The Curse of Iron Eyes (11 page)

Slowly Iron Eyes
climbed the staircase.

The
bridge was big. Far bigger than he had ever imagined it would or
could be. So big that Harve Calhoon had seen it when he and the
rest of Big Jack Brady’s team of handpicked outlaws were more than
a mile away from Honcho Wells.

Even
the moonlight could not lessen its sheer awesome
splendor.

Spanning the entire valley, Calhoon had quickly calculated
that it had to be nearly three hundred yards across and at least
fifty foot high at the center. The outlaw had seen bridges before
but never one like this.

It was made up of
thousands of large wooden trestles, bolted together and supporting
the single-span tracks at its top, spanning the width of the
valley.

Harve Calhoon started
to get worried.

His
mind tried to work out how much dynamite it would take to bring
down such a magnificent structure. This was way beyond anything he
had experience of. In the past, Calhoon had used explosives to
blast a dozen or more bank vaults open with remarkable success but
he had never once thought of demolishing a bridge.

Where did you start
with something like this?

He focused on the
trestles at the very base of the bridge. Was it possible to blow
them apart and bring the rest down like a house of cards?

Calhoon had no idea how
the bridge was constructed. He knew that he would have to get up
close to see if he could find a weak point.

His mind wrestled with
the problem as they continued to advance towards the bridge.

The river flowed
swiftly between the wooden trestles at the base of the bridge. The
high moon above made it appear that a thousand fireflies were
dancing on the wide river.

The dozen horsemen and
heavily laden wagon rode down on to the level ground next to the
fast-flowing water.

Calhoon was riding next
to the wide-shouldered giant Big Jack and could hear the man
getting more and more excited the closer the long line of horses
got to it.

‘
Looks mighty
fine, huh?’ Brady asked.

Calhoon grunted. ‘Yep. Mighty fine, Big Jack.’

Every
few paces of their horses, Calhoon glanced over his shoulder and
watched as Black Roy Hart steered the wagon’s four-horse team along
the rugged route towards the place known as Honcho
Wells.

He had
inspected the explosives before they had ridden out of Calico a few
hours earlier. There were thousands of sticks of top-grade
nine-inch dynamite and boxes full of fuses on the flat bed of the
wagon.

Calhoon began to think
that he might require every one of them to bring down a bridge so
well constructed as the one before them.

The
outlaw watched as Brady’s huge right hand plucked a pocket-watch
out of his coat and opened its golden cover.

‘
What’s the
time, Big Jack?’ he asked.

‘
Four fifteen,
Harve.’ Brady smiled, patting him on the back for the umpteenth
time. ‘I can tell ya eager to start work on that bridge. Don’t you
fret none. We’ll be there in less than half an hour.’

Calhoon cleared his dry
throat.

‘
I can hardly
wait.’

‘
We have between
seven to eight hours for you to bring down that bridge and get all
the boys in place ready to strike in the confusion,’ Brady
announced.

‘
What if the
train is early, Big Jack?’ Calhoon posed the question that most of
the other men had thought of but none been brave enough to
ask.

For the first time
since he had met Brady, he saw the venom for which the big man was
famed. The eyes widened and looked across the distance between the
two lead horses. There was a madness in them.

‘
Ya better pray
that the train is on schedule and you’ve blown the bridge apart
before it reaches Honcho Wells, Harve,’ Brady warned. ‘’Cause if it
is early and ya ain’t done your job, I’ll surely kill
ya.’

Harve Calhoon felt his
throat tighten. He looked away from the angry face and stared again
at the bridge. The closer they got to it, the bigger it looked.

‘
Understood, Big
Jack,’ Calhoon said as every bone in his body began to wish that he
had stayed with the rest of his gang and headed on to Waco instead
of riding to Calico.

It had
been the promise of a big payday that had tempted him away from the
rest of the Calhoon gang in the first place.

Now he was beginning to
realize that one way or another, he might not live to collect.

Dynamite man Harve Calhoon had taken the biggest gamble of his
entire life. He had studied the high bridge from the banks of the
river which flowed beneath it and decided that he did not have to
bring the entire structure down to achieve what Big Jack Brady
wanted.

The
locomotive would have to stop even if only ten or twenty feet of
the bridge was missing. If it didn’t, then there would be one
almighty mess in the valley.

It was more guesswork
than anything, but he knew the damage the explosives could do if
carefully placed in large enough quantities. Even though he had
never had to demolish anything like the bridge before, he knew that
it ought to fall once the dynamite bundles started to blow.

That was the
theory.

Would the reality prove
him correct?

Calhoon had strapped ten bundles of dynamite sticks to upright
wooden trestles at the base of the bridge exactly at the point
directly below where the bridge left the solid ground of the
western side of the hilltop high above. His reckoning was simple,
if he blew the lowest trestles away, the sheer weight of everything
above ought to be too great for it to do anything but
collapse.

Calhoon knew that it
sounded logical, but he had to make sure by giving himself a second
string to his destructive bow.

The
outlaw filled a sack with bundles of dynamite sticks and some more
fuses. He climbed up the trestles until he was standing on the rail
tracks high above the valley. The light of the moon gleamed off the
steel tracks as they rested on the sleepers along the bridge.
Calhoon squinted at them stretching off into infinity.

Calhoon knew that they
might hold together even if he were to destroy everything beneath
them. There was only one way to ensure that did not happen.

Carefully walking across the precarious wooden joists and
trying not to look down, his skilled hands tied four bundles of
dynamite sticks to the metal tracks roughly twenty feet from the
start of the bridge. After inserting the fuse caps into the center
dynamite stick in the bundles he moved to the edge of the bridge
and dropped the long fuse coil down to where the rest of the
outlaws were watching his every move.

Harve
Calhoon rubbed the sweat off his face and started to climb back
down. He had ensured that the top and bottom of the first section
of bridge would be blown apart; he just prayed that everything in
between would follow suit.

Big Jack Brady watched
Calhoon descending towards him and then turned to allow the light
of the moon to illuminate the face of his pocket-watch.

It was nearly dawn.

He looked at the rest
of his men.

‘
I want you all
up there waiting on either side of the tracks for when that train
gets here,’ Brady said. ‘Black Roy stays down here with me, Harve
and the wagon. After all, there ain’t no way we can move boxes of
gold coin out of here without a wagon.’

‘
How many boxes
of gold coin do you figure there’ll be, Big Jack?’ one of the
outlaws asked as he gathered up his reins.

Brady
smiled. ‘Might be hundreds, boy.’

The gunhands nodded,
mounted their horses and rode up the steep incline. They knew that
they would have to wait hours for the train to arrive at Honcho
Wells, but they were used to waiting.

Waiting and then
killing.

It was what they did
best.

That was why they had
been chosen by Brady from all the other outlaws who roamed the
badlands. The big man knew whom he could rely upon to turn his
ambitions into reality.

Big
Jack Brady said nothing when Calhoon got to the base of the bridge.
His hooded eyes watched, though, as the man wove the various long
fuses together until he had just one in his gloved
hands.

‘
You gotta match
I can borrow, Big Jack?’ Calhoon called out to Brady.

The big man reached
into his vest pocket, hauled out a box of matches and tossed them
across to the outlaw. Harve Calhoon smiled as he caught the box in
his left hand.

‘
I thought that
maybe you’d want to light this yourself, Big Jack,’ Calhoon
grinned.

Brady
waved a huge hand at Black Roy Hart. ‘Get the wagon away from here,
Black Roy. I don’t wanna have it crushed by all the timber that’ll
be fallin’.’

Hart
scurried up the side of the wagon, grabbed hold of the reins and
hauled them to his left. He released the brake-pole and then got
the team of horses moving.

‘
How far shall I
take it, Big Jack?’ Black Roy shouted down from the driver’s
seat.

Brady
pointed down the riverbank. ‘About a quarter mile should be OK. Now
git going.’

Calhoon suddenly noticed that the sky above them was changing
color. The sunlight traced across the cloudless sky faster than the
blink of an eye. He glanced across to the mouth of the valley and
noticed that the sun was starting to rise.

‘
You sure you
don’t wanna light the fuse?’ he asked the big man again.

Brady
did not reply. He was walking away from the bridge with his horse
on a short rein. There was an urgency in his step that told Harve
Calhoon a lot about the man who liked to pretend that nothing
frightened him.

But Calhoon could sense
the truth, he was afraid of the dynamite and it showed.

Harve Calhoon opened
the box and pulled out a match. He looked up the embankment at the
rest of the gang, who had just reached the flat ground near the
steel rails.

‘
You better take
cover up there, boys!’ Calhoon yelled at the top of his lungs.
‘There’s gonna be an awful big bang in a couple of
minutes.’

The outlaws pulled
their reins hard and turned their dust-caked mounts. Then they
galloped away.

Harve Calhoon turned
away from the rising dust that drifted into the morning air. He
glanced back at Brady, running now as he desperately sought
cover.

The outlaw struck the
match along the side of the box and cupped the flame carefully to
the end of the fuses. For a few seconds nothing happened. Then they
burst into spitting fiery action.

The outlaw who was
known as the dynamite man carefully lowered the fuse to the ground
and watched it for a moment. When satisfied that it would not go
out, he strode to his waiting horse, stepped into the stirrup and
hurriedly mounted. He swung the horse around and jabbed his
spurs.

The horse sprang into
action. Calhoon rode after the fleeing Brady and the wagon.

The ground was hard
along the riverbank. The outlaw had no idea at what speed the fuses
would burn to reach the explosives but he had no intention of
waiting to find out. He hoped that they had roughly a couple of
minutes before the first explosion, but even that was a guess.

As he urged the mount
on he realized how much easier it was to blow open bank vaults.

When Calhoon reached
the puffing Brady, he stopped his mount and looked down at him. He
pointed at the wagon, which was another few hundred yards further
along the riverbank.

‘
I reckon that
Black Roy’s about the right distance away from the bridge, Big
Jack.’ Calhoon smiled, then spurred his horse and galloped to where
the wagon was waiting. Brady grabbed hold of his saddle horn,
hauled his immense bulk on to his saddle and followed.

Just as the large rider
reached the wagon and the two men who were taking cover behind it,
the first of the dynamite bundles strapped to the bridge trestles
exploded. Within seconds, the rest of them blasted.

None of the three
outlaws had ever heard anything like it.

It hurt.

The massive bulk of
Brady scrambled off his saddle to the ground and stared in
disbelief at the sight of scores of well-placed explosives igniting
into deafening action.

The
dynamite bundles exploded one after another at intervals of a few
seconds. The explosions went up the trestles at ten-foot intervals
until the burning fuses reached the rails at the very
top.

Then it was like a
volcano erupting.

Fire and smoke shot
hundreds of feet into the morning air as plumes of dust were
blasted off the dry valley wall. Even more black smoke and debris
spewed out in every direction as the shock waves sent clouds of
choking dust over the entire area.

Suddenly Brady dived
beside Calhoon and Black Roy. The pair of outlaws had no chance to
ask why. Thousands of fragments of wood showered over them and the
wagon.

Their startled horses
reared up and vainly kicked out at the very air itself.

The
smoldering downpour seemed to last forever as the stench of burning
wood filled their nostrils. Blinding dust swept over the trio as
they tried to breathe and the wagon above them shook violently. At
last the deafening explosions gradually stopped as the smoke and
dust drifted across the river, leaving the three men lying beside
the wagon.