IPA for Outlaws The Long Haul

Story by Sumit Vohra.

Silver Hollow came down on itself the second week of January. A rock fall sealed the main drift with eleven men behind it. They had water from the seep, food for a week if they were careful, and air as long as an old crack in the ceiling held. The only way to them was a new shaft through forty feet of granite. The only dynamite in the territory sat in a powder shed at Cutter's Tank, three hundred miles and one bad pass away.

The notice went up on every saloon wall in the county. Gold to whoever brought the powder in six days.

Hard men in winter coats read a notice nailed to a saloon wall

Honest men read it and went home. That pass in January killed honest men.

Six outlaws signed on before supper.

The trail boss was Hattie Crane, who had driven freight for twenty years and never lost a load. She knew the other five from the walls of sheriff's offices and didn't ask their names. While they loaded the crates at Cutter's Tank she told them two things. Go slow. Stay dry.

Hattie Crane and five outlaws at a snowy railroad water stop, crates going onto the wagon

The man in the new buffalo coat asked if the cold would hurt the load. Hattie said the cold was her business.

The man in the new buffalo coat asks with an easy smile; Hattie looks back, unimpressed

The pass was everything they'd heard. Snow to the axles. Wind like a skinning knife. The crates rode in straw under buffalo robes, and every rut in the trail made six people hold their breath.

The wagon crawls up a mountain pass in a blizzard, six figures bent into the wind

The first night, a linchpin went missing from the front axle. The second night, the lead horse came up lame with a stone driven into its shoe. Accidents, everybody said. Hattie stopped saying it.

A wagon wheel missing its linchpin, and a horse's hoof with a stone wedged in the shoe

The third night, somebody pulled the robes off the crates and poured a canteen over the straw. By morning the powder would be frozen solid. Dynamite that freezes and thaws sweats raw nitroglycerin, and after that, the first hard rut turns the wagon into a hole in the mountain.

Firelight on a crate with its robe pulled back, the straw soaked, an empty canteen in the snow

Hattie lined them up by the fire.

"Back at Cutter's Tank," she said, "one of you asked me if the cold would hurt the load. I never told any of you that it could. I never told anybody. Freight men know it. You're not freight men." She looked at the buffalo coat. "Somebody taught you. And the only man who'd teach a hired gun how to ruin dynamite is the man who wants that mine shut. Silver Hollow sits on the best silver in the territory. Somebody in Denver would buy it cheap the day it closes."

Hattie at the campfire facing the outlaws, every eye turning to the man in the buffalo coat

The man in the buffalo coat ran. He ran straight out into the dark and the snow, and nobody went after him. The mountain would decide.

The man in the buffalo coat runs into blowing snow and darkness

They heated stones in the fire and packed them around the crates. They gave up their bedrolls to wrap the load. For three nights five outlaws slept back to back around a wagon full of dynamite, keeping it warm with their own bodies. Nobody slept much.

Five outlaws asleep back to back around the wrapped crates, stones glowing in the snow

The wagon rolled into Silver Hollow at dawn on the sixth day with five outlaws asleep on the bench. By noon the new shaft was blasted. By dusk, eleven men climbed out into the light, blinking like newborns.