“You’re wrong about that,” Maggie said, striking a match. “We invited you.”

She lit the clipped fuse of the dynamite stick in her basket and hurled it at the column of horses. Sergeant Finley, a miner by trade before he pinned on a cinco-peso star, and highly skilled with explosives, cut the fuse to last only a few seconds.

The dynamite stick had barely landed at the foot of Stiles’s horse when it blew. Maggie ducked back inside the store. Major Stiles, and the rider and horse next to him, were thrown violently off their mounts in the ensuing eruption.

The explosion was the signal the town of Magdalena had been waiting for.

At the same time that twenty more sticks of short-fuse dynamite were thrown from the rooftops of buildings on both sides of the street, a fusillade of gunfire, also from both sides of the street, was unleashed. Rifle shots from every window, doorway, and alley cut loose. An instant later, those who had thrown the dynamite from the roofs began firing their rifles as well. Bullets rained down on the Stiles Gang from each side, and above them. Outlaws and horses began falling right and left.

Over twenty thunderous explosions, in rapid succession, rocked the streets of Magdalena. Most of them went off within the column of riders. Horses and men, sometimes in pieces, were tossed in every direction. Many were killed outright. Others were horribly maimed as the powerful explosives did their work.

Some of the gang members, still able to remain on horseback, tried to flee the blasts and torrent of incoming bullets. They charged through a hail of gunfire in the direction they’d entered, toward the east. When they reached the end of the street they found four wagons blocking the road, and more rifle fire pouring at them from behind the barricade.

Those outlaws not gunned from their horses turned around and charged back the way they’d came, again through a gauntlet of gunfire. By the time they reached the end of town they’d entered, they found a large herd of cattle had been released and was blocking that exit as well. They were trapped, in the open, in Magdalena’s main street.

Boxed in and with no way to get out, the remainder of Stiles’s men had no choice but to reenter the town and try to ride through the alleys and passageways between buildings, as Pritchard had predicted they would, to make their escape.

The first rider to attempt it steered his terrified horse between the saloon and general store. The barbed wire strung between the buildings felled him and his horse instantly. Several other riders suffered similar fates as they failed to penetrate the spaces between the buildings due to the razor-sharp wire.

All remaining outlaws, those who hadn’t been blown up or shot, were now on foot. They ran for their only option left: the sanctuary of the buildings themselves.