"Quit it!" Casey interrupted. "Stay where you are, Farwell, I'm not going to have a scrap. Tom, you come with me."
"Oh, well, just as you say, Casey," grumbled McHale. "I ain't hostile, special. Only I don't want him to run no blazers on me. He——"
But Casey got him outside and administered a vitriolic lecture that had some effect.
"I'm sorry, Casey," McHale acknowledged, contritely. "I s'pose I ought to known better. But that gent with the gun and Farwell between them got me goin'. Honest, I never hunted trouble in my life. It just naturally tracks up on me when I'm lyin' all quiet in camp. Course, it has to be took care of when it comes."
"There'll be enough to keep you busy," said Casey grimly. And apparently in instant fulfilment of the prophecy came the short, decisive bark of a six-shooter. By the sound, the shot had been fired outside the camp, in the direction of the gate.
"It's that cuss that held us up!" snarled McHale, and swore viciously.
Both men went up into their saddles as if catapulted from the earth. McHale yelled as he hit the leather—a wild, ear-splitting screech, the old trouble cry of his kind in days gone by—and both horses leaped frantically into motion, accomplishing the feat peculiar to cow and polo ponies of attaining their maximum speed in three jumps. They surged around the medley of tents and shacks, and came into the open neck and neck, running like singed cats.
A few hundred yards away, where the new sign-board stood beside the trail a horse struggled to rise, heaved its fore quarters up, and crashed down again, kicking in agony, raising a cloud of dust. Facing it, bending slightly forward, stood a man, holding a gun in his right hand.
Suddenly out of the dust cloud staggered a second, who rushed at the first, head down, extended fingers wildly clutching, and as he came he bellowed hoarsely the wild-bull cry of the fighting male, crazed with pain or anger. The gun in the hand of the first man flashed up and cut down; and, as it hung for an instant at the level, the report rapped through the still air. But the other, apparently unhurt, charged into him, and both went down together.
