“Blow a hole in his old walls!” he suggested, cheerfully.  “That old fort was built against Injins.  A man could sneak up in the shadow and set her off.  It wouldn’t take but a dash of soup to stick a hole you could ride through a-horseback.”

“Soup?” echoed Buck.

“Nitroglycerine,” explained Watkins, who had once been a miner.

“Oh, sure!” agreed Buck, sarcastically.  “And where’d we get it?”

“I always carry a little with me just for emergencies,” asserted Brower, calmly, and patted his black bag.

There was a sudden and unanimous edging away.

“For the love of Pete!” I cried.  “Was there some of that stuff in there all the time I’ve been carrying it around?”

“It’s packed good:  it can’t go off,” Artie reassured us.  “I know my biz.”

“What in God’s name do you want such stuff for!” cried Judson.

“Oh, just emergencies,” answered Brower, vaguely, but I remembered his uncanny skill in opening the combination of the safe.  Possibly that contract between Emory and Hooper had come into his hands through professional activities.  However, that did not matter.

“I can make a drop of soup go farther than other men a pint,” boasted Artie.  “I’ll show you:  and I’ll show that old——­”

“You’ll probably get shot,” observed Buck, watching him closely.

“W’at t’hell,” observed Artie with an airy gesture.

“It’s the dope he takes,” I told Johnson aside.  “It only lasts about so long.  Get him going before it dies on him.”

“I see.  Trot right along,” Buck commanded.

Taking this as permission Brower clapped heels to the stallion and shot away like an arrow.

“Hold on!  Stop!  Oh, damn!” ejaculated the senor.  “He’ll gum the whole game!” He spurred forward in pursuit, realized the hopelessness of trying to catch the Morgan, and reined down again to a brisk travelling canter.  We surmounted the long, slow rise this side of Hooper’s in time to see a man stand out in the brush, evidently for the purpose of challenging the horseman.  Artie paid him not the slightest attention, but swept by magnificently, the great stallion leaping high in his restrained vitality.  The outpost promptly levelled his rifle.  We saw the vivid flash in the half light.  Brower reeled in his saddle, half fell, caught himself by the stallion’s mane and clung, swinging to and fro.  The horse, freed of control, tossed his head, laid back his ears, and ran straight as an arrow for the great doors of the ranch.

We uttered a simultaneous groan of dismay.  Then with one accord we struck spurs and charged at full speed, grimly and silently.  Against the gathering hush of evening rose only the drum-roll of our horses’ hoofs and the dust cloud of their going.  Except that Buck Johnson, rising in his stirrups, let off three shots in the air; and at the signal from all points around the beleagured ranch men arose from the brush and mounted concealed horses, and rode out into the open with rifles poised.