Five to two, seemed the odds, with all of the highwaymen saving the one bold figure screened from view and so holding the advantage of position.  And yet, for once, the odds were not what they seemed.

For now there came abruptly, and utterly with no sign of warning, the answer to the last big play of Ben Broderick and Henry Pollard and the rest.  Into the road out of the same canon from which the masked man on the horse had come now rode two more men, side by side and with a thunderous racket of pounding hoofs beating at rocky soil, their heads up, their faces unhidden, their eyes hard and bright and their right hands lifted a little.  Two-Hand Billy Comstock and Buck Thornton, come at the top speed of a swinging gallop to alter the odds and take a hand.  And as Thornton’s horse’s hoofs struck in the dust of the road and the masked rider swung about, startled in the moment of his supreme arrogant confidence, it looked to those who saw as if there came Buck Thornton on one big grey horse racing down upon another Buck Thornton on that big grey’s mate.  With but a hundred yards between them....

“Pull the rag off your face, Broderick!” shouted Thornton savagely.

And oddly enough Ben Broderick, with a swift realization that a bandana hiding his face now could no longer befriend him and might flap across his eyes at a time when he should see straight and quick, yanked it away.  And with the same gesture, he jerked his lifted gun down and started firing, straight at Thornton.

Of the five rifles trained upon those in the stage not a one was silent now.  Hap Smith jumped to his feet and fired as fast as he could work the trigger; the man at his side leaped down into the road, crouched at the wagon wheel and poured shot after shot into the brush whence he had seen the muzzles of two guns.  Before Ben Broderick’s pistol had broken the silence Buck Thornton had fired from the hip; and Two-Hand Billy Comstock, his reins on his saddle horn, was freshening his right to his title, firing with one gun after the other in regular, mechanical fashion.

Hap Smith was the first man down; he toppled, steadied himself, fired again and collapsed, sliding down against the dash board and thence to the ground.  His horses had plunged, leaped and in a tangle of straining harness tugged this way and that a moment and then with the stage jerking and toppling after them went down over a six-foot bank and into the thicket of willows along the creek bed.  With them went Blackie, his face showing a moment, grey with fear....

Hap Smith, alive simply because the trampling horses had whirled the other way, lifted himself a half dozen inches from the road bed, struggled with his gun and fainted....  The guard saw a head exposed from behind a tree and sent a 30-30 rifle ball crashing through it; on the instant another bullet from another quarter compacted with his own body and he went down, shot through the shoulder....