'I may lose more men, it is sure that I will lose more men. I may lose many more men. But not for you, Calhoun, not for your evil bourbon, but for what they have done to my people the army of the white men are my enemies and will be while White Hand lives. But they, too, are brave and skilful fighters. And if they find out that it is White Hand and the Paiutes who have attacked them they will never rest until they have hunted down and destroyed each last one of us. I say the price is too high, Sepp Calhoun.'
'And if there is no white man left to tell what happened?' Calhoun let this thought take hold, then went on softly, persuasively: 'The rewards are even higher.'
After a long pause. White Hand nodded several times. 'The rewards are even higher.'
Fifteen minutes after the troop train had embarked on its laborious crawl up Hangman's Pass, Marica stood gazing through the day compartment window, oblivious both of the six men seated behind her and the icy chill of glass against which her forehead rested. She said to no one in particular: 'What a fantastic view!'
She could hardly be faulted for her comment. The blizzard-like squall had passed away and from where she stood she could see the track curving round and downwards for the space of almost two miles as it followed the breathtaking contours of the conifer-lined white valley until it reached the spidery bridge spanning the gorge at the foot of the valley. As was so often the case after snow had ceased to fall, everything could be seen with preternatural clarity.
Claremont was uninterested in the view; he had more pressing and disturbing matters on his mind. He said: 'Made any progress with your enquiries. Marshal?'
'No, sir.' Pearce wasn't demonstrably unhappy, because it wasn't in his nature either to feel or express such an emotion, but he certainly couldn't have been described as ebullient. 'Nobody knows anything, nobody's seen anything, nobody did anything, nobody heard anything and nobody as much as suspects anybody else. No, sir, you can take it that I haven't made any progress.'
'Oh, I don't know.' Deakin spoke encouragingly. 'Every little elimination helps, doesn't it, Marshal? For instance, I was tied up, so it couldn't have been me. Means you've got only eighty-odd suspects left. Marshal. For a man of–'
Deakin broke off as a sharp report was heard. Claremont, already half out of his seat, said in the voice of a man who knew that impending doom was no longer at hand but had arrived: 'In God's name, what was that?'
Marica must have left him in no doubt as to the accuracy of his diagnosis. Her voice rose to a scream. 'No! No! No!'
Apart from Claremont, Pearce and Deakin there were three other men in the compartment – O'Brien, the Governor and the Rev. Peabody. Within two seconds the last of them had propelled himself to his feet and flung himself towards the nearest window on Marica's side. The faces of the six reflected, or appeared to reflect, all the consternation, shock and horror that Marica's voice had held.
The last three wagons of the train – the two troop-carrying coaches and the brakevan – had broken away from the main body of the train and were already rolling quite quickly back down the long steep descent of Hangman's Pass. The rapidly widening gap between the leading troop coach and the second of the horsewagons showed just how rapidly the three runaway wagons were accelerating.
Deakin shouted: 'For God's sake, jump! Jump now! Before it's too late.'
But nobody jumped.
The middle wagon of the three runaways – the second troop coach in which Sergeant Bellew was quartered – was already beginning to sway and rattle in the most alarming fashion. The clicketyclick of the wheels crossing the expansion joints in the lines increased in tempo with the passing of every moment; and as the fish-plates which held the lines were secured to the sleepers by spikes and not by bolts there was a mounting danger that the track itself might begin to work loose from the bed.
The confusion among the soldiers in the coach was total, their expressions ranging from the dumbfounded to the panic-stricken. Most of the men – all of them struggling to maintain their balance – were milling about wildly without any set purpose or intent, but two pairs of soldiers, lashed by the urgency of Bellew's voice, struggled desperately to open two side doors. After only a few fruitless moments they gave up. One of the soldiers raised his voice above the bedlam of sound.
'Godalmighty!' His voice was only one degree short of a shriek. 'The doors are locked! From the outside!'
In fascinated horror, the six men and the girl in the day compartment, completely without any power to help, continued to watch the runaways, now quarter way round the quarter circle curve of Hangman's Pass and at least a mile distant, remorselessly accelerating and terrifyingly swaying to the extent that wheels were now beginning to lift clear of the track.
Claremont shouted : 'Devlin! The brakeman! Why in God's name doesn't he do something?'
The same thought, though understandably with even more urgency, was in the mind of Sergeant Bellew.
'The brakeman! The brakeman! Why doesn't he do – what in God's name is he doing?'
Bellew ran or more correctly staggered along the wildly shaking and vibrating aisle towards the rear door, a matter made easier by the fact that the central space was clear, nearly all the soldiers having their terrified faces pressed close against the windows, their minds mesmerized by the blurring landscape and hypnotized by shock into the blind acceptance of the inevitable.
Bellew reached the rear door. He tugged desperately and completely without avail at the handle; this door, too, was locked. Bellew drew his Colt and shot above and to the side of the handle. He fired four times, oblivious of two ricochets which whistled with lethal potential through the coach; by this time there were more deadly dangers abroad than ricochets. After the fourth shot the door yielded to the desperate pressure of Bellew's hand.
He emerged on to the rear platform and was almost immediately thrown off by the combination of a wind which had now reached near-hurricane force and an exceptionally violent lurch of the coach. To save himself he had to grab desperately at the rail with both hands. His Colt had been in his right hand: now it went spinning over the side.
Bellew took a suicidal chance, but between sudden death by suicide and sudden death through external causes there lies no difference. He flung himself towards the front platform on the brake van, caught the rail, dragged himself to temporary safety and seized the door of the brake van. This he twisted, pulled and pushed with a close to fear-crazed violence, but this door, by now predictably, was also locked. Bellew flattened his face against the glass panel to the side of the door and peered inside; his eyes widened and his face became masked in the total and final despair of a knowledge that comes too late.
The big brake wheel was at the end of the van but there was no hand on this wheel. Instead, the hand clutched a Bible, which was opened, face down, on the floor of the van. Devlin himself, also face down, lay beside his makeshift bed; between the thin shoulders protruded the hilt of a knife.
Bellew turned his stricken face sideways and stared, almost uncomprehendingly, at the snowladen pines lining the track-side stream whizzing by in a hundred-mile-an-hour blur. Bellew crossed himself, something he hadn't done since boyhood, and now the fear was gone from his face. In its place there was only resignation, the acceptance of the inevitability of death.
In the day compartment the seven horrified watchers were without speech for there was no longer anything to say. Like Bellew, although with a vastly different outlook, they too had dumbly accepted the inevitability of death.
The runaway coaches, two miles away now and still somehow miraculously remaining on the track, were hurtling towards the final curve leading to the bridge. Marica jerked convulsively away from the window and buried her face in her hands as the runaways failed to negotiate the last bend. They shot off the track – whether they ripped the track off with them or not it was impossible to tell at that distance – toppled sideways as they then sailed out across the void of the gorge, turning over almost lazily in mid-air until the three coaches, still locked together, had assumed a vertical position, a position they still occupied when all three smashed simultaneously into the precipitous far cliff-side of the gorge with the explosive thunderclap of sound of a detonating ammunition dump. Unquestionably, for every man aboard those coaches death must have super- vened instantaneously. For a long second of time the flattened, mangled coaches remained in that position, seemingly pinned against the canyon wall as if unwilling to move, then, with a deliberation and slowness in grotesque contrast to their speed at the moment
