Before we took off to shaft number forty-two we wired once more to Appaloosa to check with Chastain regarding the lookout of Driggs.
We waited for the response, then Chastain replied that he had nothing to report. He stayed clear of the hotel but kept the entrance in sight from a long distance, but said he did not see anyone matching the description we provided him of Driggs and the warden’s wife.
Virgil and I followed Cotton and a handful of his men riding in a buckboard up a winding road to the location of number forty-two. The moon was out, but it was a little under half full and there was slight cloud cover, so it was dark as we traveled up. A few of the men in the buckboard carried lanterns, so the path up to the mine was easy to follow. It was a good half-hour ride out of Bridgewater, and the moment we arrived the men bailed out of the buckboard and got to work.
Cotton turned the buckboard around and pulled next to Virgil and me.
“Follow me. We’ll go around to the other side of the bluff. Leave our animals over there, away from the blast.”
Virgil and I did as Cotton said, and once we got the horses tied we walked back around the bluff with Cotton to where the men were setting the explosives.
“There’s the entrance of forty-two,” Cotton said. “You can see the rails disappearing into the middle of it where it’s covered up from the blast. We’re setting small explosives at the entrance by the rails. We’ll blast away at the cover-up. We have to do this a little bit at a time, just like we do when we’re building a shaft. Otherwise we could bring the whole damn mountain crumbling down over the entrance, and we don’t want that.”
“How far to the other side?” Virgil said.
“Oh, ’bout an eighth of a mile,” Cotton said.
“And how far is it to the other side of the mountain?” Virgil said.
“Long damn way,” Cotton said. “There is no short way over, take half a day to ride over there from here.”
“How long will it take to go at this a bit at a time,” I said.
“Hard to say. Depending on how much we need to shore up, or if we have to shore up. My guess is the blast that closed it up happened just inside the portal collar-set, which is sturdy as hell, so I’m thinking the blast just brought in the rock behind that . . . we’ll know soon.”
The first blast was ready within a matter of minutes. Cotton’s men had moved back toward where Virgil and I were standing. Cotton lit the fuse on the dynamite, then walked back over to where we were, just behind the edge of the bluff. The explosion sounded kind of muffled from where we were standing, but the light from the blast lit up the pine trees surrounding us like a lightning strike. Then the men moved back to the shaft and got to work on preparing a second blast.
“Why this?” Virgil said.
I looked to Virgil. He was staring off, looking out into the dark, then looked at me.
“Why up here?”
“I know,” I said.
“Leave your horse here and enter this here shaft,” he said.
“Don’t make a lot of sense.”
“Not really,” Virgil said.
“You think maybe Degraw lured them?”
“Crossed my mind,” Virgil said.
“But then if Degraw did that, he wouldn’t have left the horses.”
“No, I know,” Virgil said.
“We could just get going and ride around to the other side?” I said.
“Let’s see what happens here first,” he said.
“Sounds right,” I said.
Virgil looked off for a moment, thinking.
“Stringer has been family to us, Everett.”
“He has,” I said.
“Damn good hand,” Virgil said.
I just looked at Virgil but didn’t say anything for a moment, then he said, “He helped us with Bragg way back when.”
“That he did,” I said.
“These are some bad hombres we’ve come across,” Virgil said.
“Damn right they are,” I said.
“Five dead, two back behind the walls,” he said.
“According to Tillary, these last two are the worst,” I said. “And according to me, the one of the two that I know, Tillary’s account is correct.”
“Driggs might be long gone,” Virgil said.
“Degraw, too,” I said.
“I know,” Virgil said. “Here we go.”
I followed Virgil’s look to the miners walking toward us and Cotton lit the fuse for the second blast.