Elmore Leonard - Escape from Five Shadows

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.”