FRANK AND BONNEY WERE still watching the bridge sentry, the great plume of powder-smoke rolling downstream from Bonney’s rifle, when a sandbagged handcar appeared on the tracks above them. The muzzle of a machine gun swiveled their way.
“Run!”
Automatic fire tore into the reeds. They scrambled up the bank, turning just long enough to see a squad of khaki-clad men leaping down from the car to give chase. The two miners clawed their way through a tangle of heavy brush as rounds caromed through the willows. They gained a little trail along the river and began to run. Frank thought their pursuers would give up once they’d set their quarry to flight. They didn’t. They were scampering from tree to tree now, hooting and firing, as if flushing animals through the woods.
He followed Bonney up a rocky creek that crossed the trail, staying low, the pair of them slipping and scrambling, fighting to get a lead on their pursuers. They came out on a steep, woody ridgeline and began running along the edge, pushing hard, zigzagging in and out of the trees. Frank looked over his shoulder again.
He never saw what tripped him. Before he knew it, he was plunging down the steep face of the ridge, down through briars and slicks, sliding and somersaulting, trying to cover his head so a rock or tree trunk couldn’t bash his skull. Finally he lay still, curled up in a stony creekbed that fed the river. He could hear the men passing on the ridgeline above him, still chasing Bonney.
“I think we winged him, boys. Let’s go, he can’t run forever!”
By the time Frank climbed back to the trail, the sun had shifted in the sky and the men were long gone. He’d lost the shotgun in the fall and so tread carefully in the pursuers’ wake, one hand on the revolver strapped across his chest, afraid at every bend of finding Bonney shot-riddled or swinging from a tree. An hour later, he lost their trail amid a rocky branch. Hard to believe any pack of townsmen could catch Bonney in the woods, but if they’d wounded him …
By noon, he’d made his way back to the friendly lines at Crooked Creek Gap, hoping to find Bonney and the rest. Instead, he found himself holed up in a shallow trench, pinned beneath a relentless hail of fire. The others told him it had been this way all day—they’d hardly gained an inch of ground. They had no news of Bonney or the others.
In the late afternoon, he heard the whistle of an inbound train. The sound hit him like a nail in the chest, an iron spike. That train would roll over the bridge they’d failed to blow and come hissing to a stop on the far side of Blair Mountain, where a line of motorcars would already be waiting, engines running. In less than an hour, the defense line would have enough ammunition to stave off Armageddon.
Frank looked up through the trees, fighting the urge to scream. He’d lost everyone. Evie, Lacey, Crock—all dead. He didn’t know where Bonney or the rest of the Bad Seven were, if they’d even made it out alive. Didn’t know when he’d see Mama-B again, if ever he would.
Tears scalded his cheeks, fat and hot. Around him, men were preparing for another charge. Loading magazines and checking chambers, kissing saints’ medallions and crossing themselves, muttering prayers of protection. Making ready to go over the top. Men with rocklike hands and crinkled faces and outsized forearms.
He didn’t know any of the men in the trench with him, their names. But he knew they were proud of who they were and the work they did. The work of hard men in deep places. They knew, if not today, they could die in slate falls or rock bursts or blasting accidents, by gun thugs or firedamp or coughing up black blood long before their hair turned white. They had to face those destinies morning and night. They lived with them, slept with them, dreamed them.
A sudden warmth in Frank’s chest, explosive, a vast ache for these men. Some young, some old, their faces seamed with grit. He wanted to grab up the boy next to him, to hug him close to his chest, to say he was proud to stand with him. But a trench whistle had sounded down the line and the men were already rising out of their trenches and scrambling over the top, out of his reach, into the fire.