Escape from Five Shadows

12

“Wait a minute,” Renda called. “This is far enough!” He brought up his shotgun as the four men on the climbing trail ahead of him stopped.

Brazil, leading the file, called back, “He says you got to start at the top.”

“You believe everything he tells you?” Renda’s face, flushed from the climb, showed sudden anger.

To Bowen who was second in line, carrying two coils of fuse over his shoulder and a box of detonators in his hand, Brazil said, “The old man can’t take it, so he’s got to yell at somebody.”

Bowen turned and looked past Pryde and Manring who followed him to Renda. “You want to stand here with fifty pounds of dynamite and talk about it?”

Renda edged along the inside of the trail close to the wall, past Manring and Pryde. As he reached Bowen, Pryde lowered the case of dynamite from his shoulder, placed it against the wall and sat down on it.

Manring, carrying a shovel, a hand axe and a sapling pole, looked at him uncertainly. “You better be careful.”

As Manring spoke, Renda turned quickly. “What are you doing!”

“I’m resting,” Pryde said, “while you talk it out.”

“You can’t sit on dynamite!”

“And I can’t stand with it a hunnert feet above nowhere while you get over your nervous state.”

Bowen said to Renda, “I explained it once. You got to start at the top.”

“He don’t take to high places,” Pryde said. “Or marching behind fifty pounds of charge.”

Renda turned on him angrily. “Pick it up!”

Pryde remained seated, leaning back against the wall. “There’s more chance of dropping it than my hind-end heat setting it off.”

“I said pick it up!” The tight-muscled, open-eyed expression of Renda’s face was dark with anger. He was aware of the four men watching him, and wanting to show neither anger nor fear he said to Bowen, more calmly, “All right. We’ll talk about it upstairs.”

Rising, lifting the case of explosives, Pryde said, “Frank, you want to carry this a while?”

But Renda, refusing to be angered further, ignored Pryde. He remained in line where he stood and followed Bowen the rest of the way up the trail, along the slanting wall, then into a depression where the rock had fallen away and the trail was less steep. The depression cut into the wall and formed a forty-foot draw from the shelf up to the rim of the canyon.

As he came up out of the draw, Bowen saw a Mimbreño tracker off in the trees. He was there for a moment, then gone. That’s your big problem, Bowen thought.

Renda was still breathing heavily as he reached level ground. He stepped aside as Pryde and Manring came up and said to Bowen, “All right, why do you start at the top?”

“I figure-” Bowen began.

“You figure!”

“I never blew up a mountain before.”

Renda exhaled. “Go on.”

“I figure,” Bowen said again, emphasizing the word, “if you start from the bottom, as you work up you’ll be covering what you just uncovered every time you set a blast. You get your road widened and the shoulder built up, then touch one off higher up and”-he snapped his finger-“like that, no more road.”

Manring said, “That makes sense.”

Renda glanced at him. Then to Bowen he said, “What do you do first?”

“Test the fuse.” Bowen placed the box of detonators on the ground carefully and took the two coils of fuse from his arm, dropping one of them and handing the end of the other fuse to Manring. Then he walked away from them, straightening the line as he did, measuring it with the length of his hand as he unwound it. With ten feet of it played out he said to Renda, “I need a knife.”

“What for?”

“To cut the fuse!”

“I’ll do the cutting.”

Bowen shrugged. “Then over the next couple of weeks you’re going to be living on an awful lot of dynamite.”

Renda brought out a pocket knife. He hesitated, then handed it to Bowen. “Every day when we quit, you give this back to me. Closed.”

Bowen smiled. “You don’t trust anybody.” He cut the fuse, then stretched it out on the ground. “Have you got a clock with a sweep hand on it?” When Renda nodded, Bowen said, “Start timing as soon as it catches.” He pulled a match from his hat-band, struck it on the bottom of his shoe and touched it to the fuse.

The fuse hissed and a small flame spurted from the end of it. There was little smoke, but the fuse moved and seemed alive with the flame burning through its powder-filled core. “It’s slow enough,” Renda said.

“Mind your clock,” Bowen told him. When the fuse had burned all the way, he looked at Renda again. “How long?”

“About three minutes.”

“Mr. Renda,” Bowen said mildly, “we’re talking about how much time to get clear of a blast. Don’t give me any about.”

Renda glared at him, but looked at his watch again and said, “Just a little over three minutes. Maybe five seconds.”

After a moment Bowen said, “That means it burns just about a foot in eighteen seconds. Maybe you think that’s slow. It’s not when you’re lighting the end of it.”

“I’m impressed,” Renda said. “Now what?”

“Now we’ll test the charges,” Bowen answered. Manring drew the hand axe from his belt and handed it to Bowen as he moved to the case of dynamite. On the top of the case was stenciled, This Side Up, below that, High Explosives-Dangerous, and at the end which Bowen opened, 50 lbs. No. 1 Dynamite-1¼×8 inches.

“You’re supposed to use a wooden hammer and wedge to open this,” Bowen said.

Renda edged toward him, then back again. “Why?”

“Something about a metal tool slipping and hitting the charge,” Bowen said, prying the top boards loose with the hand axe. “You never know what’ll happen.”

Renda’s hands were tight about the shotgun and he stood without moving. “We don’t need any talk. Just hurry it up.”

“That’s another rule,” Bowen said. “You don’t hurry.” He lifted one of the ten paraffin-coated packets from the case and opened it.

“Here you are,” Bowen said. He extended one of the dynamite cartridges to Renda.

“I don’t want it!”

“I thought maybe you wanted to see one close.” Bowen rose and glanced around, then moved to the edge of the draw and looked down, studying the narrow defile that reached to the trail.

“Earl,” Bowen said then. “Take your stick down there and poke a hole in the left-hand wall. Right down at the end of it.”

“How deep?”

“Deep as you can make it. Start about a yard in from the corner.” As Manring started down the defile, Brazil following him, Bowen cut a three-foot length of fuse. He opened the box of detonators, took one of the copper capsules from its felt wrapping and began to gently push the fuse into the capsule’s open end. He did this very carefully until the fuse was touching the detonating compound. Then, with his teeth, he crimped the open end of the detonator tightly to the fuse.

Pryde said, “You ought’n to use your mouth for that.”

“I don’t see any nippers around,” Bowen said, and thought: For a man in the construction business he’s missing a damn awful lot of tools.

“How many sticks?” asked Pryde.

“We’ll try three,” Bowen said. “And find a stick-sharp pointed and about the size of a pencil.” He moved down the draw then, holding the detonator gently in his closed hand. Pryde followed, but Renda came only halfway down.

Brazil stepped back as Bowen reached them. He saw Renda then and called, “What’s the matter, Frank?”

“Mind what you’re paid for!”

Brazil was grinning. “You’re going to miss something way up there.”

“I can see all right.” Renda was twenty feet up the draw standing close to one of the steeply sloping banks.

“That deep enough?” Manring asked. “The stick’s no damn good.”

“You’ll have to get a metal rod,” Bowen said. He looked closely at the hole. It was formed in a slanting crevice in the rock and was not really a hole at all, only the rock fragments cleared from the crevice, but it would serve the purpose.

Pryde handed him two cartridges and Bowen inserted them into the seam. As he did he murmured, “Look around, Ike. Get the lay of things. Figure how the Mimbres would come from the other side of the canyon.”

He unwrapped one end of the third cartridge and with the pinyon twig that Pryde gave him punched a small hole. The detonator went into this, and Bowen rewrapped the paraffin-coated paper so that only the tip of the detonator, with the fuse extending from it, could be seen. This went into the crevice, then loose sand on top of it so there would be no space between the charges and the walls of the crevice. Bowen tamped the sand gently and now they were ready.

He looked down into the canyon-seeing the convicts grouped around the wagons that were pulled over to the far side and the two guards mounted and standing off from them-then lit the fuse. As he turned he saw Renda go over the top of the draw. “Frank’s already cleared,” Brazil said, then waited to go up last to show that he wasn’t afraid.

They moved back from the rim of the canyon and a moment later the blast went off. Dust billowed up out of the draw and close on the explosion they heard the faint boom of an echo up canyon, then another, then silence and the dust hung in the sunlight above them.

As it began to clear, they went down into the draw again. The corner that met the trail was sheered off in an undercut. Shattered rock and sand were scattered over the shelf and much of it had gone over the edge into the canyon.

“That wasn’t so big,” Renda said. He was at ease again.

“The next one’ll be bigger,” Bowen said. “First you find out what a few sticks will do. Then you add to it.” He glanced at Pryde, then back at Renda. “We can make them as big as you want.”

Bowen organized the routine and that day they blasted three times. At Bowen’s direction they began thirty feet down the trail from the defile. Four convicts were brought up and put to work digging into the wall of the canyon. Their job was to hollow a niche six feet deep and wide enough for Manring to work in. Manring would then cut a hole, parallel with the canyon wall, for the dynamite charges. As he did this, the four convicts would return to the bottom of the canyon.

Renda said, why not send them around into the draw? But Bowen objected. “Once we light the fuse that’s the way we run, and we’re not going to have anybody standing around in the way.” There was an anxious moment, a moment of seeing the plan that was already forming go to nothing. “That’s why we started down a ways,” Bowen explained, “instead of right at the defile. So we’d have cover to use. But it won’t do us any good crowded with men.” Renda said nothing and Bowen added, “Then, after we’re about halfway down the trail and working the dynamite from the bottom, we’ll come back and blow the part we skipped. Right now, though, we got to have that pass clear.”

Renda thought it over. “All right,” he said finally, “send them down before you set your charge”-and Bowen’s anxiety was past.

They exploded the first charge at midmorning-a forty-pound charge with the cartridges tied into bundles of eight-and the convicts were kept busy until almost noon clearing the shattered rock, spreading it evenly over the widened section of road.

As Bowen thought would happen, Renda went below before the first charge was set off, leaving Brazil to watch them. Brazil remained close. He would wait until the fuse was lighted, then go for the draw with them. He seemed fascinated by the dynamite, by the force and the noise of it, and he watched every phase of the work carefully.

That afternoon they moved a dozen feet farther down the trail. This would be slow going, Bowen realized, blowing only ten or twelve feet at a time; but Renda did not have drilling equipment and without it they could use only smaller charges effectively. Another niche was carved out of the crusted sand and rock and another blast set off. Then later, after the third charge was exploded, after watching Brazil and now realizing there would be only one more day of using the draw for cover, Bowen made up his mind.

And later again, in the barracks that evening, after the lamps had been put out and the three of them crouched in the darkness beneath the window, Bowen explained his escape plan. He told Pryde and Manring exactly what each of them would do. He made sure there were no objections. He emphasized that each man had to do what he was supposed to do, and nothing else. And if they did, this would be their last night at Five Shadows.