At the head of twenty horsemen Lassiter rode along the side of a timbered ridge. It was a week later, just before sunup, and cold mists drifted across the river far below. They had been in the saddle for two days. Two days and sixty miles from the fort.
There was a town on both sides of the river, the two parts connected by an iron bridge. The sun hadn’t burned off the mist yet, and the outlines of the buildings were blurred with white. Some of the windows showed lights, and two dogs started a barking contest as they rode quietly, the horses hooves wrapped in sacking, along the ridge.
The column stopped when Lassiter raised his hand. Colmar stopped his horse beside Lassiter. “It would be better if we could go in from both sides,” Lassiter told the Indian, who nodded agreement. “But there’s no way to cross that river. Too fast and deep. Not unless we ride on and ford where it gets shallow.”
The Indian knew he wasn’t being asked for his opinion.
Lassiter reached into his coat and took out a folded sheet of map paper. Under the dripping pines, with the mist blowing, they had to squint to read the Irishman’s map of the town. They had gone over it many times during the past two days. It was a simple map of a small town, the center of a gold mining and logging district.
Running his finger along the lines of the map, Lassiter reexamined the layout. There was the main street. It ran across the bridge and continued on the other side. A few short streets straggled off the main stretch, and didn’t get very far. The bank was there, a steepled church on one side, a commercial building on the other. Dots on the map were supposed to show where the militiamen guarding the bank would be. Lassiter wasn’t too sure about the dots. The buildings would stay where they were, but the dots, being men, could be moved around. According to the Irishman’s information, the provincial militia was well supplied with the new rapid-fire Maxims. Back in the States they were still using the hand-cranked Gatlings. North of the border they were more progressive. The light, recoil-operated, belt-fed Maxim could fire six hundred rounds a minute, and it didn’t have to be moved around on wheels like the old Gatling.
Lassiter wished the Irishman’s spies knew more about the Maxim guns. That was the trouble in working with amateurs. A real spy would be more interested in the rapid-fire guns. Just one Maxim placed in that church steeple could make things awfully messy.
Lassiter told the two dynamite men, Mullins and Ritter, to come forward. Mullins and Ritter were two of the eight new men the Indian had picked from the infantry squads. Both were old soldiers, Mullins ex-Union Army, Ritter ex-Prussian, and they both knew something about demolition work. Ritter, the German soldier-turned farmer, was the smart one, and he was in charge.
The biggest part of the town and the militia barracks were on the far side of the bridge. Lassiter said, “No matter what else we do, you got to blow that bridge. Rob the bank or not, they’ll be coming after us if you don’t knock out the bridge. They will anyway. The bridge will slow them down. Four men will give you cover. Don’t let me down, boys. Get yourself killed if you have to, but don’t let me down. Any questions?”
There were no questions.
The next two men he questioned were Mapes and Kittridge, from Greeley’s old outfit. Mapes, a heavy man made uglier than he was by a large birthmark on his face, had a pack horse in tow. Two burlap sacks were slung over the animal’s back. The sacks were loaded with whiskey bottles filled with kerosene and sugar, one part sugar, two parts kerosene, and the necks were plugged with kerosene-soaked rags. The fire-bombs were Lassiter’s idea. The Mexicans had been using them for years. Petroleum made a better fire-bomb than kerosene, but there was no petroleum at Fort Liberty.
“Remember,” Lassiter said, “they won’t work if you try to use a lit cigar. You got to use a wood match. One more time, boys. Let’s see those matches.”
Mapes didn’t smile. Kittridge did. Both reached into their pockets and showed handfuls of wooden matches.
The steel-gray sky was beginning to brighten. Soon the mist would clear. At Lassiter s command the men dismounted and untied the sacking on the horses’ hooves. They reached the end of the ridge, walked their horses down onto the road. The road sloped down from where it passed through a break in the ridge, then spread out where the main street began. Lassiter patted the five sticks of dynamite stuck inside his belt. He lit a cigar.
The noise of the barking dogs came through the thinning mist. Other dogs, sensing something, joined in.
“Now!” Lassiter yelled. The spurs dug in, and the horse jumped forward. They came down the slope yelling like Comanches. They reached the beginning of the main street. A man came running out of the first house. He had a red nightshirt on, and he tripped and went down like a shot rabbit. Lassiter killed him with one shot when he got up. Riding hard, they fanned out, keeping the two dynamite men in the middle. A bell started clanging. A man with a blue uniform and a military rifle shot at Lassiter from an alley between two buildings. Lassiter and the Indian shot him at the same time. The force of the bullets knocked him out of sight.
The first of the fire-bombs smashed against the side of a hardware store, splashing liquid fire. The second fire-bomb didn’t break. It bounced onto the boardwalk and rolled. The Indian hit it with a bullet before it stopped rolling. The dry wood, coated with the fierce-flaming sticky mixture of sugar and gasoline, burned like paper. Lassiter saw the bank, brick-built and solid, heavy bars on the windows. Glass shattered and rifle barrels poked out through the bars and fired.
Lassiter cursed the Irishman. The guards were supposed to be outside, not inside the bank. He slowed his horse, reaching for a stick of dynamite, and Colmar rode past him. The men in the bank had bolt-action repeaters and the fire, after the first surprise, was heavy. Lassiter saw Mapes setting off another firebomb. The big man was digging into the sack for another bomb when a bullet hit the sack of bottles and man and horse exploded in a sheet of white flame. Mapes gave a long, high scream. The screams of rider and horse blended together. Mapes was screaming for Jesus. Lassiter had to ride fast, slashing with the spurs, to catch up. He swung the gun and killed Mapes with two shots. He put the bullets in the burning man’s back. Mapes didn’t fall off the horse. Lassiter shot the running horse in the head. Another bullet brought it down. He wheeled back through a rain of bullets from the bank. The stick of dynamite was still in his left hand. A bullet burned the back of the hand that held the dynamite. He grinned at that. He touched the burning cigar to the short fuse and tossed it at the window of the bank. It bounced off the bars and exploded in the air. The boardwalk was blown to matchwood and splinters of brick sang like hornets and smoke and dust boiled up in a blinding cloud. When his ears stopped ringing Lassiter heard a bugler blowing his brains out.
Fighting to steady his horse, he fired another stick and threw it through the smoke. He didn’t see the stick after it left his hand. He knew it went through the window. This time the explosion was dull, heavy, contained by the heavy brick walls. Another alarm bell added its noise to the bugle blasts. No more bullets came from inside the bank, but there was heavy firing down by the bridge. His face twitched when the Maxim gun started firing down by the bridge. It had taken them a while to get it going. Now it was going good, and the gunner, firing in controlled bursts, knew his business. Two riderless horses raced past him, eyes flared with fright.
There was a gaping hole in the bank wall where the window had been. A dead body without a head hung across the opening, the rifle still clutched in the hands. There was no sign of the head inside or outside the bank. Lassiter wasn’t looking for it. It was something he noted without thinking about it.
Gun ready, he climbed across the body, through the hole in the wall. The way the bodies inside were torn apart by the blast there was no way to tell how many guards there had been. The cashiers’ cages were wrecked, the bars twisted. The big steel safe was exactly where the Irishman said it would be. It was the only undamaged thing inside the bank.
Brushing off the chunks of fallen plaster, Lassiter examined it, a heavy standard Crossley & Powers with a combination lock. The firing down by the bridge was heavier now, and without thinking about it he was waiting for the explosion. He tied a stick of dynamite to the safe with a length of copper wire. Nitro was the smart way to blow a safe, but the dynamite would have to do. He shortened the fuse with a knife and got out fast through the hole in the wall after firing the fuse.
The safe blew and smoke and dust boiled out through the hole. Both sides of the main street were burning, and right after the safe the bridge went up, the first charge, the second, then the third. The ground shook under Lassiter’s feet, and more brickwork fell from the wall of the bank. He climbed back into the bank, the gray powdery dust stinging his eyes.
He took a breath and pulled on the handle of the safe, and the door creaked open. The money stood there in neat stacks, crisp and new in its bank wrappers, undamaged by the blast. The Irishman said fifty thousand dollars, and there might be more than that. Lassiter took the canvas sack stuffed into his belt and began to fill it. While he was doing it, he heard them coming back from the bridge, keeping up a running fire as they came.
Brigham Colmar’s Indian-brown face poked through the hole in the wall. For fifty thousand it came to a small sackful. Lassiter slung it through the hole to the Indian and came out after it. The Indian rode to get Lassiter’s horse, galloped back with it, and threw him the reins. “Let’s travel,” Lassiter said.
A bullet knocked one of the men, Canaday, off his horse. Canaday’s friend Tolliver wheeled his horse, swearing, and shot at something. Tolliver, holding the gun. started to climb down. “Leave him,” Lassiter yelled. “Move out. Everybody move out.”
They got out fast, up the slope, then back along the ridge the way they had come in. The road would have taken them out of there faster, but the road went nowhere but to another town and more militia. The telegraph and telephone lines were cut, the bridge was blown, more than a few militiamen were dead, and there wasn’t any time to lose. The raid on the bank was supposed to be timed with other, smaller attacks—no banks—made from Fort Liberté and another strong point the Irishman had set up. Until now it had been mostly talk, flowery speeches and flag waving. If a raid on the bank and the smaller raids were the start of the rebellion, the beginning of the Irishman’s so-called policy of total terror, the “official” declaration of armed insurrection against the Province of British Columbia and—Lassiter grinned at the notion—the whole goddamned British Empire. He rubbed his neck, thinking of the rope that was waiting for him now.
They got down off the ridge and rode beside a long, straight, narrow drainage ditch that ran through a valley on the other side of the ridge. Lassiter looked at the sack of money roped to the Indian’s saddle, then at the Indian’s face. “We lost five men,” Colmar said, “and we captured one Maxim gun and two boxes of ammunition.”
Lassiter looked back at the horse carrying the rapid-fire gun. Another riderless horse carried the boxes of ammunition slung across its back. There hadn’t been time to dismantle the Maxim gun. It rode on the animal’s back, the tripod sticking out awkwardly, the bullet-heavy feed belt flopping. Looking at it, Lassiter felt the professional man killer’s interest in something new and deadly. It was beginning to look as if they had the makings of a real guerilla troop. The Maxim was factory new and not completely free of grease. It bothered him to see any fine weapon used badly, and if he had been in charge of the militiamen back there he would’ve kicked their asses from hell to breakfast.
Colmar saw Lassiter was smiling. It wasn’t much of a smile—Lassiter was smiling sourly at his officer like thoughts—and the Indian didn’t smile back. The Indian never smiled, never did much of anything, never wasted energy or motion.
“You capture the gun?” he asked.
The Indian nodded.
“You know how to work it?”
“No,” Colmar said. “Do you?”
Lassiter knew how to take a Gatling apart and put it back together with his eyes shut. An infantry officer he rode with once on a train told him something about the new rapid-fire gun a Maine Yankee inventor named Hiram Stevens Maxim was manufacturing in England. The officer said the new gun could fire six hundred rounds a minute. Lassiter couldn’t recall much else about the conversation.
“We’ll learn,” he told Colmar. “You tell those boys back there to treat that gun like a new bride.”
Riding steadily but easily because of the gun and the coiled belts of ammunition in the two boxes, they moved through the valley beside the irrigation ditch and through a wide gap into another valley. The farmland dropped behind as they rode the length of the second valley, resting their horses before they climbed back into the foothills, following an old Indian trail used before the white men pushed west into British Columbia. There was no point trying to cover their tracks. There were too many of them, the winter-soaked ground was soft enough to be mud in places, and even if the ground had been hard and dry there wasn’t time. Anyway, that wasn’t the idea, according to the Irishman. They, meaning the ham-fisted Colonel Cameron and his militia officers, would know about Fort Liberté by now. McCain said the idea wasn’t to defend the fort but to use it as long as they could, then move out to another strong point when Cameron was strong enough to move against them. It was standard guerilla tactics, with nothing wrong with it in theory, but Lassiter, like any professional, was leery about the Irishman’s amateur spies.
The watery sun was directly overhead when Lassiter ordered Colmar to have the men dismount and get something to eat. They were deep in the foothills now, with eight or nine hours ride uphill to where the mountains split and the trail went through a narrow pass, ran level for about three miles before it started down on the other side toward the fort. Without the gun to slow them down they could have made better time. Lassiter said to ride easy. He wasn’t fooling about how important the Maxim was. To him, it was more exciting, in its way, than any young bride.
The men chewed on dried beef and hard biscuit while Lassiter walked up to the high rock where Colmar was scanning the country behind with field glasses. They had been on the move for five hours and, slowed by the gun, about twenty miles.
“See anything?” Lassiter asked.
“Nothing,” the Indian said.
Lassiter took the field glasses, and, from high up where they were, he started a slow sweep of the countryside, starting first at the end of the ridge, then the length of the irrigation ditch in the first valley, and on through the gap into the second. The only living thing he saw was a woman, miles away, slopping hogs in front of a farmhouse.
“Move them out,” he told the Indian.
The sun was bright without heat, and they mounted up and began to climb again, the tension from the raid all gone now, leaving their bodies dull and cold. Lassiter thought of the bottle waiting for him in his quarters at the fort. He rolled a cigarette and made do with that, sucking in the bitter blue smoke, thinking about the money in the sack, idly going over the possibility of taking it and heading south. Naturally, he would have to kill the Indian. After that, what about the rest of them? He could always set up the Maxim gun when they made camp for the night. Once he got the hang of it by chewing up the bushes with ten or twenty rounds he could simply swing the Maxim on its tripod and kill them all. There were fifteen, including the Indian. The Maxim fired six hundred rounds a minute, sixty rounds in ten seconds, six rounds in a second. Five seconds, ten to do it right, was all he needed.
Lassiter grinned without showing it, thinking that some men played games like chess in their heads. Others, himself for instance, used more interesting games to kill time.
It was getting dark when they entered the mouth of the pass and Lassiter told the Indian to get the men off their horses. “No fires,” he told Colmar. “They might as well get used to it. There will be a lot of cold camps if this war goes on.”
The Indian shrugged. Cold or heat meant nothing to him. This war meant something to him, but since that first time when he said he wasn’t in it for the money he hadn’t said anything else.
“You watch the money,” Lassiter said, grinning at the dull suspicion in the Indian’s heavy eyes. “I’ll set up the gun.”
Colmar paused just long enough for Lassiter to say, “You can stand behind me while I do it. If that’s what’s bothering you.”
“No need,” Colmar said, and Lassiter knew he could take that two ways. Colmar trusted him, or he didn’t think Lassiter could kill him, gun or no gun.
He loosened the ropes that held the gun and carried it to a shelf of rock overlooking the camp. Ritter, the German, had survived the attack on the bridge. Lassiter told him to open one of the ammunition boxes, to bring fresh belts for the gun. The German had been a farmer longer that he’d been a soldier, but he did what he was told, quickly and easily.
Checking the Maxim, Lassiter decided it sure as hell was a nifty piece of work, light but sturdy, operated by a short-recoil, and that was about all he knew about it. Checking the way it worked inside would have to come later. He told Ritter to straighten the twisted feed-belt, to hold it steady, to let the feed mechanism take the belt once he fired, and it began to move.
With the Maxim the first shot had to be fired like any other gun. The men making camp below looked uneasy when Lassiter took his place behind the gun, the German hunkered down beside it, and swung the barrel, tilting and depressing it, to get the feel.
Colmar sat on his saddle looking up at Lassiter. The sack of money lay beside him. Lassiter wondered what the Indian was thinking about. Lassiter knew the Indian was fast with a six-gun, maybe as fast as he was himself. It would be interesting to know how fast any man was against an automatic weapon. But this wasn’t the time for that.
“Everybody keep down,” Lassiter said, aiming the gun at a patch of bushes on the other side of the camp. He knew about Gatlings, had used them in the Cavalry and other places. There was no need to hold a Gatling steady when you fired it. The weight of the gun did it for you. He pressed the trigger and the Maxim came to life. A string of bullets tore the bushes to pieces, first the dirt and roots, then the tops when the barrel of the gun tilted because he wasn’t using it right. He took his finger off the trigger, and the gun was quiet. It was as different from the Gatling as any gun could be. It wasn’t often that Lassiter got enthusiastic about anything, not even about women or money.
The old German soldier squatting beside the gun was sweating in the cold air, delighted with the new killing machine, no longer a farmer.
The men, all except the Indian, were hugging the ground. They stayed that way when the shooting stopped. The Indian sat on his saddle, working on the barrel of his revolver with an oily rag. The Indian, the rag in his left hand, looked up at Lassiter. He took his time about saying what he said: “Works pretty good.”
“Let’s try it again, Fritz,” Lassiter told the German.
It took two more tries before he got the hang of it. Nothing that concerned the use of weapons took Lassiter long to learn. The bullets chewed the bushes to bits, and, holding the gun steady in his big hands, he put the bullets where he wanted them to go. When he stopped firing again, the German said the feed-belt was almost run through. Lassiter remembered something else he knew about the Maxim. There were clips at the beginning and end of every feed-belt. One belt could be clipped on to the other, making continuous fire possible.
Ritter checked the belts and nodded happily. The German was impressed with Lassiter’s knowledge. Lassiter was glad to know the feed-belts could be linked. He was glad because even after checking the gun he wasn’t sure how to start a belt through. He didn’t tell the German.
Eager to help, Ritter linked the belts and Lassiter triggered ten rounds, all that were left in the first belt. A squeeze on the trigger started the new belt and it went through smoothly—a short burst—until he let up on the trigger. New bride! he thought. Like hell! There would always be new brides, and they didn’t matter a damn right now.
“Let go the belt,” he ordered the German. He remembered something else from his conversation with the infantry officer on that train. That the Maxim worked best when the belt was fed by a second man. That it usually worked pretty well, with few chances of jamming, when the man behind the gun allowed it to feed itself. That the gunner could still shoot all right if he learned to reach around and let the belt run across his hand, keeping it level and easy.
Colmar stayed where he was, polishing his gun, the rest of the men flat on their faces, while Lassiter looked around for something solid to shoot at. There was a twisted mountain pine growing from a crack in a rock. Using the swivel, he lined up the barrel of the Maxim to where he thought it should be. Firing—the belt fed through fine—he knew he was still shooting it with a sideways turn of the Gatling, and he corrected the line of the barrel, unsqueezing the trigger when he did this. When he fired again, correcting slightly as he did, the steady fine of bullets stripped the bark off the tree in chunks and nearly tore it in two. He could have knocked down the tree if he’d been willing to use more bullets. He wasn’t. There was still a lot he didn’t know about the Maxim—what to do if it jammed, for instance—but he knew he needed the bullets.
He told Ritter to get back down, and he told the Indian to come up. The Indian wasn’t honored by Lassiter’s trust, and his expression didn’t change, not much anyway, when the working of the gun was explained to him. Lassiter explained about how the gun must be held steady, the way it fired, not faster than the Gatlings Colmar knew, but more evenly. The important thing was to remember that the Maxim had only one barrel while the old Gatling had many. With this in mind, the Maxim must be fired in short bursts so the single barrel would not overheat.
The Indian nodded. “I have been watching and listening,” he said.
“You take the first four hours,” Lassiter said, not taking too much of a chance with the Indian.
The Indian nodded again and said nothing.