“Hidin’ behind a woman, are you?” he taunted, and again flung the epithet men will not tolerate.

At any moment he might fire.  Dave caught the wrists of the girl, dragged them down from his neck, and flung her roughly from him to the ground.  He pulled out his little bulldog.

Doble fired and Dave fell.  The outlaw moved cautiously closer, exultant at his marksmanship.  His enemy lay still, the pistol in his hand.  Apparently Sanders had been killed at the first shot.

“Come to git me with that popgun, did you?  Hmp!  Fat chance.”  The bad man fired again, still approaching very carefully.

Round the corner of the house a man had come.  He spoke quickly.  “Turn yore gun this way, Dug.”

It was Shorty.  His revolver flashed at the same instant.  Doble staggered, steadied himself, and fired.

The forty-fives roared.  Yellow flames and smoke spurted.  The bulldog barked.  Dave’s parlor toy had come into action.

Out of the battle Shorty and Sanders came erect and uninjured.  Doble was lying on the ground, his revolver smoking a foot or two from the twitching, outstretched hand.

The outlaw was dead before Shorty turned him over.  A bullet had passed through the heart.  Another had struck him on the temple, a third in the chest.

“We got him good,” said Shorty.  “It was comin’ to him.  I reckon you don’t know that he fired the chaparral on purpose.  Wanted to wipe out the Jackpot, I s’pose.  Yes, Dug sure had it comin’ to him.”

Dave said nothing.  He looked down at the man, eyes hard as jade, jaw clamped tight.  He knew that but for Shorty’s arrival he would probably be lying there himself.

“I was aimin’ to shoot it out with him before I heard of this last scullduggery.  Soon as the kid woke me I hustled up my intentions.”  The bad man looked at Dave’s weapon with the flicker of a smile on his face.  “He called it a popgun.  I took notice it was a right busy li’l’ plaything.  But you got yore nerve all right.  I’d say you hadn’t a chance in a thousand.  You played yore hand fine, keelin’ over so’s he’d come clost enough for you to get a crack at him.  At that, he’d maybe ‘a’ got you if I hadn’t drapped in.”

“Yes,” said Sanders.

He walked across to the corral fence, where Joyce sat huddled against the lower bars.

She lifted her head and looked at him from wan eyes out of which the life had been stricken.  They stared at him in dumb, amazed questioning.

Dave lifted her from the ground.

“I...  I thought you... were dead,” she whispered.

“Not even powder-burnt.  His six-shooter outranged mine.  I was trying to get him closer.”

“Is he...?”

“Yes.  He’ll never trouble any of us again.”

She shuddered in his arms.

Dave ached for her in every tortured nerve.  He did not know, and it was not his place to ask, what price she had had to pay.