It wasn’t likely he’d get out. It was likely he’d get killed. In fact he might die of his own trick. But it was better than what they had in mind for him.
He tore the binding off the Bible and removed the pages in clumps and then separated the clumps until he had hundreds of flimsy pages isolated. He crumpled each page in his fist into a loose ball of paper and he piled the paper up against the old door in a big heap. He mixed the small pieces of blanket into the pile and when it was ready, some time around midnight he guessed, he took one of the matches out of his sock and ignited the pyre.
Small flames trickled up from the bottom corners of the heap of paper and suddenly the whole thing crashed into flame. It was a hot roaring bonfire that wouldn’t last long at all and he was afraid the wood was too thick to catch. He couldn’t stay to make sure; the heat drove him back across the cell with his arm flung up across his face. He coughed in the smoke and climbed onto the platform that passed for a bunk. Held his face twisted into the bars of the little window. The flames sucked a wind through the opening and he was able to breathe here.
The heat was a blast of agony. It was good he hadn’t had to rip up his clothes for fuel because without that protection he would have been singed and scorched and blistered from head to foot.
He kept his back hunched against it and pushed his face against the bars. Smoke wheeled into him and burnt his throat and he thought, while he coughed white hot pain, that if this was what Don Pablo Ortiz endured every time he had a coughing spasm then Don Pablo was a braver man than Boag had thought.
The heat pushed at him as though he were in the fire, not ten feet from it. But paper burned very hot while it burned and he had no confidence it would last long enough to ignite the door; the heat began to drop and so did the blinding light of it and when he looked at it the paper heap was collapsing into a small pile of uncurling papers with grey edges.
He pounced across the room and kicked the paper back up against the door and tried to shove some of it under the crack with the toe of his boot.
He did not want to think about what he was doing to the Bible.
Little flames flickered around the lower edge of the door and he kept crowding the ash toward them because there were still fires in the ashes.
The door was burning. Here and there it turned red at the splinters. The flames had caught and it was not burning high like the paper but it was burning, turning black beneath the flames as the fire crept upward along the cracks where air came through from the corridor and fed it.
He watched the last of the Bible disintegrate. Little patches of blanket-cloth still smoldered and he shoved them all under the door. Then he picked up the single strip of blanket he had saved and carried it back to the window with him and stood there in the clean wind, watching the small fires nibble the wood.
Finally he knew he had it licked when he saw flames sliding in through the cracks from the outside of the door. It meant the fire was climbing up the corridor side of the door. The draft would draw the flames through the cracks to this side and that would keep it burning.
He had been parched before. The smoke sucked the last moisture out of him and he almost strangled dry-coughing; he had to swallow a dozen times in panic before the saliva began to run reluctantly in his throat.
He heard them running down the corridor. The boots clattered to a halt outside the burning door and he heard a voice. “Get buckets—get water!”
Then another voice with the timbre of command. “Never mind, let him fry in there.”
The first voice: “But the door.”
“It will have to be replaced in any case.”
Just the two of them, Boag decided; there were no others. Yet.
He judged the door and it had to be now, he had to hope the fire had weakened it enough.
He made his run.
He left the floor halfway across the room, launched himself into a flying dropkick and hit the door fairly low, feet first, expecting the tough old timbers to hold firm and break his feet.
But the wood was dry and brittle and the fire had eaten enough of it. He went through in a tangled crashing of broken wood and angry flames.
He skinned his ankle on the corridor floor and rolled fast; it was a blind lunge but it caught somebody across the shins and the man came down on top of Boag. A voice shouted and Boag slithered out from under the flailing body, found the man’s head as it lifted; Boag whipped the length of blanket-strip around the man’s neck and yanked it tight as a garotte.
He saw the other one back away fumbling for his revolver.
Boag clamped a one-hand grip on the rag that circled his man’s throat; he whipped up the guard’s revolver with his free hand but he wasn’t fast enough and the man on his feet began shooting. One of the bullets slammed into Boag’s man. Boag felt the body lurch against him. He fired past the man’s ear and saw the other guard flinch from the shooting; Boag pulled trigger again and it scored. The guard went down.
Flames burned strong around the jagged hole in the door, sucking a wind through that moaned in the corridor. Boag batted his prisoner across the temple with the gun, but it wasn’t needed, the man had a bullet somewhere in his guts and there was no fight in him. Boag left him, left the blanket-strip, scooped up the other guard’s revolver and ran down the hall with revolvers in both fists.
A guard bolted around the far bend into the end of the corridor. Boag snapped a shot that drove the guard back behind cover. Remember now you’ve used two from the left hand and one from the right. Were they the kind who loaded six or were they the kind who loaded five and left the chamber empty under the pin? Assume that; assume you have seven left.
The gunbarrel was poking around the corner and Boag flattened himself in a doorway. The guard down there sprayed the corridor, shooting blind. Boag let him take his five shots and then Boag was out and running again and he heard the guard retreat in panic. He heard empty shell cases clatter on the floor.
He tried doors as he passed them. Three were locked. The fourth stood ajar but it was only an empty cell. Boag reached the corner and triggered a blind shot around it, burst around the corner, guns up, and saw the guard frantically plugging ammunition into his revolver. Boag sighted and fired quickly but not too quickly. The bullet snapped the guard back against the doorframe and he slid to the floor leaving a blood smear on the wood.
How many more of them and where would they come from? Boag tried to remember the route by which they had brought him into the prison. Where were the exits? He stepped across the dying, guard, scooping up the man’s revolver; he crouched to finish the reloading job and took the guard’s ammunition pouch with him back into the dark offices.
He made several turnings, moving without sound now; he heard voices shouting in the labyrinth behind him. Some fool fired a shot in some other part of the building and the echoes clanged around in the night.
He tried a door slowly and peered through the crack. It was a side door into the room where they had taken his belongings from him. There was a long counter with locked cabinets behind it.
He didn’t have time to seek out his things. But he knew where he was now and he slipped into the room, pulled the door shut behind him and loped across to the far door. Beyond it was a corridor and at the far end of that was a courtyard, and across the courtyard was a gate to the street of Ures.
The gate would be shut of course and there were guard towers up on the walls. It would be impossible to cross the courtyard in the open on foot and even if he did, there would still be the gate, at least ten feet high under its arch of adobe.