Chapter 59 - Blood on the Iron Siding
The steam winch screamed in protest as Caleb slammed the engagement lever forward. The ancient boiler, stoked with pitch-pine by Toby and Judge Vance below, hissed violent jets of pressurized steam into the frigid night as the iron gears ground against one another with bone-shaking force.
The ore bucket lurched violently into the void.
Clara leaned out over the edge, the wind howling around them as the earth dropped away into a sea of black pines and white snow. Below, Township Nine looked like a scattered handful of dying embers, defenseless in the frozen basin. Above, the gaping black mouth of Mine Number Four grew closer with agonizing slowness.
A sharp *ping* rang out against the iron bucket.
"Snipers!" Clara yelled, dropping to her knee.
Another bullet struck the suspension chain, throwing sparks into the darkness. Up at the tram landing, fifty yards above them, Sterling’s sergeant-major had taken position behind a barricade of iron rail ties, firing down into the open bucket with a heavy Sharps rifle.
"Hold the rim!" Caleb roared.
He dropped his Winchester, grabbed the hanging steel haul-rope with his left hand, and leveled his Colt with his right. As the bucket swung through a wide, sickening arc over the three-hundred-foot drop, Caleb fired three rounds in rapid succession. The heavy lead thudded into the pine supports around the sniper.
The sergeant ducked, and in that split second, Clara rose. She didn't hesitate. Bracing her forearm against the rim, she fired a single, calculated shot.
The bullet found the gap between the rail ties. The sniper jerked backward, his rifle spinning off the platform into the dark abyss, his body collapsing against the timber chute.
Before the echoes of the shot could die, the bucket smashed into the upper terminal platform with a deafening crash of iron on timber. Caleb vaulted over the lip, hit the frost-slick planks, and rolled to his feet, his rifle coming up to cover the tunnel entrance.
The adit of Mine Number Four was a black throat cut into the heart of the mountain. The smell of sulfur, stagnant mine water, and cold iron poured out of the darkness. Footprints—deep, hurried tracks from cavalry boots—disappeared into the blackness.
"Sterling!" Caleb’s voice echoed into the tunnel, hollow and metallic.
Only the steady, ominous drip of water answered.
Clara stepped up beside him, a kerosene lantern in her left hand, the wick turned low to cast only a narrow beam along the wet floorboards. "The lower gallery is three hundred yards in," she whispered, her eyes tracking the boot prints. "If they’ve already reached the magazine..."
"They haven't," Caleb said, pointing down at the damp rail ties. Fresh red droplets glistened on the timber. "One of them is bleeding. They’re moving slow."
They stepped into the darkness together. The mountain swallowed the howling of the blizzard, replacing it with the suffocating silence of stone. The ceiling beams groaned under the weight of thousands of tons of frozen granite overhead. Every twenty yards, rusted iron drill rods hung from the rock walls like broken ribs.
Suddenly, the lantern light caught a shadow lunging from a side drift.
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A cavalryman, his face blackened with coal dust, lunged forward with a fixed bayonet aimed directly at Clara’s throat.
***
