“Evidently they’re not down there,” whispered Chick.

“Let’s try the upper floors,” suggested Patsy.  “They may be laying for us up there, but I reckon we’re good for them.”

“We’ll take the chance, surely.  Come on.”

They crept through the hall again, and then mounted the broad stairway, which led to the next floor.

There the utter silence and the semidarkness quickly convinced them that they were on the wrong track.

“The stable,” muttered Chick, suddenly.  “We’ll try the stable.”

“They certainly have vamosed this ranch,” remarked Patsy.

“Plainly.  Come on, then, and we’ll try the stable.”

Together they started downstairs.

A moment later Kilgore, Pylotte and Matt Stall came flurrying into the house by the rear door.

In the bright light of the broad hall each party discovered the other at precisely the same moment, and Kilgore instantly guessed the truth.

With a cry of rage, he whipped out his revolver and fired point-blank at the two men on the stairs.

“Down ’em, boys!” he yelled furiously.  “Down ’em, or our game is done for!”

His bullet glanced from the baluster rail near Chick, and buried itself in the wall behind him.

“Drop them, Patsy!” he shouted, instantly.  “Shoot to kill!  It’s them or us!”

“Let her go, Gallagher!” roared Patsy, pulling both guns.

Then, amid the tumult of the breaking tempest outside, there began a fusillade the thunder of which rivaled that of the night, and which, though comparatively brief, was as fast and furious as any man there had ever experienced.

Pylotte went down at the first shot from Chick, however, with a bullet in his brain.

Then shot followed shot with lightning rapidity.

Both detectives sprang down several stairs to evade the rain of lead, for both Kilgore and Stall were rapidly emptying two revolvers.

A bullet singed Patsy’s ear.

Another dislodged Chick’s hat.

Then Kilgore reeled with a slight wound in his left arm.

A score of shots were fired and wasted, meantime, for all hands were dodging about the hall and stairs in an utterly indescribable fashion.

It was the warmest kind of a fight for fully three minutes.

Then Chick got a line on Matt Stall from behind the baluster post, and dropped him with a ragged wound in his hip.

Stall fell with a yell of rage and pain, and Kilgore found himself alone, and against odds.

He turned like a flash, and darted out of the rear door of the house.

He knew that the game was up, his confederates done for, and his own chances of escape but small; and the situation stirred to their very depths the worst elements of this lifelong criminal.

But one thought possessed him—­that of revenge, that of destroying the chief cause of his downfall—­Nick Carter.