“Three men could ‘a’ stopped that gun as easy as twenty, and saved more hosses.  Who wants to take a little pasear after that gun?”

Several of his men volunteered.

“I only need two,” he said, smiling.  “I call by guess.  Number twenty-six, number thirty-eight, and number three.”

The last was his own number.

In the wide hallway and massed on the court-house stairs the mob was calling out to recover the gun.  Beyond control of their leaders, crazed with drink and killing, they surged forward, quarreling, and shoved from behind by those above.

“We’re ridin’,” said the old Ranger.

With a man on each side of him he charged across the square.

Waco, peering from behind a stone column in the entrance, saw that Lorry was one of the riders.  Lorry’s lips were drawn tight.  His face was pale, but his gun arm swung up and down with the regularity of a machine as he threw shot after shot into the black tide that welled from the court-house doorway.  A man near Waco pulled an automatic and leveled it.  Waco swung his arm and brained the man with an empty whiskey bottle.  He threw the bottle at another of his fellows, and, stumbling down the steps, called to Lorry.  The three riders paused for an instant as Waco ran forward.  The riders had won almost to the gun when Waco stooped and jerked it round and poured a withering volley into the close-packed doorway.

Back in the side street the leader of the cowboys addressed his men.

“We’ll leave the horses here,” he said.  “Tex went after that gun, and I reckon he’s got it.  We’ll clean up afoot.”

But the I.W.W. had had enough.  Their leaders had told them that with the machine gun they could clean up the town, capture the court-house, and make their own terms.  They had captured the court-house, but they were themselves trapped.  One of their own number had planned that treachery.  And they knew that those lean, bronzed men out there would shoot them down from room to room as mercilessly as they would kill coyotes.

They surrendered, shuffling out and down the slippery stone steps.  Each man dropped his gun in the little pile that grew and grew until the old Ranger shook his head, pondering.  That men of this kind should have access to arms and ammunition of the latest military type—­and a machine gun.  What was behind it all?  He tried to reason it out in his old-fashioned way even as the trembling horde filed past, cordoned by grim, silent cowboys.

The vagrants were escorted out of town in a body.  Fearful of the hate of the guard, of treachery among themselves and of the townsfolk in other places, they tramped across the hills, followed closely by the stern-visaged riders.  Several miles north of Sterling they disbanded.

When a company of infantrymen arrived in Sterling they found several cowboys sluicing down the court-house steps with water hauled laboriously from the river.