“Here, Brocky!” shouted Norton.  “All right down there?”

“Pretty well,” called Brocky.  “They’ve winged three or four of us . . . they’re damned rotten shots, Roddy.  We’ve popped over a dozen of them.”

There were other shouts then, tenor Mexican voices for the most part with the Kid’s unmistakable snarl running through them.  Men were calling in Spanish to their fellows across the arroyo.  Whatever it was that Brocky was trying to say was lost in the din.  And then again came a volley of rifle-shots.

Norton rose slowly to his feet, studying the situation with frowning eyes.  A bullet hissed high overhead, another cut by his side, another went shrieking off into the night.  But while they whined in his ears he laid his rude plans.

The arroyo wound and twisted this way and that through the broken uplands.  Where Brocky Lane had placed his men so as to defy the union of the two bands of outlaws it described a wide rude arc curving about the spur from Mt.  Temple.  Here the cowboys, with some twenty or thirty feet separating each man from his nearest fellow, were extended along a line which must be about two hundred yards long.  The Mexicans to the eastward, where del Rio and Kid Rickard and Moraga were, were bunched in the protecting shadows of a field of boulders such as those where the sheriff’s men lay.

“We could stick here all night and get nothing done,” said Norton to the men close to him.  “Rickard’s gang could have charged down on Brocky long ago if they’d had the stomach for that sort of thing.  They’ve got the numbers on us; they more than had the count on Brocky’s outfit; with those jaspers on the mountainside they could have turned the trick.  But that sort hasn’t the desire for a scrap unless they can pull it from behind a rock.  And, by the same token, they won’t last five minutes in the face of a charge.  Get me?”

“But the ginks on the mountain will pick us off pretty lively as we hit the trail down the slope here,” said a thoughtful voice.

Then Norton explained further.  He meant to eliminate the other crowd; it could be done.  When he gave the word every man was to jump to his feet and make the first half of his charge the bloodless one down into the arroyo toward Brocky Lane.  Then, Norton’s men and Brocky’s united, they could surge up the creek’s banks and make their flying attack, coming in between the two other factions so that the men on the mountain must hold their fire or kill as many of their own crowd as of the others.

The suggestion was accepted without discussion.  When Norton said “Ready,” they were ready; when he jumped to his feet and ran down toward the arroyo, they ran with him.  A shout of laughter went up from each side of the dry water-course as jeering voices announced triumphantly that the Gringoes were afraid.  And with the shouts came rifle-shots.

But to the last man of them they reached the arroyo safely, and ducking low, trotted on to join the cowboys.  In a moment more Norton had found Brocky Lane, had explained his plan, had had Brocky’s silent nod for an answer.  In quiet voices the men passed the word along the line.  Those from the farther end drew in closer so that their whole body of something better than thirty men occupied but a brief section of the arroyo.