Rolling Thunder Page 4

  ‘I believe I’ll be staying, Tom. Let’s have another cup of coffee, shall we?’

  Inside I found the boys, sleepy-eyed and rumpled, settling in around the puncheon table. I waited for them to have coffee themselves and get their heads on before I handed out instructions.

  ‘Toby, I want you to go with me this morning. We’ll be riding into the Pocono Gorge. Ben, Will – you and George can ride the perimeter to the south. Watch for trouble, but push any Peebles beef you come across as far off my range as you can.

  ‘Barney,’ I said with no mention of his earlier timidity, ‘you and young Randall Holt here stay around the house. Sort out the provisions, clean up whatever still needs to be cleaned. Keep alert. Fort up if anyone besides any of our crew rides in. Everyone clear on what his job is?’

  Heads nodded. Only Toby looked doubtful. He had never been near to an explosion the size of the one he was going to see. He looked at my face, saw grim determination and shrugged. The boys began stamping into their boots, slinging their gunbelts on and shouldering into their winter coats.

  Toby Trammel and I traced a trail through the cold pines, Toby leading the laden mule. The land went upward and only upward here as we paralleled the swiftly running Pocono River, the source of all the creeks and meandering rills that watered the long grass valley below us. Ahead, rising up 500 feet along the slopes of the gap known as the Crag, stood two broken granite spires that Gil Stratton had named the Sentinels, for obvious reasons. They stood beside the white-flowing, roaring river where it raced through the narrow gorge before it broke free of the channel and slowly spread itself out into peaceful, glittering streams.

  ‘What are you meaning to do, Tom?’ Toby asked with habitual trepidation. ‘I mean … the dynamite?’

  ‘I’m going to bring down the Sentinels, Toby. They’re mine. The headwaters are mine. I’m going to form myself a nice deep lake.’

  He looked up doubtfully at the jutting granite monoliths. ‘It can’t be done, Tom, can it?’

  ‘It can be,’ I assured him. ‘This isn’t something I thought up overnight. I know this land better than any man except Gil Stratton. I’ve come back with the skills the powder-men in the railroad crews taught me. I can bring the whole mountainside down, if I choose.

  ‘And I choose,’ I added grimly.

  I heard Toby curse between clenched teeth. He liked none of this, but if ever a man rode with more raw determination than I was carrying with me on that day, I had not met him. Toby saw that and continued to follow along, shaking his head.

  ‘Once we’ve set the charges, Toby, you can ride out of here. Rock will be flying, as you can imagine.’

  ‘Tom,’ Toby said, recovering his bold grin, ‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world. Though I still think you’re crazy!’

  ‘That seems to be the general consensus,’ I agreed.

  It was the work of an entire morning, setting the bundles of dynamite. Even with my practiced eye I wasn’t sure I had gotten the charges in exactly the right position. I wished I had the long-honed skills of those men I had worked with on the Colorado & Eastern who thought nothing of blowing away entire mountainsides to force a path through for the westward-driving Iron Horse. But I thought I had learned enough in working for the railroad to drop the Sentinels and accomplish my goal.

  Not until the early hours of afternoon had we planted the fuses, strung out what seemed to be miles of wire and settled ourselves in behind a huge stack of boulders on the back side of a piney slope. Earlier I had sent Toby off to picket the horses and the mule even further down the slope. Still they might bolt and run, but at least they would be safe.

  ‘You don’t have to stay here, Toby,’ I said, giving him one last chance before I hit the detonator.

  ‘Hell, Tom,’ he said, crouching beside me. ‘I’ve done my work – let me see the show!’

  I wondered if he knew what he was in for. I did, having witnessed dozens of hard-rock blasts, but I just told him. ‘Watch yourself,’ and dropped the plunger on the detonating device.

  At first there was only a small flicker of flame visible against the bases of the distant granite spires. Red and yellow, briefly touching eerie light to the stone monuments. Toby half-rose and peered that way. ‘What went wrong, Tom?’

  ‘Get down!’ I shouted, grabbing him by the shoulder, for I knew the way of the fuses and that was their signal that all was well and that hell was about to break loose. No sooner had I spoken than the big, earth-shifting rumble of the dynamite packs exploding began. Toby hit the earth, his fingers in his ears.

  There was no flame now, but the explosions, one after the other, threw dust and boulders, fragments of the monoliths skyward. And they began to rain down on us, far away from the blasts though we were. The ground trembled beneath us and Toby rose again, fearfully, but not willing to miss what was to come next.

  For a moment there was no sound, nothing but the settling of smaller fragments of stone around us. The heavy clouds of rock dust continued to blur our vision. Toby again looked at me with uncertainty, and I began to have doubts myself about how well I had learned my lessons of destruction.

  Then, distantly, a creaking began, as if some behemoth were opening his dungeon door and I thought I saw – did see – the northern Sentinel sway ever so slightly. As Toby stepped beside me to watch, mouth agape, eyes scoured with dust, the northern monolith began to crumble at its base and the 500-foot spire slowly, inexorably began to tilt toward its twin. An odd creaking sound, grating and as loud as a dozen locomotives, followed as first one and then the other Sentinel collapsed earthward and the ground trembled again, angrily.

  We pressed faces and bodies to the earth behind the boulders and stayed there until the last rumbling had settled to shuddering silence. There was no sound in the forest when we rose, not a single bird or creature moved.

  ‘Let’s see what we’ve accomplished,’ I said, dusting myself off with my hat. Our faces were dark with granite dust. My legs trembled slightly as we walked up the shale-strewn slope to view the destruction we had caused. Standing on a rocky shelf high above the gorge with the wind snatching at our clothes I could see that my execution of the Sentinels had been nearly perfect. Behind the newly formed stone dam the waters of the Pocono were beginning to back up, to swirl as if in frustration, to slow and spread out, forming a broad lake.

  ‘God, Tom!’ Toby Trammel said in awe. He removed his hat and wiped back his stringy blond hair. ‘I wasn’t sure you could do it.’

  ‘Neither was I,’ I answered, smiling at him as I watched the silver lake widen and capture the afternoon sunlight.

  ‘But I was right,’ Toby said distantly. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.’

  As we rode southward once again, Toby commented, ‘They’ll have heard the blast all the way to Stratton.’

  ‘Very likely.’

  ‘They won’t be able to guess what it was, but when the creeks start drying up and the town has no water, they’ll come looking.’

  ‘That’s right, Toby.’

  ‘With all of the gunmen Peebles can muster.’

  I glanced at him from out of the shadow of my hat-brim. I remembered what I had told Barney Weber that morning and I repeated it to Toby Trammel. ‘If you want to ride out now, Toby, it’s all right.’ But the wrangler only grinned at me and said:

  ‘Tom, I wouldn’t miss it for the world!’

  There seemed to have been no trouble on the spread when Toby and I trailed in from The Crag. But both Randall Holt, rake in his hands and Barney Weber who was standing on the porch with a broom, stopped what they were doing and considered our streaked faces and dusty clothes with unvoiced questions. As we swung down from our horses, Barney asked as last:

  ‘What in hell did you do up there, Tom! The explosion nearly knocked me off my feet.’

  Sitting on the porch, my hat tilted back, I told them succinctly what we had done and reminded them, as if they hadn’t already realized it, that I had definitely o
pened Pandora’s box. Trouble would certainly be on its way.

  Our own water supply was not going to be interrupted. Gil Stratton and I had spent many weeks digging a deep well behind the house. I rolled up my shirtsleeves and rinsed myself off with cold water drawn from its depths and then asked Toby:

  ‘Is there still a print shop in Stratton?’

  ‘Well, sure,’ he said with puzzlement. I was getting used to my men looking at me in that way – as if they thought that I might be mad. Maybe I was, I don’t know. ‘We still have that one-sheet newspaper,’ he told me, ‘the Stratton Gazette. But old man Savage is gone now. He was forced out after he printed a few items that Shelley Peebles didn’t care for. Do you mind if I ask what it is that you’re up to now, Tom?’

  I rolled my cuffs down, wiped my fingers through my damp hair and answered, ‘Why, I think it’s only right to give Shelley Peebles fair warning, Toby.’

  ‘I don’t think I get you, Tom,’ Toby said, shaking his head worriedly.

  I placed my hand briefly on his shoulder and said. ‘You will.’

  Toby and I cinched up again and started south to ride the ten miles to Stratton. The skies held clear except for a few high white clouds, but we could hear grumbling in the high mountains as thunder built menacingly.

  Half a mile on we came upon Big Will Ford and George Holt riding toward us. We pulled up in a group and Will explained: ‘We decided among us that two of us would ride back to the house and have dinner then spell the others while they did the same. Is that all right with you, Tom?’

  ‘A man has to eat,’ was all I said. At their curious looks, I went on to explain that Toby and I were riding into Stratton. Will’s broad face lowered into a frown.

  ‘Tom, Shelley Peebles will surely be out for your hide after what you’ve done today. Do you want us to ride with you?’

  ‘He doesn’t know yet what has happened. All he knows is that I’m back – Mary will have told him. Besides,’ I added ruefully, ‘he doesn’t feel threatened by me. To him I’m of no more importance than a fly he has to shoo away. You boys get your dinner. We hope to be back by sundown.’

  Toby and I rode in silence for a time after that. The grass was still lush and green, but it would not be for long. There were still Peebles’s cattle on my land, but there would not be for long. Toby said in a quiet voice, ‘Tom, maybe you should have told the boys to come along with us. I’ve a feeling our welcome is not going to be a warm one.’

  Maybe Toby was right. Maybe all of them were right and I was behaving foolishly, but I had my plan laid out and I meant to follow it as well as I could. I had spent months thinking this over, remembering the faces of the young hopeful settlers I had guided into this beautiful valley, newlyweds, young children, weary men who had been given some hope of a new life.

  I would continue.

  At mid-afternoon we crossed the town line and rode up the main street, still puddled here and there by the recent rain. Toby directed me to the printing office where the Stratton Gazette was printed. I swung down wearily from the gray horse and tramped on in, leaving Toby with the horses, his eyes watching the passers-by warily.

  The gilt sign on the half-paned door proclaimed the name of the newspaper and in smaller script offered: ‘Brian Gerwig, Sole Prop.’

  I pushed on through the door to find Brian Gerwig, not busily at work as I had expected, but tilted back in a green-leather chair behind a shabby desk, staring dreamily at an old platen printing-press as if it might magically begin turning out the news by itself.

  Gerwig was not small, not large. He wore spectacles pushed up on his forehead. He was more boyish-looking than I had imagined. Rather than being startled he shifted his dreamy eyes toward me as if I might have come to rescue him from his frontier life. It’s idle to speculate, but he struck me as the sort of young man who had wished to grow up to be a poet, who had come West on a whim and a desire for adventure and found it, on the whole, a dreary and lonely place.

  ‘Yes, sir?’ he said, now lowering his eyeglasses to distort his pale-gray eyes.

  ‘I want to place a public notice in tomorrow’s paper,’ I told him.

  ‘Oh?’ he said without interest.

  ‘A half-page should do it.’

  ‘A half-page.’ He goggled at me through the lenses of his spectacles. ‘Do you know what that will cost you?’

  ‘No, I don’t. You tell me.’

  ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ he asked, focusing now on my eyes.

  ‘Very.’

  ‘All right.’ He shoved a sheet of foolscap toward me across his desk along with inkwell and pen. ‘Write out what you want printed.’

  I did, carefully. Gerwig watched me intently, at times trying to read what I was writing upside down When I was finished I handed the paper back to him. He studied it with a frown and then a hint of alarm.

  ‘I can’t print that!’

  ‘Of course you can,’ I said calmly. ‘I intend to pay you for it.’

  His fingers ran spiderlike over his dark hair. ‘But, you don’t understand …’ he said miserably.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do. Shelley Peebles may not like it. But you did not write this. I did. And Shelley Peebles already does not like me.’ I reached into my pocket and pulled out a ten-dollar goldpiece. ‘If this is not acceptable,’ I told him coldly, ‘there are other currencies.’

  He saw the slight movement of my hand toward my walnut-handled Colt .44 and decided gold was preferable.

  I stood by as he rearranged the newspaper from how he had intended to run it and set my two-column notice up in bold typeface. The platen turned and clacked and still I waited. The paper was warm, the ink still wet when, satisfied, I read what he had printed:

  Notice is hereby given that no cattle, horse or other animal of any kind is allowed to graze north of the seven-mile Stratton Valley marker if not carrying an authorized brand. Further if any unauthorized horse, cattle or other animal is not removed from this land forthwith, it will be considered maverick and subject to seizure or slaughter. Further no unauthorized use of any water or watercourse deriving its source from the Pocono River headwater may be used for any purpose whatsoever without explicit permission of its sole owner.

  Tom Quinn

  There were beads of perspiration on Brian Gerwig’s forehead as he printed out his usual run of one hundred papers. He glanced up at me once and said, ‘Peebles will have you killed, you know?’

  ‘I know he’ll try,’ I answered quietly.

  ‘Mister,’ the newspaperman said, ‘I have to tell you – you’re plain crazy.’

  I had heard that so often lately that it was becoming repetitious. Hell, maybe they were all right and it was me who was wrong. It does give a man pause to consider.

  After folding two of the one-sheet newspapers into eighths and jamming them into my pocket, I stepped out into the still-bright late afternoon day and nearly walked into Mary Ford’s arms.

  FIVE

  I can’t tell whether I was more pleased, upset or puzzled by the unexpected return of the woman I had once wanted to marry. My uncertainty was mirrored in her deep-blue eyes, which searched my face at length.

  ‘I have to talk to you, Tom,’ she said, taking my wrist with her small hand. She was wearing a yellow dress with lace at the cuffs and throat, and was carrying a yellow parasol. The color suited her. Small tendrils of blond hair slipped from under her white bonnet and were teased by the breeze.

  ‘All right,’ I said as calmly as I could.

  ‘Not here,’ Mary said with a glance at Toby Trammel, who was still holding the horses, looking down and away as if we were both invisible to him. ‘Let’s walk uptown a little way.’

  Then Toby did look up with a slight warning glance. I felt Mary’s hand slip under my arm at the elbow and she quite definitely, if lightly, turned me away from Toby. We walked uptown along the boardwalk, once again passing the dying sycamore tree I had planted in the town square. The new brick city building appear
ed and I halted.

  ‘What is it, Tom?’

  ‘This is far enough. Are there still benches in the square?’

  ‘Of course!’ She looked ready to laugh – at what I couldn’t say. Continuing to cling to my arm, twirling her yellow parasol, she guided me across the square to where a few unpainted wooden benches sat in the broken shade of the old tree. As we reached a bench I removed my bandanna and spread it out for her to sit on. I now had to squint into the sunlight to see her face; I could read no expression in her eyes. The sycamore, like a lost memory, sighed in the breeze.

  ‘Is it going to storm in the high country, Tom?’ Mary Ford asked me.

  ‘It might. It’s an unpredictable time of year.’

  ‘I thought I heard thunder in the high pass earlier.’ I couldn’t tell whether she was probing me or simply making the usual mundane conversation a person does when trying to delay getting to the point.

  ‘There’s something you wanted to say to me, Mary,’ I prompted. I had my eyes on a group of shabby-looking men wearing their guns low, watching us from across the grassless park.

  ‘A lot of things, Tom,’ she said, her small hands folding together on her lap. She turned her eyes down briefly. ‘You’re still a fine-looking man, you know? Your eyes, your face looking as if the elements had chiseled and honed them.’

  I didn’t respond. I never know what to say to words like those. I only had one question, and I needed to know the answer before the conversation went any further. I met her eyes directly.

  ‘Why did you leave me, Mary?’

  She shrugged and managed to make it a charming gesture. ‘It’s just the way you are, Tom. Reckless and wild. A woman needs some security in her life – especially out in this country! If you had taken the job the railroad offered you in Denver, perhaps we could have gotten back together. Tom, I have seen you when you’re pushed, when you feel threatened you’re a crazy man.’

  ‘My recklessness is what brought the original settlers to this town, what got us through a few shooting scrapes. Or don’t you remember those months on the trail?’