BAD TONY LOOKED WEST. A column of smoke was rising from the Guyandotte River. The railroad trestle. He looked back to his ammo runner, speaking through his teeth. “How many rounds left, did you say?”
The boy wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “Ain’t but ten belts left for the Browning, sir. I thought we had more in the other truck. We’re running low on cartridges for the high-powers, too.”
Tony growled. “We had north of fifty thousand rounds yesterday.”
“It’s been a whole hurricane of shooting, sir. Some of the boys, they’re ankle-deep in brass. It’s filling up their trenches and boots, coming out their dang ears.”
Above the foxhole, the incessant splinter and crack of the sky, the air sizzling with crisscrossing rounds. The fire was as thick as anything Tony had experienced overseas. He pointed to the column of smoke. “See that smoke, that’s the bridge over the Guyandotte River going up. They’re trying to burn it to cut us off from reinforcements or resupply.”
“You think the Army’s going to get here in time?”
“Not if they have to swim the fucking river.”
“What are we gonna do?”
Tony touched the bloody spot on his cheek where the splinter had gone through. He stroked the wound lightly, thinking. Then looked at the runner. “Run down and call the sheriff, tell him to turn that little air force of his into a supply line. I don’t know what them little puddle-jumpers will carry, but whatever they can. Tell him it’s highest priority. Do it yourself and keep it quiet.”
“Yes, sir.” The boy looked doe-eyed down the defense line, where constables and militiamen were shooting their rifles as fast as they could work the bolts and levers. “Shouldn’t we tell the men to start conserving ammo?”
Tony shook his head. “Hell, no. They’ll panic, thinking the line won’t hold. We’ll get overrun.”
“You think they’d bolt if they knew?”
“They’re civilians, most of them, so we can’t shoot ’em if they do.”
FRANK AND BONNEY WATCHED the bridge sentry scrambling up the soft slope of the riverbank, fighting for purchase, grabbing fistfuls of dirt and muddy roots. He was dragging a three-gallon milk tin behind him, the bright water of the Guyandotte sloshing from the bomb-shaped vessel. A one-man bucket brigade. His rifle was slung across his back, his boots and trousers mud-caked. Above him flames were crackling on the bridge, sending a pale haze of smoke into the sky, a ghostly watchtower.
The man had awoken with a start, clutching his chest as if shot. A dream. Certainly he hadn’t seen the two men lying just across the river, sniper and spotter. Hadn’t seen the shooter remove his finger from the trigger and retract his barrel into the reeds. A man who’d heeded the whispered words of the friend beside him.
Mama-B, she’d say to do the hard thing. Seems to me, giving him a chance is harder than pulling a trigger.
They could see he was a plain townsman, dressed in the rumpled khaki and white armband of the local vigilance committee. Probably he had his own office in town, his name painted in gold on the pebbled glass door. An attorney or insurance man. A cut-glass whiskey decanter on the sideboard, a set of snifters, a small nickel-plated derringer in his desk drawer.
For years, the troubles of the mines had remained at a remove for such men, grumbling along the edges of the county—a threat the Czar kept at bay, walling off the county with his army of deputies and secret agents. No Mother Joneses, no Sid Hatfields, no agitators or organizers. Now that once-distant reality had punctured the ramparts, threatening to thunder down their streets.
The Czar was said to stand sweaty and overwrought in his makeshift headquarters, telephones held to both ears, his bowtie wilted at his throat. Meanwhile, the townsmen had risen to defend hearth and home, donning armbands and ankle boots—men who wore glossy belts and loafers to work, cuff links and tie pins and class rings. Men who believed that beneath their starched shirts and soft bellies, they retained the same strength and prowess as their forebears, who’d cut their lives bloody from these hillsides and survived, sending their descendants down into the towns. Now they’d been given a chance to prove themselves, to show they still carried that same mettle in their bones.
Frank watched the man drag the heavy tin onto the smoldering bridge. It was excruciating to witness; he was making headway against the flames. The ties and timbers hadn’t caught fire like they’d expected—perhaps the heaviness of the morning dew.
“Maybe I should just wing him,” whispered Bonney.
“Could you do that?”
“With this thing?” Bonney nodded to the giant Swiss rifle. “Like to lop a whole limb off his trunk. It’s black powder, too. Not smokeless. Now the sun’s up, one shot will give away our position.”
Frank looked to the hills above them, crawling with patrols. They were deep in enemy territory. He looked to the spot where the dynamite charge lay hidden beneath the tracks. Any second, a speck of glowing cinder or drip of burning kerosene could touch the leached nitroglycerine and detonate the charge. The tracks would erupt, their wooden ties and iron rails flailing heavenward, a cloud of debris rising over the river. The sentry would be hurled like a ragdoll through the air, his name cast into every newspaper in the country.
“See if you can’t just scare him off,” said Frank.
“They’ll see us.”
“We got to try.”
Bonney set his eye into the scope, leading his target slightly. The man on the bridge looked wretched, dragging the heavy milk tin banging down the tracks, water sloshing out with every step. Wretched but determined.
Bonney fired. The gun bucked, sending forth a great plume of powder-smoke as the slug sparked off the iron girders. The man kept going. One shot among a cacophony of others. He was lost in his own agony, driving himself to the edge of infarction. They watched him reach the core bloom of the fire, where the heat had to be rising through his bootsoles, blistering the balls of his feet. This dentist or druggist or insurance man. He roared over the pain, heaved the milk tin high to his shoulder, and turned it upside down.
A thick hawser of water poured straight into the heart of the fire. Pale blooms of vapor boiled outward, breaking around his knees. His hat was wafted from his head, tumbling off through the steam and smoke, and Frank could almost see his face roasted red.
The fire guttered beneath the stream of water, the outer tongues of flame canting this way and that, as if trying to escape. They began winking out, one after the next, snuffed into coils of smoke. Soon the milk tin rested empty on the man’s shoulder, big as the spent brass of a field gun, and the embers fumed at his feet, all but extinguished.
He began stamping out spot fires. He was nearly dancing, his hobnail boots pounding a lively jig, when he froze on his tiptoes, staring straight down between his legs.
“Shit,” said Bonney. “He just saw the charge.”
It would be just visible between the ties, a waxen bundle that could’ve blown him tap-dancing into oblivion, sprinkled down on the Guyandotte like a butcher’s special. That still could. The man set his fists on his hips and bowed back on his tiptoes, raising his voice to the sky. They couldn’t hear him from this distance, but they could see the thick worms of his neck veins standing out, the spit flying from his upraised mouth.
“He’s cursing hell out of us,” said Bonney, tapping his finger along the trigger guard. “No idea we could put a bullet through his head anytime we want to.”
Frank nodded. “Must be how God feels sometimes.”
Bonney grit his teeth. “All the time.”