up behind the wall because the wall is where everything is."
They split at four o'clock in the afternoon on the third of February in a draw in the breaks.
Stuart did it and he did not let anybody else do it, and he did it fast, because he had learned a long time ago that the one thing that kills a split party is a long goodbye at the fork.
The powder went east with six.
Ames Pruitt, because he had loaded a face.
Iris Wendt, because she had hauled it for nine years and because she had said one thing in the last hour that Stuart could not get out of his head, which was that a person who is frightened of a thing and does it anyway is worth four who are not.
Ellery Halloran and the boy Tobin and Cobb Halloran on the cart ropes, and Odile Sorenson, nineteen, who could go all day and who Stuart put with them because he needed one person on that cart who would walk nine miles in the dark to tell him something.
"Two days," Stuart said. "Can you make it in two."
"We can make it in two if the ground is what he says it is," Iris Wendt said. "We cannot make it in two and load it in two."
"How long to load."
Ames Pruitt looked at the old man.
"Describe it to me one more time and do not leave anything out."
"Forty feet wide," Pierre Aubert said. "The creek is under the south side and the road is on the north. The rock comes down on the north in a face about ninety feet high and it is broken all the way up, and there is a shelf at about forty feet where a man can stand,
and above the shelf it is loose and it has been loose for as long as I have been looking at it, and there is a crack behind the shelf you could put your arm in."
Ames Pruitt closed his eyes.
"Say the crack again."
"A crack behind the shelf that runs about sixty feet along the face and you can put your arm in it in three places."
"How wide at the top."
"A hand."
Ames Pruitt opened his eyes and looked at Iris Wendt, and Iris Wendt looked back at him, and something passed between two people who had done the same trade twenty years apart.
"That's a bench shot," she said.
"That is a bench shot that God dug for us."
"Say it in English," Stuart said.
"It means we do not have to drill," Ames Pruitt said.
"It means there is a crack up there sixty feet long and a hand wide with nothing but loose rock behind it, and if we can get the bags up onto that shelf and get them into that crack and stem it properly with mud and rock, we are not blasting a face.
We are prying a hillside off a mountain with eight hundred pounds of the cheapest thing in the world."
"How long."
"A day and a half to get it up there," he said. "It is forty feet of climbing with bags on our backs and we have got six people."
"So four days."
"Four days," Ames said, "and I will tell you now that if you come to me on the third day and ask me to fire it early, I am going to say no, and I want you to know that in advance so that neither of us has to find it out in a bad hour."
"You'll get your four days," Stuart said.
"You do not know that."
"No," Stuart said, "I do not, and I am promising it anyway, and if it turns out I cannot keep it I will come and stand in front of you and say so."
The other eight went south and east at the speed of a person.
Stuart. Camille with her arm in a strap and the Lebel slung on her good side.
Nell Fairweather and four magazines. Pierre Aubert and five dogs.
Josiah Tarp. The Pruitt boy, who had asked to go with his uncle and had been told no by his uncle in eleven words.
Ames Pruitt's cousin's wife, a woman named Bride Kelsall who had come to the Crossing in March and had been a labor and delivery nurse for nineteen years and who had asked to come east at the Hall meeting and had not explained why and had not needed to.
And Kestrel, on the sledge, pulled by dogs.
That was the argument Stuart expected to have and did not have, because Pierre Aubert simply put the harness on two of the five and said, "He comes. He is the only one of us who has been inside that gate and he weighs a hundred and thirty pounds and my dogs have pulled him a hundred and forty miles
already."
They walked until it was full dark and then they walked three more hours.
The crust came back hard at about seven and they took it, and the old man went in front the whole way with a dog at his knee and never once put a light on, and Stuart Redman walked behind him in the dark and thought about a man who had gone up and down this country for two years being disbelieved.
They camped at two in the morning under a rock lip with no fire.
"How far," Stuart said.
"Nine miles."
"And up?"
"Up is four of them," Pierre Aubert said. "We will be on the ridge before it is light, and I want to be, because there is one place to come up onto that ridge where you are not against the sky and I would rather do it in the dark than explain it to you in the daylight."
They went up at four.
It took two hours and it was the worst two hours of Stuart's life since the divide, and his hip failed him twice and Camille put her good shoulder under his arm the second time and neither of them said one word about it.
They came onto the ridge at ten past six.
The old man took them along it two hundred yards below the crest, on the north side, in the dark, with the dogs strung out in front, and at a place that looked like every other place he stopped and went down on his belly and went up the last eleven feet on his elbows.
He put his hand back.
Stuart came up beside him.
And there, below them, a mile off and eleven hundred feet down, in the gray before dawn, was the mouth of the Ninemile.
It was bigger than he had let himself imagine.
That was the first thing and it was the thing that went through him like cold water.
He had been carrying a picture of a mill yard and a scale house and four bunkhouses, and what was down there was an industrial site half a mile long in the bottom of a canyon, with a log deck and a sorting yard and a rail spur that went nowhere and a building with a roof three hundred feet long.
Two enormous black patches still smoking on the fourth day.
And in the middle of the yard, in the flat open gravel where the scale had been, standing in rows in the dark at six in the morning, were people.
"They are still there," Stuart said.
"They are still there."
"They have been standing in that yard since yesterday afternoon."
"They have been standing in that yard," Pierre Aubert said, "for about eighteen hours."
Camille came up on Stuart's other side with the glass.
She looked for a long time and did not say anything and then she handed it to Stuart without a word, which frightened him more than anything she could have said.
He looked.