Free Black Hills by Dan Simmons Page A

after the owner’s wife—where he’d once worked as chief powderman. The owners of the Holy Terror had held life cheap, and the lives of itspowdermen were held the cheapest of all. The owners had carried over dynamite from one season to the next, something absolutely prohibited in any gold or silver or coal mine where safety is a consideration.
    Paha Sapa always enjoys showing new powdermen how dynamite sweats—the nitroglycerine leaking through the paper and beading up on the exterior—and how one can take a finger and snap a bead of dynamite sweat against a nearby boulder. The new men always flinch away when that hurled bead explodes against the stone with the sound of a .22 pistol being fired.
    Then Paha Sapa explains about the dynamite headaches.
    But the old dynamite stacked and stored in his cellar and shed does more than sweat death. The nitroglycerine in most of it has gathered and clumped and crystallized until it’s become so unstable that just shifting the crates—much less moving them in a car or truck or Paha Sapa’s own motorcycle sidecar—would be the equivalent of playing Russian roulette with all six cartridges loaded. (Paha Sapa is tempted to smile when he thinks of President Roosevelt’s caravan of cars on its way up here to the Monument on August 30, the president himself protected by Secret Service men, passing through Keystone and within thirty yards of Paha Sapa’s shed and root cellar, holding enough unstable explosive to blow all of Keystone a thousand feet into the air.)
    But, he thinks again, it’s not the president he wishes to harm.
    Even if Paha Sapa is able to get the unstable dynamite and the dangerous caps to the top of the mountain in the dark of night, past the few night guards Borglum has posted to watch over the tools and equipment, past the compressor house and hoist house and blacksmith shop and past Borglum’s studio and residence itself—then manages to somehow get the two tons of unstable explosives carried up these same 506 steps he’s just climbed—he’ll still need to drill hundreds of holes into the three faces.
    On a regular day such as this one in August of 1936—normal except for the unusually brutal heat—there are already thirty or more men on the work areas of the three faces (and below them, a dozen men now on Washington’s chest), drilling, drilling—the compressors howling, the drill bits screaming—and many more “steel nippers,” workmen rushing up and down the cliff exchanging fresh drills and bits for old,sending the dulled bits down on the tramway to be sharpened at the blacksmith shop across the valley. Soon, Whiskey Art and Paha Sapa and their assistants will be swinging down onto the cliff faces and presidents’ faces to join the drillers there as they load the preset drill holes with their hundreds of charges, then carefully tie the charges into an electrical detonator cord.
    It’s the loud, roaring work of scores—sometimes hundreds—of men, just for a minor blow at noon or four p.m., when the workers are off the face, to move a ton or two of stone. To kill the
wasichu
heads, Paha Sapa will have to do it all at night, with unstable dynamite in hundreds of holes all over the faces to move a hundred times as much stone as a regular blast, and do it all silently, in the dark, and by himself, alone.
    Still—that’s what he will have to do if he’s to bring down the three heads already risen from the stone. And he has long since come up with a plan that may give him a chance. But now, between the news of his growing cancer and the confirmation of the date for Roosevelt’s visit for the dedication, Paha Sapa knows he will have to do it by a week from the day after tomorrow, so that the “demonstration blast” in front of President Roosevelt and the gathered dignitaries and cameras will be the end, forever, of the stone
wasichus
rising from his sacred hills.

7

At Deer Medicine Rocks, Near the Big Bend of the Rosebud

June 1876

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