Chapter 14
Stuart came off the spur in a way his hip was going to make him pay for and hit the road running.
"Ames!"
"I'm at the box."
"Do not touch it. Do not put your hand on it. Hands behind your back, both of them, and stand there and look at me and nothing else."
"Stuart, if that column gets under this face"
"I know exactly what happens if that column gets under this face," Stuart said. "That is why you are standing there with your hands behind your back. Iris."
"Here."
"You are the second man on that box and you know why."
Iris Wendt looked at him and understood it in about half a second, which was why he had picked her.
"Because he has been under that rock for three days and I have not," she said.
"Because you have been standing back from it and he has been inside it," Stuart said, "and a man who has loaded a hole wants to fire it. That is not an insult, Ames."
"It is not an insult and it is entirely true," Ames Pruitt said, "and I am going to stand right here with my hands behind my back and I am glad somebody said it out loud."
Stuart turned around in the road.
Fourteen people were looking at him.
"Everybody listen," he said. "We have got about nine minutes and I am going to say this once because there is not time to say it twice."
"Say it."
"There are eleven hundred yards of road between us and them and forty feet of gap at our backs. There are a hundred people coming down it who cannot run any further, and there is a line of men behind them who can."
He pointed east.
"Camille. Nell. Halloran. Up that fold, two hundred feet, and get behind rock and do not fire one round until I am under you. Camille, you have got one arm and you will take the Lebel up there and you will lie down and you will shoot lying down and you will not argue with me about it in front of
everybody."
"I was not going to argue."
"You were absolutely going to argue."
"Yes," Camille said, and went.
"Bride. Kestrel. Tobin. Get that second cart off this road and get it in the creek bed under the south wall and cover it with brush and then get up that fold behind them. Four hundred pounds of nitrate in an open cart in the middle of a gunfight is the single stupidest thing in this canyon."
"It won't go off," Iris said.
"It will not go off unless a boosted charge goes off next to it," Stuart said, "and there is a boosted charge in that crack over our heads, and I am not having that conversation with anybody's mother. Move it."
They moved it.
"Odile."
"Sir."
"You go west up that road four hundred yards and you get up on the north side out of the road, and when the front of that crowd comes past you, you come down out of the rocks and you get in front of them and you walk backwards and you shout one thing and one thing only."
"What thing."
"Water on the left, rocks on the right, keep going," Stuart said. "You do not stop. You do not help anybody. You walk backwards in front of a hundred frightened people and you say the same eleven words over and over until you are hoarse, and you do not change one word of it."
"Why the same words?"
"Because a frightened crowd does not hear sentences," Stuart said. "It hears a rhythm. If you say a different thing every time, they stop and look at you and the whole column bunches and somebody goes in that creek. Same words, same speed, walking backward, all the way through."
Odile Sorenson said, "Water on the left, rocks on the right, keep going," and turned and ran.
"Pruitt."
The Pruitt boy came up.
"You have got the strongest back here and you are going to hate this job."
"Sir."
"East end of the gap. When they come through, they are going to want to stop, because the gap is where it opens out and it feels like arriving. You do not let one single person stop in that gap.
You push them through it and you keep pushing them and you get them two hundred yards east onto the flat and you do not let anybody sit down inside a hundred yards of that rock face."
"What if they won't go?"
"They will go if you are loud and you never once stop moving," Stuart said. "A person who has been running for a mile will follow anybody who is walking with purpose. Be the man walking with purpose."
He turned around.
"Old man."
Pierre Aubert was standing in the middle of the road with his five dogs sitting in a line behind him and had not moved since Camille said the word children.
"I am here."
"I need your dogs and I need them for a thing they have never done."
"Say it."
"There are going to be people who fall," Stuart said. "There always are. Old ones and children and somebody's ankle in that gravel, and they are going to go down and the crowd is going to go over the top of them and that is how you lose eleven people in a canyon without anybody firing a shot."
"Yes."
"Can your dogs hold a line."
Pierre Aubert looked at him.
"They can hold a line," he said.
"Behind the crowd. Not in it. Behind it, across the whole road, moving at the speed of the slowest person. Anything that goes down, the dogs stop and they stand over it and they do not let anybody past until I come."
"They will not know what they are standing over."
"They do not have to," Stuart said. "They only have to stand."
The old man went down on one knee in the gravel and took each dog's head in both hands in turn and said something to it in French that Stuart did not ask about.
Then he stood up and walked west and the five of them went with him in a line.
Bride Kelsall came back up out of the creek bed with her sleeves already rolled.
"Where do you want me."
"East end, two hundred yards past the gap, on the flat. You do not come into this canyon for anybody."
"There are going to be people hurt in here."
"There are going to be people hurt in here and they are going to come out to you," Stuart said, "and if you are in the middle of it you will be one of them and then nobody has got a nurse.
Two hundred yards east and pick a flat place and start tearing up whatever you have got before the first one arrives."
"I have got nothing to tear up."
"You have got fourteen coats," Stuart said, "and every person in this party is going to hand you one on the way past. Say it to them as they come."
The front of the crowd came into the narrow at four twenty.
Odile Sorenson came in front of it walking backwards with her arms out, saying eleven words in a voice that had already gone hoarse, and the front of that crowd came through the gap in a mass eight abreast and every single one of them was looking at her instead of at the rock.
Stuart stood on the north side with his back against stone and did not move.
That was the hardest thing he did in the whole of it and he knew it at the time.
Every part of him wanted to be in that road with his hands out doing something, and every part of him that had been alive five years knew that a man standing still against a wall is a thing a crowd flows around, and a man reaching into a crowd is a rock in a river.
They came past him for four minutes.
They were not what he had seen on the ridge. On the ridge they had been rows. Here they were people, and they were exhausted in a way that eighteen hours in a yard does not do to anybody, and about a third of them were carrying something.
That was the thing he noticed and it told him everything.
They had bundles. Blankets tied. A woman with a cook pot on a strap. A man with a sack of what was probably flour that he had carried four miles and was going to have to put down inside the next mile and did not know it yet.
They had not run out of a gate in a panic.
Somebody had told them to pack.
"Josiah!"
The boy came out of the mass and got to the rock wall and put both hands on his knees and could not speak for eleven seconds.
"Breathe," Stuart said. "Do not talk. Breathe three times."
He breathed three times.
"Gate's open," he said.
"How."
"Fenna," Josiah said. "Fenna and eleven women and the bar. They bar it from the outside and there is a slot in the wall by the hinge where a man can get his arm through to drop it,
and she has been looking at that slot for two years and she worked out that a woman's arm can get through it the other way."
"And the men."
"They were not in the wall." He got another breath. "They walked us in on the fifth and then they went back down to the mouth, all but nine, because the mouth is where the stores are and he has been moving stores for two weeks."
"Nine men in the wall."
"Nine men in a wall with a hundred and eleven people in it," Josiah said, "and Fenna has been counting that too."
"Where are the nine."
Josiah Tarp looked at him.
"Six of them are in the wall," he said, "and they are not coming out, and I am not going to say any more about it in front of anybody today."
"All right."
"The other three are on those horses."
Stuart looked west up the road.
The crowd was still coming through and behind the last of it, four hundred yards back, were the four horses, and a long way behind the horses was a line of men on foot coming down the canyon at a jog.
"How many behind."
"Forty-one," Josiah said. "I counted them at the two mile."
"You counted them."
"I count everything," Josiah Tarp said. "It is the only thing I have ever been good at and it has been used for the worst possible purpose for five years and I would like to use it for something."
"Then keep counting," Stuart said. "Go east, past the gap, find the woman with her sleeves rolled and tell her what you saw on the road behind you. How many down, where, and what is wrong with them. That is worth more to her than anything I can give her."
The tail came through at four thirty-one.
It came through with five dogs walking across the road behind it in a line at the pace of an old woman, and Pierre Aubert walking behind the dogs, and twice on that last stretch the line had stopped and stood and the old man had picked somebody up.
He came through the gap last of all.