When they reached the terminus of the cut-and-fill site, high on the folded earth across the wash from Comb Ridge, and had thoroughly sand-packed the last piece of road-building equipment, they sat down on a juniper log to rest. Seldom Seen, reckoning by the stars, estimated the time at 2:00 A.M. Hayduke guessed it was only 11:30. He wanted to go on, following the surveyors, and remove all the stakes, pins and flagging that he knew was waiting out there, in the dark, in the semi-virgin wilds beyond. But Abbzug had a better idea; instead of destroying the survey crew’s signs, she suggested, why not relocate them all in such a manner as to lead the right-of-way in a grand loop back to the starting point? Or lead it to the brink of, say, Muley Point, where the contractors would confront a twelve-hundred-foot vertical drop-off down to the goosenecks of the San Juan River.

“Don’t give them any ideas,” Hayduke said. “They’d just want to build another goddamned bridge.”

“Them survey markings go on west for twenty miles,” Smith said. He was against both plans.

“So what do we do?” says Bonnie.

“I’d like to crawl into the sack,” Smith said. “Get some sleep.”

“I like that idea myself.”

“But the night is young,” Hayduke said.

“George,” says Smith, “we can’t do everything in one night. We got to get Doc and get back to the truck and haul ass. We don’t want to be around here in the morning.”

“They can’t prove a thing.”

“That’s what Pretty-Boy Floyd said. That’s what Baby-Face Nelson said and John Dillinger and Butch Cassidy and that other fella, what’s his name—?”

“Jesus,” Hayduke growls.

“Yeah, Jesus Christ. That’s what they all said and look what happened to them. Nailed.”

“This is our first big night,” Hayduke said. “We ought to do as much work as we can. We’re not likely to get more easy operations like this. Next time they’ll have locks on everything. Maybe booby traps. And watchmen with guns, shortwave radios, dogs.”

Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul. He had to yield.

They marched back the way they’d come, past the quiet, spayed, medicated machinery. Those doomed dinosaurs of iron, waiting patiently through the remainder of the night for buggering morning’s rosy-fingered denouement. The agony of cylinder rings, jammed by a swollen piston, may be like other modes of sodomy a crime against nature in the eyes of deus ex machina; who can say?

A hoot owl called from what seemed far away, east in the pitch-black shadows of the dynamite notch. One short and a long, then a pause, one short and a long repeated. Warning cry.

“Doc’s on the job,” Smith said. “That there’s Doc a-talkin’ to us.”

The men and the girl stood still in the dark, listening hard, trying to see. The warning call was repeated, twice more. The lonesome hoot owl, speaking.

Listening. Nervous crickets chirred in the dry grass under the cottonwoods. A few doves stirred in the boughs.