“What’s the matter, Greaser?” queried the rider behind him, hearing his leader stumble and fall. “Bootsoles too slippery?”
As he spoke, he, too, vaulted the palings and dropped to his feet in the yard. One of the unmounted men was climbing the fence in more leisurely fashion, his head appearing now over the top.
As calmly as though he were shooting quail, Fenno went into action.
One barrel of his shotgun was fired point-blank at the rustler who had just landed in the yard. Wheeling, he emptied the left barrel into the head of the climber.
There was a panic yell from the road; then pell-mell a scurry of hoofs and of running feet. Slipping two new cartridges into the breech, Joel Fenno climbed halfway up the fence and fired both barrels down the road into the muddled dust-cloud that was dashing toward the coulée.
Royce Mack, still drunk with sleep, came staggering and shouting down from the ranch house, his flashlight playing in every direction. At the edge of the outbuildings he slithered to a dumbfounded halt.
The arc of white radiance from his flashlight illumed a truly hideous and incredible scene. Athwart the fence top, like a shot squirrel, sprawled an all-but headless man. On the ground, just inside the palings, lay another slumped figure.
Somewhat nearer to Mack knelt Joel Fenno, his gun on the earth beside him. He was stanching the blood of a third man—a man whose throat was that of a jungle beast’s victim.
Beside him, tense and raging, and held in check only by Joel’s crooning voice, towered the huge gold-white Treve.
“I reckon we c’n save this one of ’em, Royce, long ’nough for the sheriff to git his c’nfession,” airily observed Joel, continuing his first-aid work. “I pried Trevy loose before he got to the jug’l’r. With Trevy standin’ by, to prompt him like, the feller’s due to talk all the sheriff wants him to. Me an’ Trevy will see to that. As f’r them other two—”