“Ike, what’ve you got that for?”
Pryde stopped. “Didn’t you say bring it?”
“I got all we need,” Bowen said. “Set it down there and we’ll pick it up on the way back.” His eyes moved to Brazil. No reaction. No change in his tight-jawed, narrow-eyed expression.
Bowen turned the corner and moved down the shelf, along the thirty feet which they had not yet dynamited, then over the widened, graded section-roughly fifty feet of this-to the place where they would set off the next blast.
Manring was waiting there. The grading crew had moved out and were already at the bottom of the trail. “Ready?” asked Manring.
Bowen only nodded. He stepped into the closet-sized space that had been cut into the wall and began placing the charges. The horizontal chamber that Manring had prepared was waist high and ran parallel with the wall of the canyon. It was deep enough to hold all of the charges, but it was too wide; and with each charge that he placed Bowen would tamp sand into the chamber so the dynamite would fit snugly and there would be no air space. When he finished, only the fuse could be seen extending from the packed sand.
Bowen looked at Brazil. “You said you wanted to light it.”
“I’ll hold your rifle,” Pryde said.
“I guess you would,” Brazil said. He waved the barrel of the Winchester. “You all get out of the way. Start moving up.” He drew a match and stooped over the fuse, then called after the three men, “This one’s ten feet?”
Bowen turned and nodded. “Three minutes’ worth.” He watched Brazil strike the match and hold it to the fuse. “Give him room,” Bowen murmured.
He turned again, now hearing Brazil coming up behind them, and started to walk faster.
Brazil called, “What’s the hurry?”
Bowen glanced back. “That one’s bigger than the others. We got to get all the way up to the top.”
Pryde let Bowen pass him. He was next to Brazil as they turned into the draw. Then he stopped. And as Brazil went on, Bowen and Manring ahead of him, he stooped quickly, took the knife from the wooden case and cut the fuse so that less than a foot of it remained. Bowen looked back as he brought the knife down.
“What’s the matter?” Bowen called.
Brazil stopped.
Pryde stepped in front of the cut-off fuse and waved up to Bowen, the knife palmed in his other hand. “Go on. I got to get this box is all.” He watched Bowen and Manring move up through the draw. Brazil turned to follow them.
“Hey!” Pryde called sharply, bringing Brazil around. He waited. Brazil frowned. Now Bowen and Manring were reaching the top of the draw. Pryde waited a moment longer, until they were over the rim. Then he said, “Come here.”
Brazil started toward him, but stopped, as if only then remembering the burning fuse down on the trail. “Pick it up…we got to move!”
Pryde stared at him. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“What’d you say?”
“You heard me.”
Brazil’s gaze went beyond Pryde and abruptly his eyes opened wide. “What’d you do to that fuse!”
Something was wrong. Something was going on that shouldn’t be happening. But even as he realized it, even as his nerves came alive and he reflexively brought up the Winchester, it was too late, Pryde was on him.
He tried to go back, tried to leave the Winchester, but Pryde’s left hand pushed up on the barrel. Brazil’s arms went up with it and he half turned to wrench the Winchester from Pryde’s grasp. As he did, Pryde’s right hand drove the knife into his side. Brazil gasped and the shock of it was in his eyes and in his straining, open-mouthed expression as he slumped to the ground.
Pryde was at the fuse again. He struck a match, touched it to the fuse and started to run. A ten-inch fuse-time enough to climb out of the draw, but not for Bowen to come down after Brazil. You had to think of Bowen doing things like that.
He was twenty feet from the rim when the main charge went off and the suddenness of it made him stumble. His ears rang and there was dust in the air and the echo up canyon and suddenly Pryde fell again.
His hands clutched at his stomach. He felt a wetness and looking down saw that it was his own blood. He could not believe it, but it was there. He had been shot and the bullet had gone completely through him. But there had been no report! Only the ringing and the echo and the slamming against his back that could have been a rock-
He rolled over and felt himself sliding and then he saw Brazil at the bottom of the draw. He was lying on his stomach aiming the Winchester.
“Ike!”-above him, Bowen’s voice.
Pryde saw the Winchester raise and he called out to warn Bowen.
Bowen had already seen Brazil. He went down, rolling away from the slope, hearing Pryde’s one-word scream lost in the high-whining, dust-kicking report of the Winchester.
There was no time to think, yet it was in his mind to help Pryde. He had returned to the defile in time to see only part of it-Pryde lighting the fuse and running, Brazil rolling to his stomach, bringing up the Winchester, then the blast going off down on the shelf and Pryde stumbling-
And now, even knowing it was too late, Bowen thought of Lizann’s revolver. He pushed up to his hands and knees, then was moving, running for the row of detonator boxes when the draw erupted behind him.
The force of it slammed him to the ground and he covered his head with his arms as the sand and rock fragments showered down on him. Then he was up again, the hissing ringing of the explosion still tight about him, seeing Manring coming toward him, Manring looking past him to where the draw had been.
The left wall of the draw had been blown in, completely filling the narrow depression, so that now a steep slope of shattered rock dropped to the shelf and covered the section of it that had curved into the draw.
“Ike’s under there,” Bowen murmured. “He cut the fuse short, tried to leave Brazil there, but Brazil shot him-”
Manring looked back toward the trees. What had happened to Pryde meant nothing-not with Mimbres about to appear. He said urgently, “We got to move!” and started back toward the equipment.
Bowen stared down the slope. Was it worth that? You didn’t do it-it was his own fault!
“Come on!” Manring’s voice.
Bowen’s gaze went down into the canyon. He saw the convicts, small figures far below, and a rider moving up canyon. He turned and ran toward Manring. “Cut the fuses!”
“With what?” Manring looked at him helplessly. “Ike had the knife!” He turned to the trees nervously. “With what, damn it!”
“We’ll cut them,” Bowen said. “Hold on to yourself.”
“We got to get out of here!”
Bowen’s eyes went over the equipment. No knife…but the hand axe.
He picked it up, gathered the five dynamite sticks he had prepared and had lined up on the ground, ran his hand down all five fuses at once, drawing them together, then chopped down with the hatchet-once, twice, again, until he had chopped through all of them and only eight inches of fuse remained with each cartridge.
“There!” Manring was still looking at the trees. “I saw one!”
Bowen looked up. Off through the trees he could see a movement. Now you have to be careful, he thought. Not too close.
He struck a match, held it to a fuse, then picked up the stick and threw it. The dynamite exploded as it struck the ground ten yards out from the trees.
He told Manring, “When I throw the next one, run.” And he thought: You don’t even have to light it. But it’s better to be sure.
He struck a match, touched it to a fuse and threw the stick in the same direction. It was end over end in the air as Manring started to run, striking the ground and exploding as Bowen took the revolver from the detonator box and shoved it inside his shirt and into his waist. He picked up the three remaining cartridges and ran after Manring.