"Yes," she whispered.
"Then—if you please—press the button!"
Slowly Joanne's right hand crept out, while the fingers of her left clung tighter to Aldous. She touched the button—thrust it over. A little cry that fell from between her tense lips told them she had done the work, and a silence like that of death fell on those who waited.
A half a minute—perhaps three quarters—and a shiver ran under their feet, but there was no sound; and then a black pall, darker than the night, seemed to rise up out of the mountain, and with that, a second later, came the explosion. There was a rumbling and a jarring, as if the earth were convulsed under foot; volumes of dense black smoke shot upward, and in another instant these rolling, twisting volumes of black became lurid, and an explosion like that of a thousand great guns rent the air. As fast as the eye could follow sheets of flame shot up out of the sea of smoke, climbing higher and higher, in lightning flashes, until the lurid tongues licked the air a quarter of a mile above the startled wilderness. Explosion followed explosion, some of them coming in hollow, reverberating booms, others sounding as if in midair. Unseen by the watchers, the heavens were filled with hurtling rocks; solid masses of granite ten feet square were thrown a hundred feet away; rocks weighing a ton were hurled still farther, as if they were no more than stones flung by the hands of a giant; chunks that would have crashed from the roof to the basement of a skyscraper dropped a third of a mile away. For three minutes the frightful convulsions continued, and the tongues of flame leaped into the night. Then the lurid lights died out, shorter and shorter grew the sullen flashes, and then again fell—silence!
During those appalling moments, unconscious of the act, Joanne had shrank close to Aldous, so that he felt the soft crush of her hair and the swift movement of her bosom. Blackton's voice brought them back to life.
He laughed, and it was the laugh of a man who had looked upon work well done.
"It has done the trick," he said. "To-morrow we will come and see. And I have changed my plans about Coyote Number Twenty-eight. Hutchins, the superintendent, is passing through in the afternoon, and I want him to see it." He spoke now to a man who had come up out of the darkness. "Gregg, have Twenty-eight ready at four o'clock to-morrow afternoon—four o'clock—sharp!"
Then he said:
"Dust and a bad smell will soon be settling about us. Come, let's go home!"
And as they went back to the buckboard wagon through the gloom John Aldous still held Joanne's hand in his own, and she made no effort to take it from him.