He turned to Chief Whitehawk. "Chief, when you hear my rifle fire from the high rim, have your men open up with every musket and bow you have along the main breastwork. Draw that Gatling gun's fire to the center. Give me thirty seconds to work."
Whitehawk placed his scarred palm against Ethan’s chest, directly over his heart.
"Go with the strength of the eagle, my son," the old chief said in his native tongue, his voice trembling with solemn reverence. "The spirits of our grandfathers walk with your boots."
Ethan didn't look back. Slapping Dutch on the hip to send the gray horse into the safety of the rear cottonwoods, he grabbed his Winchester, stuffed the dynamite pouch into his coat, and sprinted into the dark cleft of the eastern switchback.
The climb up the Path of the Crows was a breathless, agonizing nightmare.
The trail was not a path at all; it was a fractured seam in the vertical sandstone face, barely six inches wide in places, slick with loose red shale and choked with thorny catclaw that ripped through Ethan’s sleeves and tore the flesh of his forearms. He climbed with his Winchester slung diagonally across his back by a rawhide strap, his fingers digging into razor-sharp cracks in the stone until his nails split and bled.
Below him, the gorge was a cauldron of fire and thunder.
Ben Thorpe’s men had opened fire again with the Gatling gun, the mechanical roar shaking the very cliff face Ethan was clinging to. Down at the barricade, Whitehawk and Tahzay were executing their diversion with terrifying valor. Twenty Apache warriors leaned out from behind the boulders, firing an erratic, blazing volley of musket balls and whistling arrows down into the freight wagons.
Clack-clack-clack-clack!
The Gatling gun swung toward the center, its muzzle flash lighting up the gorge like a continuous lightning strike, chewing into the dirt where the warriors were firing, keeping the mercenaries' eyes glued to the valley floor.
Reaching the upper rim seventy feet above the canyon floor, Ethan dragged himself onto a narrow, flat shelf of red sandstone. He was soaked in sweat, his breath coming in ragged, burning gasps, but he gave himself no time to rest.
He crawled on his belly to the edge of the drop and peered over.
Directly below him—barely sixty feet down in the dry wash—sat the open freight wagon containing the remaining twenty kegs of Dupont powder. Near the undercut cave, Ben Thorpe himself stood holding a sputtering, smoking length of sulfur-fuse, preparing to touch it to the master train of powder.
"Light it up, boys!" Thorpe roared above the gunfire. "Get back to the limbers! We drop this mountain right now!"
Ethan pulled the leather pouch from his coat. With trembling, deliberate fingers, he took out a stick of Hercules dynamite, inserted a copper blasting cap into the soft, greasy explosive, and cut a two-inch section of waterproof fuse. Two inches gave him exactly four seconds before detonation.
He drew a long, slow breath to steady his racing heart.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a sulfur match, and struck it against the dry sandstone ledge.
The match head flared with a bright blue flame. In the pitch-black darkness of the upper rim, that tiny flare of light was as visible as a beacon on an empty sea.
Down in the wash, one of Thorpe’s sharpshooters looked up. "Hey! On the rim! Look out!"
Ethan touched the flame to the fuse. It sputtered, hissing with angry, white-hot sparks.
He didn't hesitate. Standing fully upright on the exposed stone shelf, silhouetted against the indigo stars, Ethan drew his arm back and hurled the hissing stick of dynamite straight down into the bed of the powder wagon.
"DYNAMITE!" a mercenary shrieked, dropping his rifle and turning to run.
Thorpe looked up, his scarred face twisting in horror as the spinning red cylinder plummeted through the air. "Get clear! Get clear of the—"
The dynamite struck the wooden floor of the freight wagon and detonated.
The blast was blinding, a brilliant white-yellow sun that erupted in the bottom of the gorge. The single stick of high explosive instantly sympathetic-detonated the twenty kegs of black powder in the wagon bed.
A shockwave of unimaginable violence ripped through the canyon.
The freight wagon vanished into a fireball three hundred feet high, vaporized into flying iron tires and splintered oak. The concussion slammed into Ethan like a physical fist, lifting him off his feet and throwing him backward against the solid sandstone wall of the ledge. The breath was knocked entirely from his lungs; his ears rang with a deafening, high-pitched squeal as darkness closed in around the edges of his vision.