“It’s them, all right,” he said when he returned.  “I know some of the horses.  It’s the Kid and about three others.  They are all saddled up—­probably stopped in to cook a meal.  We’ll get ’em sure.  Now, all of you hitch back here, and crawl around to the arroyo below, there.  That’ll put us within a hundred yards or so of the house.”

Each man, dismounting, hitched his horse, then quietly ran over the cylinder of his revolver, blew the dust out of the rear sight of his Winchester, tested the magazine, and cleared the breech action.  This done, each crept to the place assigned to him.  Dan Anderson found himself moving mechanically, dully, with a strange absence of excitement.  He almost felt himself looker-on at what other men were doing.

For some time Stillson lay behind a little bush at the edge of the gully, peering critically at the house, from which came nothing to indicate that their approach had been discovered.  At length, without a word, he slowly raised his short-barrelled rifle and fired.  One of the horses hitched to the beam above the door stumbled forward and sank across the opening, blocking it.  The bullet had caught it at the butt of the ear, and it fell stone dead, its neck bent up by the shortened rein.

In response, without a word of parley, a thin cloud of smoke gushed out of the only window facing the attack.  Puffs of sand arose along the front of the arroyo, searching out each little bush top which might possibly offer cover.  Stillson heard a smothered spat and a short sound, and turned his head quickly.  He saw Jim Harbin, one of the boys from the lower range, turn over with a sigh, and lie with arms spread out.  He had been shot straight through the neck.  Dan Anderson, the man nearest to him, drew him back.  He would have raised the head of the wounded man, but the choking warned him.  Harbin lay out on his back, looking up, his breath gurgling in his throat.  “No use,” he whispered thickly.  “Leave me alone.  I’ve got to take my medicine.”  In ten minutes he was dead.

The day’s work went on.  The sheriff fired three or four more deliberate shots, but finally turned around.  At each shot, the other horse tied to the beam sprang back.

“Can’t you hit it?” grinned McKinney.

“I don’t want to kill the horse,” said Stillson; “I know that horse, and it’s a good one.  I want to turn it loose.  Here you, Anderson, can you see that rope from where you are?  Shoot it off, if you can, close up to the beam.”

Dan Anderson, in spite of Stillson’s hasty warning to keep down, rose at full height at the edge of the cover, and took a deliberate off-hand shot.  They saw him whirl half around, and look down at his left arm; but as he dropped lower, he rested his rifle on a bit of sage brush, and fired once more.  With a snort the horse, which had been pulling back wildly on its lariat, now broke free and went off, saddled as it was.