Chapter 14 #2
"Three down on the road behind," he said. "Two got up. One is a man of about sixty with a leg and I have got him under a rock on the north side and I have put Ilse Brantner with him and I could not carry him and there was not time."
"How far back."
"Six hundred yards."
"Then he is behind their line in four minutes."
"He is behind their line in four minutes," Pierre Aubert agreed.
Stuart stood in the gap.
"Everybody east," he said. "Now. Pruitt, get them moving and do not let them stop. Old man, get your dogs off this road."
"And you?"
"I am going up that fold with the rifles and we are going to make forty-one men come through a forty foot gap at a walk," Stuart said, "because if they come through it at a run they will be among those people in three minutes and there is not one thing anybody can do about it after that."
He went up the fold at a speed that finished his hip for the day.
Camille had picked the place and it was the right place, which was not the highest and not the closest, but a shelf of rock two hundred feet up and eighty yards east of the gap,
from which you could see the whole of the road for four hundred yards west and nobody down there could see a muzzle against the sky.
Nell Fairweather was flat behind a rock with the 10/22 and three magazines laid out in a row on her coat.
Ellery Halloran had the scoped bolt gun on a folded coat.
"Range," Stuart said.
"The gap is eighty," Halloran said. "The bend is two ninety. That white rock on the north side is four hundred and eleven and I ranged it off my boots on the second day."
"Nell, what have you got."
"A hundred," she said. "Anything past a hundred with this is a waste of a round and I am not going to pretend otherwise."
"Then you do not fire until they are in the gap."
"Yes sir."
"Mr. Halloran."
"Here."
"I want to say a thing and I want everybody to hear it," Stuart said. "We are four rifles and they are forty-one men, and there is no version of this where we beat them by shooting."
"Then what are we doing."
"We are making them slow," Stuart said. "That is the whole of it. Every minute they are walking instead of running is a hundred yards more that a hundred people get away from this canyon, and a man who is being shot at from above walks."
"For how long."
"Until dark or until they stop," Stuart said, "and it is quarter to five and it is dark in this canyon at ten past."
The horses came around the bend at four thirty-eight.
Halloran shot the first horse at two hundred and ninety yards and it was the most deliberate thing Stuart ever saw a man do, and the horse went down in the road and the man came off it and got up and went into the rocks on the south side.
The other three turned around.
"That's the horses," Halloran said, and worked the bolt and did not look pleased with himself at all.
"Why the horse," Nell said.
"Because a man on foot is one man," Halloran said. "A man on a horse is a man who gets to those people in four minutes. I have been a warden twenty-six years and I have never shot a horse in my life and I am going to think about that one."
The line came around the bend at four forty-one.
They came at a jog and they came in a bunch, which told Stuart in about two seconds that whatever else these men were, they were not soldiers and had never once been shot at from above.
Halloran fired at three hundred and fifty.
He did not hit anybody. He put the round into the road eleven feet in front of the bunch and the whole of it came apart sideways into the rocks, and then he put a second round into the north side high and dropped rock on them, and the jog stopped.
After that it took them nine minutes to make a hundred yards.
"That's it," Stuart said. "That is exactly it. Keep doing that."
"I am going to run out of rounds doing that."
"How many have you got."
"Nineteen."
"Then make them nineteen minutes," Stuart said.
At four fifty-two a man got up on the south side and made about forty yards along the creek in the shadow and Camille shot him at two hundred and twenty yards lying on her right side with one arm, which nobody who was there ever forgot.
At four fifty-eight they stopped coming.
They did not go back. They got into the rocks on both sides four hundred yards up and they stayed there, and one of them shouted something that nobody on the shelf could make out.
"They are waiting for dark," Camille said.
"They are waiting for dark," Stuart agreed. "And dark is in eleven minutes and then they will come through that gap and there is nothing any of us can do about it."
"Then we go now," Halloran said.
"Not yet."
"Stuart."
"Two more minutes," Stuart said, "because there is a man under a rock on the north side at six hundred yards with a broken leg and a woman sitting with him, and I am not going off this hill without knowing."
He put the glass up.
He found the rock. He found it because Pierre Aubert had told him exactly which one and had described the shape of it twice.
There was nobody under it.