He had studied the high bridge from the banks of the river which flowed beneath it and decided that he did not have to bring the entire structure down to achieve what Big Jack Brady wanted. The locomotive would have to stop even if only ten or twenty feet of the bridge was missing. If it didn’t, then there would be one almighty mess in the valley. It was more guesswork than anything, but he knew the damage the explosives could do if carefully placed in large enough quantities. Even though he had never had to demolish anything like the bridge before, he knew that it ought to fall once the dynamite bundles started to blow. That was the theory. Would the reality prove him correct? Calhoon had strapped ten bundles of dynamite sticks to upright wooden trestles at the base of the bridge exactly at the point directly below where the bridge left the solid ground of the western side of the hilltop high above. His reckoning was simple, if he blew the lowest trestles away, the sheer weight of everything above ought to be too great for it to do anything but collapse.
