Ten or twelve Indians crouched at the rock face, swinging short-handled picks. Others gathered the ore into baskets, which they emptied into another truck. The air was heavy, thick with dust and almost unbreatheable.
Dillinger turned away and moved back along the tunnel. He paused once, leaning against the wall, and coughed harshly, trying to clear the dust from his lungs. There was a sudden slide of pebbles from the darkness above.
“See what I mean?” Fallon said.
Dillinger didn’t reply. He turned and moved back along the tunnel. Suddenly a man cried out in pain, the sound echoing flatly through the darkness.
Dillinger started to run. Gradually the light increased as he came out into the main tunnel, and he saw several Indians crouched against the wall, their truck tipped onto its side, ore blocking the track.
With one hand Rojas kept an old, gray-haired Indian down on his knees. In the other he wielded a whip. It whistled through the air and curved around the thin shoulders, drawing blood. The old man cried out in pain.
When the whip rose again, Dillinger spun Rojas around and sent him crashing back against the wall. The Mexican gave a cry of rage and came up from the floor, drawing his revolver.
Dillinger moved in fast, ramming one arm against the man’s throat, grabbing the gun hand and forcing the barrel toward the floor. For a moment they swayed there, and suddenly the revolver went off.
The sound re-echoing in the confined space was like a charge of dynamite exploding, and the earth seemed to tremble. As the Indians cried out in alarm, the mountain rushed in on them.
Nine
Dillinger remembered thinking, “This is it,” as everything seemed to cave in all around him. He’d thought that once before in a small bank, an easy job; as he’d gone out the door carrying a bagful of bills, he saw ten feet ahead of him a man too old to still be a cop pointing a.38 at him from a distance nobody could miss at. “This is it,” he’d thought, but the policeman’s gun clicked, a misfire, and Dillinger had just kicked the weapon out of the cop’s hand and jumped on the running board of the waiting car that took him on the git road to safety. That was the time he decided never to do a job without the protection of a bulletproof vest.
A bulletproof vest, even if he’d had one on, is no protection against a mine cave-in. Dillinger lurched forward, groping his way through clouds of dust. He tripped and fell on his hands and knees. He lay there for a moment, coughing and choking, and then scrambled up a sloping ramp of rubble to where light gleamed between stones.
He pulled at the stones with his fingers, and Fallon and Rojas appeared on either side of him, the Mexican obviously gripped by fear. A few minutes later the gap was wide enough, and they crawled out into the sunlight followed by four Indians.
A crowd was already running toward them from the ore shed, and Father Tomas came over the hill behind them in his buckboard. He reined in a few yards away and jumped to the ground.
“How bad is it?”
Fallon’s face was a mask of dust. “I think the whole damned mountain’s fallen in.”
Dillinger took the bottle of tequila from his pocket, swallowed some, and passed it to Fallon. Rojas was sitting on a boulder, his head in his hands, dazed. Dillinger handed him the bottle of tequila and said roughly, “Get some of that down you, and pull yourself together.”
Rojas took a long swallow, coughing as the fiery liquid burned into his stomach. He got to his feet and wiped his mouth.
“How many men are still inside?” Dillinger demanded.
“I’m not sure. Twenty or so.”
Fallon scrambled on top of the boulder and addressed the crowd in Spanish. “Those men in there haven’t got long. If we’re going to do anything, it’s got to be now. Get pickaxes, shovels, baskets-anything you can lay your hands on.”
Dillinger and Fallon led the way up the slope and started to pull boulders away from the entrance. Everyone joined in, even the old priest, forming a human chain to pass the earth and stones backwards as they progressed farther into the tunnel.