“Get your wind first, boys,” Norton admonished them.  “Better fill your clips, too, while you’ve got the chance.  And count on using a six gun before you’re through.  All right?  Let’s show ’em the sort of a scrap a Gringo can put up.”

Then again they were running, the unwavering line of thirty men, but with a difference which the outlaws might not mistake.  And as they ran they held their fire for a little, knowing how useless and suicidal it would be to pause half-way.  But presently they were answering shot with shot, pausing, going down upon one knee, taking a moment’s advantage of a friendly rock, pouring lead into the agitated groups among the boulders, springing up, running on again, every man fighting the fight his own way, the thirty of them making the air tingle with their shouts as they bore onward.

Then it was man to man and often enough one man to two or three, dark forms struggling, men striking with clubbed guns, men snatching at their side-arms, going down, rising or half rising, firing as long as a charge was in a gun or strength in a body.  And as they fired and struck and called out after the fashion of the cowboy in a scrimmage the body of men before them wavered and broke and began to fall back.

Norton swung his clubbed empty rifle up in both hands and beat down a man firing at him with a revolver.  All about him were struggling forms and he was sore beset now and then to know who was who.  A fierce-mustachioed, black-browed man thrust a rifle toward his breast and pulled the trigger and screamed out his curses as Norton put a revolver bullet through him.  A slender, boyish form sprang up upon a rock recklessly, training his rifle upon Brocky Lane.  It was the Kid.  But the Kid had met a man quicker, surer, than himself, and Brocky fired first.  Kid Rickard spun and fell.  Norton saw him drop but lost sight of him before the body struck the earth.  He had found del Rio; del Rio had found him.

Two smoking revolvers were jerked up, two guns spoke through the clamor as one gun.  The men were not ten feet apart as their guns spoke.  Norton felt a bullet rip along his outer arm, the sensation that of a whip-lash cutting deep.  He saw del Rio stagger back under the impact of a forty-five-caliber bullet which must have merely grazed him, since it did not knock him off his feet.  Del Rio, his lips streaming his curses and hatred, fired again.  But his wound had been sorer than Norton’s, his aim was less steady, and now as he gave back it was to fall heavily and lie still.

It had lasted less than five minutes.  “It’s Jim Galloway’s fight and Galloway don’t come!” some one had shouted.  They broke again, gave back and back . . . and then were running, every man of them scenting defeat and much worse than defeat unless he came to a horse before another five minutes.  And after them, firing now as they ran, came Brocky’s cowboys and Norton’s men.