Beaudry answered his questions and turned away.  Royal clung to one hand as they walked.  The other held the muley gun.

It was no sound that warned the sheriff.  The approach of his enemies had been noiseless.  But the sixth sense that comes to some fighting men made him look up quickly.  Five riders were moving down the street toward the stable, Hal Rutherford in the lead.  The alert glance of the imperiled man swept the pasture back of the corral.  The glint of the sun heliographed danger from the rifle barrels of two men just topping the brow of the hill.  Two more were stealing up through a draw to the right.  A bullet whistled past the head of the officer.

The father spoke quietly to his little boy.  “Run, son, to the stable.”

The little chap began to sob.  Bullets were already kicking up the dust behind them.  Roy clung in terror to the leg of his father.

Beaudry caught up the child and made a dash for the stable.  He reached it, just as Sharp and his horse-wrangler were disappearing into the loft.  There was no time to climb the ladder with Royal.  John flung open the top of the feed-bin, dropped the boy inside, and slammed down the lid.

The story of the fight that followed is still an epic in the Southwest.  There was no question of fair play.  The enemies of the sheriff intended to murder him.

The men in his rear were already clambering over the corral fence.  One of them had a scarlet handkerchief around his neck.  Beaudry fired from his hip and the vivid kerchief lurched forward into the dust.  Almost at the same moment a sharp sting in the fleshy part of his leg told the officer that he was wounded.

From front and rear the attackers surged into the stable.  The sheriff emptied the second barrel of buckshot into the huddle and retreated into an empty horse-stall.  The smoke of many guns filled the air so that the heads thrust at him seemed oddly detached from bodies.  A red-hot flame burned its way through his chest.  He knew he was mortally wounded.

Hal Rutherford plunged at him, screaming an oath.  “We’ve got him, boys.”

Beaudry stumbled back against the manger, the arms of his foe clinging to him like ropes of steel.  Twice he brought down the butt of his sawed-off gun on the black head of Rutherford.  The grip of the big hillman grew lax, and as the man collapsed, his fingers slid slackly down the thighs of the officer.

John dropped the empty weapon and dragged out a Colt’s forty-four.  He fired low and fast, not stopping to take aim.  Another flame seared its way through his body.  The time left him now could be counted in seconds.

But it was not in the man to give up.  The old rebel yell of Morgan’s raiders quavered from his throat.  They rushed him.  With no room even for six-gun work he turned his revolver into a club.  His arm rose and fell in the melee as the drive of the rustlers swept him to and fro.