So please don't swallow those wild tales of a stick of dynamite that threw down a mountainside.-I once read a story--it was not so long ago--of a Chinaman who wiped out a mine with a little piece of dynamite which he carried in his pocket.-I laughed.
Casey Ryan, on the first day when he was left alone with his crippled hand and his pots and pans for company, did nothing whatever that he would not have done had one of the three been present.-He was suspicious of their going and thought it was a trap set to catch him in an attempted escape.
On the second day when the three went off together and left him alone, Casey went out gathering wood and discovered just where the "powder," fuse and caps were kept under a huge, black boulder between the tunnel portal and the dugout.-On the third day he also gathered wood and helped himself to two sticks of dynamite, three caps and eighteen inches of fuse.-Not enough to be missed unless they checked their supply more carefully than Casey believed they did; but enough for Casey's purpose nevertheless.
That night, while the moon shone in through the dingy window at the head of his bunk and gave him a little light to work by, Casey sat up in bed and snored softly and with a soothing rhythm while he cut a stick of dynamite in two, capped five inches of fuse for each piece working awkwardly with his one good hand and pinching the caps tight with his teeth, which might have sent him with a bang into Kingdom Come--and very carefully worked the caps into the powder until no more than three inches of fuse protruded from the end of the half stick.-It would have been less dangerous to land with a yell in the middle of the floor and fight the three men with one bare hand, but Casey's courage never turned a hair.
Still snoring mildly, he held up to the moonlight two deadly weapons and surveyed them with much satisfaction.-They would not be so quick, as fiction would have them, but if his aim was accurate in throwing, they would be deadly enough.-Moreover, he could count with a good deal of certainty upon a certain degree of terror which the sight of them in his hand would produce.
When Casey Ryan cooked breakfast next morning, he carried two half-sticks of loaded dynamite under his hand in the sling. Can you wonder that even he shied at standing over the stove cooking hot cakes and complained that his broken hand pained him a lot and that the heat made it worse?-But a shrewd observer would have noticed on his face the expression of a cat that has been shut in the pantry over night.
Joe volunteered to take another look at the hand and see if blood poison was "setting in"; but Casey said it didn't feel like blood poison.-He had knocked it against the bunk edge in his sleep, he declared.-He'd dose 'er with iodine after a while, and she'd be all right.
Joe let it go at that, being preoccupied with other matters at which Casey could only guess.-He conferred with Paw outside the dugout after breakfast, called Hank away from the dish-washing and the three set off toward the tunnel with a brisker air than usually accompanied them to work.-Casey watched them go and felt reasonably sure of at least two hours to himself.
The first thing Casey did after he had made sure that he was actually alone was to remove the deadly stuff from the sling and lay it on a shadowed shelf where it would be safe but convenient to his hand. Then, going to his bunk, he reached under the blankets and found the other stick of dynamite which he had not yet loaded.-This he laid on the kitchen table and cut it in two as he had done last night with the other stick.-With his remaining cap he loaded a half and carried it back to his bunk.
He was debating in his mind whether it was worth while purloining another cap from a box under the boulder when another fancy took him and set him grinning.
Four separate charges of dynamite, he reasoned, would not be necessary. It was an even chance that the sight of a piece with the fuse in his hand would be sufficient to tame Paw or Hank or Joe--or the three together, for that matter--without going further than to give them a sight of it.
With that idea uppermost, Casey split the paper carefully down the side of the remaining half-stick, took out the contents in a tin plate and carried it outside where he buried it in the sand beneath a bush.-Returning to the dugout he made a thick dough of leftover pancake batter and molded it into the dynamite wrapping with a fragment of harmless fuse protruding from the opened end.
When the thing was dry, Casey thought it would look very deadly and might be useful.-After several days of helplessness for want of a weapon, Casey was in a mood to supply himself generously.
He finished the dish-washing, working awkwardly with one hand.
After that he put a kettle of beans on to boil, filled the stove with pinon sticks and closed the drafts.-He armed himself with the two loaded pieces of dynamite from the cupboard, filled his pockets with such other things as he thought he might need, and went prospecting on his own account.
At the portal of the tunnel he stopped and listened for the ping-g, ping-g of a single-jack striking steadily upon steel.
But the tunnel was silent, the ore car uptilted at the end of its track on the dump. Yet the three men were supposedly at work in the mine, had talked at breakfast about wanting to show a certain footage when the boss returned, and of needing to hurry.
Casey went into the tunnel, listening and going silently; sounds travel far in underground workings.-At the mouth of the first right-hand drift he stopped again and listened.-This, if he would believe Joe, was the drift where the bad ground had caused the accident to Joe and his partner whose leg had been broken.
