“Who are you to stop peaceful miners going to work on their own claim?” he said coarsely.  “I’ll tell you who, boys,” he added, suddenly turning to his men with a hoarse laugh.  “It ain’t even the bank!  It’s only Jim Stacy, that the bank kicked out yesterday to save itself,—­Jim Stacy and his broken-down pals.  And what’s the thief doing here—­in Marshall’s tunnel—­the only spot that Marshall can claim?  We ain’t no particular friends o’ Marshall’s, though we’re neighbors on the same claim; but we ain’t going to see Marshall ousted by tramps.  Are we, boys?”

“No, by G-d!” said his followers, dropping the pans and seizing their picks and revolvers.  They understood the appeal to arms if not to their reason.  For an instant the fight seemed imminent.  Then a voice from behind them said:—­

“You needn’t trouble yourselves about that!  I’m Marshall!  I sent these gentlemen to occupy the claim until I came here with the surveyor,” and two men stepped from a thicket of myrtle in the rear of Steptoe and his followers.  The speaker, Marshall, was a thin, slight, overworked, over-aged man; his companion, the surveyor, was equally slight, but red-bearded, spectacled, and professional-looking, with a long traveling-duster that made him appear even clerical.  They were scarcely a physical addition to Stacy’s party, whatever might have been their moral and legal support.

But it was just this support that Steptoe strangely clung to in his designs for the future, and a wild idea seized him.  The surveyor was really the only disinterested witness between the two parties.  If Steptoe could confuse his mind before the actual fighting—­from which he would, of course, escape as a non-combatant—­it would go far afterwards to rehabilitate Steptoe’s party.  “Very well, then,” he said to Marshall, “I shall call this gentleman to witness that we have been attacked here in peaceable possession of our part of the claim by these armed strangers, and whether they are acting on your order or not, their blood will be on your head.”

“Then I reckon,” said the surveyor, as he tore away his beard, wig, spectacles, and mustache, and revealed the figure of Jack Hamlin, “that I’m about the last witness that Mr. Steptoe-Horncastle ought to call, and about the last witness that he ever will call!”

But he had not calculated upon the desperation of Steptoe over the failure of this last hope.  For there sprang up in the outlaw’s brain the same hideous idea that he voiced to his companions at the Divide.  With a hoarse cry to his followers, he crashed his pickaxe into the brain of Marshall, who stood near him, and sprang forward.  Three or four shots were exchanged.  Two of his men fell, a bullet from Stacy’s rifle pierced Steptoe’s leg, and he dropped forward on one knee.  He heard the steps of his reinforcements with their weapons coming close behind him, and rolled aside on the sloping ledge to let them pass.  But he rolled too far.  He felt himself slipping down the mountain-side in the slimy shoot of the tunnel.  He made a desperate attempt to recover himself, but the treacherous drift of the loose debris rolled with him, as if he were part of its refuse, and, carrying him down, left him unconscious, but otherwise uninjured, in the bushes of the second ledge five hundred feet below.