Gabriel picked it up, broke it open, shook the cartridges out into his palm, and put them in his pocket. Then he looked at the backstrap, at the small stamped wheel with its wings.
"You were supposed to be back across," Gabriel said. It was not a question.
"Mabry said the charge was on a long fuse. Said we'd have five minutes to come back through and jump." Snell's voice was flat and careful, as if each word had to be lifted. "I counted. It wasn't any five minutes."
"Corwin Mabry?"
Snell looked at him for a long moment, then at Louisa, then away, at the mountains. He did not answer, which was its own answer.
Louisa knelt in the grass in her magenta dress. She looked at the ruined leg, then at Snell's face. "We will put you on the train," she said. "There is a doctor in Castle Rock."
"Miss Kittredge," Snell said, and something moved in his face, some old reflex of a man who has spent his life touching his hat to the family that pays him, "you oughtn't to have been aboard. He told us you were coming Thursday."
The words sat in the grass between them.
"Who told you?" she said.
But Gabriel was already on his feet, looking down the line. Half a mile on, where the track curved around a low bluff, black smoke was rising in a thick column, and under it, small and bright, there was fire.
IV.
The express car sat on the rails exactly where it had been left, its hand brake screwed down hard. Its forward end was burning. Somebody had splashed coal oil along the boards and up the door and lit it, and the old paint was blistering off in sheets, and the flames climbed the end of the car and curled over the roof in a yellow wave. The side door had been pried open with a bar. On the ground beside it lay a small iron strongbox, its padlock shot away, and beside the strongbox stood two men in dusters, struggling to lift something heavy onto the back of a horse that did not want it.
They heard the train and looked up.
The taller of the two let go of his end of whatever they carried and drew a rifle from the saddle scabbard in one smooth motion, and fired. The shot hit the iron of the coach end beside Gabriel's head with a sound like a hammer on an anvil. The second shot went low. Behind Gabriel someone cried out, and he turned and saw the young brakeman, a boy named Billy Ochs who had come back to help with the injured, fold over his own thigh and sit down hard on the platform.
"Get down," Gabriel said to Louisa, and she did, flat behind the iron, and he went down the steps on the far side of the coach and came around the end of it with the Schofield in his hand.