"Ain't I going?"
The whistle wailed against the sky, the gunmen piled on cowcatcher and carsteps. The train choked laboriously up toward the company depot at Hewintown.
"None left," said Tom reflectively, joining Huggins on the crest.
"A few," the other grinned casually, his arm indicating the awkward blotches against the searchlit hillside. "Go back," he called to another deputy, "phone from the gap for a truck to carry them stiffs to the main office. It's been a morgue afore."
The shaken eight in the shadows beyond the fill saw all of it. Dawson kept his hand beside Wilson. "No you don't," as the hothead raised the pistol again, when the train coughed its way toward them. "Wanter make us all swing?"
"We could manage a get-away——"
Dawson pushed him into the car; the rest crawled in, sobered, sorrowing, fiercely resentful.
"God! What a story!" whispered Brant, the reporter.
Jensen's big voice shook tearfully. "Shot 'em down like rats, the black-hearted bastards! If I'd a gun——"
"No, you wouldn't," said the big organizer savagely, squeezed beside the silent son of Paul Judson. "You can't lick 'em that way. It's the last thing.... They'd call out their soldiers—where'd we be then? Oh hell! If we can just hold all the boys together, we can make 'em come crawlin' to us——"