Chapter 14 #3
Stuart moved the glass west, and then east, and then back, and then he saw them.
Four hundred yards up, on the north side, well behind the line of men in the rocks, two figures were moving up the canyon away from the fight. One of them was walking. The other was being carried on the back of a third person who had come down out of the rocks to get them.
"There's three," Stuart said.
"Three what."
"There were two under that rock and there are three of them now and they are going west, up the canyon, behind those men."
"Somebody came back for them."
"Somebody came out of the rocks behind their own line and picked up a man with a broken leg and is carrying him away from us," Stuart said.
He held the glass on them until the light went.
Then he put it down.
"All right," he said. "Everybody off this hill. Nell, you go first because you are fastest and you are going to be at the bottom telling everybody where the loose rock is. Camille, you go with Mr. Halloran and you go slow and neither of you argues about it."
They came off the shelf in the last of the light and ran the eighty yards east through the gap and out onto the flat, and the last two hundred yards Stuart did at a limping walk with Camille's good shoulder under his arm because his hip had finished with him entirely.
Ames Pruitt was standing at the shot box with his hands behind his back.
Iris Wendt was beside him with her hand on the handle and had not put it on the handle until she saw them come through.
"How far back are they," Ames said.
"Four hundred yards and in the rocks and they are going to come through that gap the minute it is full dark."
"Are all of ours out."
Stuart stopped.
He turned around and looked back at forty feet of black gap in a canyon wall.
"Count," he said.
Davey was not there and so Josiah Tarp did it, and he did it out loud by name off no sheet at all because he had memorized every one of them in eleven days, and it took ninety seconds and at the end of it he said, "Fourteen and fourteen," and Stuart Redman let out a breath.
"Everybody down," he said. "Behind the cart. Hands over your ears and your mouths open."
"Mouths open?"
"Mouths open," Iris Wendt said. "It is not the noise. It is the pressure. Open your mouth or you will be deaf in one ear for a month and I have seen it."
"Ames," Stuart said.
"I am not firing it," Ames Pruitt said. "She is firing it. I loaded it. That is the rule in every outfit I ever worked in and I have been standing here for an hour being glad somebody made me remember it."
Iris Wendt looked at Stuart.
"Say it," she said.
"Fire in the hole," Stuart said.
She turned the handle.
There was about half a second of absolutely nothing at all and Stuart had time to think, the caps are five years old, and then the whole canyon went white and then the sound arrived and it was not a sound.
It came up through the ground first.
The flat under them jumped. The cart moved four inches sideways with four hundred pounds in it. Somebody screamed and it was a long way away and underwater.
And then ninety feet of the north face of that canyon came off the hill.
It did not fall. That was the thing Stuart could never explain to anybody afterward.
It leaned out into the last of the light, all of it, forty feet of rock face across and ninety feet up, and it hung there for something that was probably a quarter of a second and felt like eleven, and then it came down into the road in one piece and broke.
The noise of the breaking went on for nineteen seconds.
Then dust, and rock still running, and the sound of single stones coming down off the top for a long time after.
Stuart got up on his knees behind the cart with his ears ringing and his mouth full of dust and could not see one thing.
"Lamp," somebody said. "Lamp, lamp."
It was eleven minutes before the dust cleared enough for anybody to walk in there with a light, and Stuart went in with Ames Pruitt and Iris Wendt and nobody else, and they went in slow with the lantern held up.
The gap was gone.
Where forty feet of road had been there was a slope of broken rock forty feet high going up into the dark, and the creek had backed up behind it and was already spreading out over the gravel.
And along the south wall, where the water ran, there was a gap.
It was not six feet. It was about four, and it was ugly, and you would have to go up over rock and down the other side.
"Four," Ames Pruitt said.
"Can a person get over it."
"A person can get over it," he said. "An old person cannot. A person carrying a child cannot. And a horse cannot and a wagon cannot and forty-one men cannot come through it in the dark tonight, and that is the only thing I promised anybody."
Iris Wendt put the lamp up against the south wall.
"Ames," she said.
"What."
"There is somebody on the other side."
They all went still.
And out of the dark on the far side of forty feet of new rock, over the sound of water going where it had never gone before, a voice came through the four foot gap, unhurried, a man of fifty or sixty who used all of his words.
"Is my father with you," it said.