“My stubbornness,” he said shortly. “I should have taken your advice about going to Kelso Basin—when we had a chance. But I felt certain that Norton would have the outfit here before this. Our chance is gone, now. There are some of Keats’s men in the hills, around us. I just saw one jump behind that rim rock on the shoulder of that big hill—there.” He indicated the spot. Then he again spoke to Bud.
“There’s a chance yet—for you. You take Spotted Tail and make a run for the basin. I’ll cover you.”
“What about you?” grumbled Bud.
Taylor grinned, and Bud laughed. “You was only funnin’ me, I reckon,” he said, earnestly. “You knowed I wouldn’t slope an’ leave you to fight it out alone—now didn’t you?”
“But if a man was hungry,” said Taylor, “and he knew there was grub with the outfit——”
“I ain’t hungry no more,” declared Bud; “I’ve quit thinkin’ of flapjacks for more than——”
He stiffened, and the first shadows of the night were split by a long, narrow flame-streak as his rifle crashed. And a man who had been slipping into the shelter of a depression on the side of a hill a hundred yards distant, tumbled grotesquely out and down, and went sliding to the bottom of the gorge.
As though the report of Bud’s rifle were a signal, a dozen vivid jets of fire flamed from various points in the surrounding hills, and the silence was rent by the vicious cracking of rifles and the drone and thud of bullets as they sped over the heads of the two men at the bottom of the gorge and flattened themselves against the rocks of their shelter.
That sound, too, died away. And in the heavy, portentous stillness which succeeded it, there came to the ears of the two besieged men the sounds of distant shouting, faint and far.
“It’s the outfit!” said Taylor.