Chapter 58 - The Broken Line
The bitter cold was an enemy that took no sides. The water Caleb had unleashed had crippled the cavalry’s firepower, but the vapor rising from the torrent was turning into a blinding ground fog, coating every surface in an unbreakable glaze of black ice.
Clara moved like a phantom through the frost-rimmed hemlocks, her revolvers cocked, her breath coming in short, rhythmic plumes of white steam. Behind her, twenty miners swept through the wreckage of the battery. They weren't soldiers, but they were men who had spent their lives working with blasting powder, heavy steel, and pickaxes; they moved with a grim, methodical efficiency, disarming the concussed soldiers and securing the perimeter.
"Clara!"
She turned sharply, her hammer easing back down as she recognized Toby emerging through the smoke, hauling a captured ammunition crate.
"Mister Caleb is down from the flume!" the boy shouted, his voice cracking with adrenaline. "He’s wounded, but he’s moving on foot toward the old compressor shack. He said Sterling took six men and headed up the tramway tracks!"
Clara’s jaw tightened. She broke into a run, her boots crunching through the freezing slush until she reached the base of the rock wall. There, leaning against the rust-red boiler of an abandoned steam winch, stood Caleb. Blood had seeped through his coat, freezing into a stiff, dark crust along his flank, but his eyes were wide, feverish with focus.
"You're hit," Clara said, stepping close, her hands immediately checking the tear in his mackinaw.
"Grazed," Caleb breathed, pushing her hands gently away with a frostbitten glove. "It didn't take the bone. But Clara, look up the slope."
She followed his gaze. A thousand feet above them, etched into the jagged spine of the ridge, sat the entrance to Mine Number Four—the abandoned copper drift that sat directly above Township Nine’s main water reservoirs. A single lantern was bobbing along the iron tram rails leading straight into the dark adit.
"He knows he can't fight through the gorge," Clara whispered, the pieces clicking together in her mind with horrifying clarity. "The telegraph wire is cut. The governor ordered him to cease hostilities, but Sterling knows his commission is over the moment a federal marshal steps into Black Ridge. He’s going for the copper drift."
"He’s not trying to escape," Caleb said, his voice flat and deadly. "There are four tons of leftover blasting gelatine stored in the lower gallery of Number Four. If he collapses the upper ceiling, the whole mountain slope will slide directly into the valley. It will bury Township Nine under a quarter-mile of shale and stone."
"He wouldn't," Toby gasped, his face pale. "There are two hundred families down there!"
"Sterling doesn't see families," Caleb replied, his grip tightening on his rifle until the knuckles went white. "He sees a battlefield he refused to lose. To him, an avalanche is just an act of God. It erases the rebellion, erases the evidence, and leaves him with a clean report."
Clara glanced back at the miners gathering below them. Most of them were exhausted, their cartridges low, their limbs stiffening as the sub-zero wind picked up once more.
"We can't drag thirty men up that ice shelf in time," Clara said, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper. "The tram cable is the only fast way up."
Caleb looked at the rusted steel cable running from the winch house up the vertical cliff face to the minehead above. It was a terrifying ascent—a four-hundred-yard sheer lift on an open iron ore bucket meant for stone, not men.
"Then it’s just you and me," Caleb said.
May you like
Clara unlatched the safety on her revolvers and stepped directly onto the frozen lip of the ore bucket. "Start the engine."
***
