Two minutes more, bending low and with his last cartridge crammed into the chamber of his carbine, Feeny turned to make a run for the ranch.  Just as he came speeding in past the westward wall the wooden shutter was hurled open and a strange voice, loud, exultant, strident, burst upon his ear.

“Come on, Pasqual!  Come ——­”

But the rest was lost in the roar of Feeny’s ready weapon.  The rude facade of adobe blazed red one instant in the flash of the carbine and the loud report went bellowing out across the plain.  But within the ranch there went up a wail of terror and dismay, for Ramon Morales, shot through the brain, was stretched lifeless at the feet of Moreno and his shuddering wife.

And then Feeny, unscathed, leaped inside the bar-room.

“Now for it, men!  Drag in those two drunken brute bastes,” he cried, laying hold of Mullan’s limp carcass.  “Lug in wan of them water-jars.  Stick their damned heads into that trough beyant.  Now be lively.  The whole gang’ll be on us in less than a minute.”

V.

At midnight the situation at Moreno’s ranch was a strange one.  The occupants of the two rooms farthest to the east were being besieged by ten or fifteen outlawed men, some Mexican, some “Gringo,” but all cut-throats, and up to this moment the besieged had had the best of it.

And yet their plight was desperate.  In the easternmost room, secure from bullet or missile of any kind so long as they crouched close to the ground and back from the door-way, lay trembling in silence old Harvey’s daughters.  At the door, only the barrel of his rifle protruding, keeping under cover all he possibly could behind an improvised parapet of barley-bags, knelt their devoted brother, cool and determined, every now and then whispering words of hope and encouragement.  In the adjoining room, connected with the eastern chamber by a doorless aperture through the adobe wall, lay the paymaster, sorely wounded, but still conscious and plucky, his faithful clerk ministering to him as best he could, stanching the flow of blood and comforting him with cool water.  At the door-way opening on the hard-trampled space at the southern front of the ranch, sheltering himself behind his breastwork of barley, but never relaxing vigilant watch, knelt Sergeant Feeny, a bandana bound about his forehead, the blood trickling down his right cheek, the sleeve of his flannel shirt rent by a bullet that just grazed the upper arm.  Kneeling on the counter and peeping through a hole in the bottom of the wooden window-shutter, one of Harvey’s men kept guard, the other faced the door-way into Moreno’s domestic apartments, every now and then letting drive a shot through the wood-work to keep them, as he said, “from monkeying with the bolt on the other side.”  In planning his roadside ranch Moreno had allowed outer doors only to those rooms which were for public use; the three which lay to the west of the bar could