Chapter 13 #3
"That crack runs seventy-one feet, not sixty. It is a hand wide at the top for forty of them and you can get your arm in at five places. There is nothing behind that shelf but broken rock sitting on its own weight and it has been waiting to come off that hill since before anybody here was born."
"Can you do it."
"I can do it," he said. "And I want to say the rest of it now while everybody is sitting down."
"Say it."
"We have got eight hundred pounds and we have got one shot, and the way that face is built I could put the whole eight hundred in and take ninety feet of hillside into that road and fill this gap with rock forty feet deep."
"Then do that."
"If I do that," Ames Pruitt said, "nothing comes down this road for a year. Not a wagon, not a horse, not a person, not a hundred and eleven people on foot in February with children in them."
Stuart put his hands on his knees.
"Say it plain."
"You want to cut sixty men off from a gate," Ames said.
"You do not want to cut a hundred and eleven people off from a country. And those are the same forty feet of road, and I have been standing under that face since yesterday afternoon working out whether there is a shot that does one and not the other."
"Is there."
"There is one," Ames Pruitt said. "It is a half load in the east forty feet of the crack only, and it drops the north face into the road and leaves the creek side open,
and if I have got it right there will be a gap along the south wall about six feet wide that a person on foot can climb over and a horse cannot."
"And if you have got it wrong?"
"Then I fill the whole thing anyway," he said, "or I do not bring down enough and I have wasted the only shot anybody in this country is ever going to get."
"What do you need."
"Four days and Iris and the boy and every hand you have got," Ames said, "and I need somebody to tell me right now, out loud, which of those two things we are buying, because once the bags are in that crack I cannot change my mind about it."
Stuart Redman stood up.
He looked up at ninety feet of broken rock and then west up the road toward a wall he had never seen, and then at thirteen people sitting in the gravel looking at him.
"Six feet," he said. "Leave them the six feet."
They loaded for three days.
It was the hardest work any of them ever did and it nearly killed the Pruitt boy on the second afternoon when a bag went off his shoulder at thirty feet and he went with it and caught the shelf with one arm.
Iris Wendt ran the shelf and would not let more than three people on it at once.
Ames Pruitt went into that crack forty times with his arms bare to the shoulder and came out with them bleeding every single time and would not let anybody else do it, and on the evening of the seventh he came down the face for the last time and sat on the bottom rock and could not close his hands.
"It's in," he said.
"All of it?"
"Four hundred and ten pounds in the east forty feet, stemmed with creek mud and rock for nine feet at every mouth, and two boosters on shock tube with a cap in each and the tube run down the face to a shot box behind that spur."
He nodded at the rock. "The other four hundred pounds is sitting in the cart and it is going home with us or it is going in the creek, and I want a vote on that later."
"When can you fire it."
"Any time from now," Ames said.
Stuart looked up at the face.
"Then we do not fire it now," he said. "We fire it when there are sixty men on the wrong side of it, and that is the whole of the thing, and nobody moves off that spur until I say."
They waited two days.
On the ninth at four in the afternoon, Odile Sorenson came down off the west watch at a dead run and did not have the wind to speak when she got there and had to put her hands on her knees.
"Say it," Stuart said.
"Coming down."
"How many."
"I could not count them properly. Forty. More than forty. On foot and there are four horses and there is a wagon."
"How far."
"Two miles and they are coming fast."
Stuart was already moving.
"Ames. Shot box. Everybody else off this road and up that fold and do not stop until you are two hundred feet above it. Iris, get the second cart off the road, get it in the creek if you have to."
"Stuart."
That was Camille, and she had the glass, and she had gone up eleven feet onto the spur and had it on the road to the west, and her voice did a thing Stuart had heard exactly twice in four years.
"What."
"They are not men," Camille said.
"Say it."
"There are women in that column," she said. "There are children in that column. Stuart, there are children in it and they are running."
Stuart got up onto the spur and took the glass out of her hand.
A mile and a half up the road, coming down the canyon in the flat gray light, was a crowd of people spread across the whole width of it with no rows in it at all, and there were four men on horses on the outside of them, and behind the horses, a long way back and coming hard,
was a line of men on foot with guns.
And out in front of all of it, a hundred yards clear and running with his coat open and his arms going, was a young man with his head bare.
Stuart put the glass on him.
It was Josiah Tarp.