At six o'clock on this afternoon in May the sun was still high above the mountain tops. By the time Edward Livingston reached his ranch buildings and saddled his horse to go to Carter's camp Hope had ridden the two miles or more between his fence and the school-house. There she found, idly waiting beside the isolated building, surrounded by several gaunt staghounds, not one of the twins, but both.
The soft-voiced twin was all smiles, but Dave with his back against the front of the building was scowling sullenly, giving vent to his ugliness by kicking small stones with the toe of his boot and watching them as they went sailing high into the air, then down the sloping stretch of young green below. At one of those stones Hope's horse shied, but the girl smiled, knowing full well the young savage's mood. She rode rapidly, and stopped beside the boys, but did not dismount.
"Am I late?" she inquired of the scowling twin. "I see you are on time with the gun like a good boy, Dave, and you've brought your own along, too. We won't do a thing to those chickens if we get sight of them to-night!" She smiled at the boy, who became a trifle more amiable; then she turned to his soft-voiced twin. "How is it you're back so soon?"
He brushed a speck of dust from his overalls before replying, and his voice was particularly sweet.
"Had to come to report. You see when I got there they was just quittin', so I came along back with some o' the fellers. Didn't you meet Long Bill and Shorty Smith up the road there a piece when you come along?" The girl nodded. "Well, I come back with them's far as home; then I saw Dave getting the guns, so I thought I'd get mine an' come along, too. Say, what's a gating gun?" Hope looked perplexed for an instant, then laughed outright.
"Oh, you mean a Gatling gun!" She laughed, then very soberly: "It's a terrible weapon of war—a wicked thing. Why do you ask?"
"Oh, I just wanted to know," replied the boy evasively. "I heard some o' the men talkin' about one, so I thought I'd ask you. Must shoot pretty fast, don't they? Long Bill was tellin' about one that fired two thousand shots a second."
"That must have been a terror of one!" exclaimed the girl. "But they don't shoot quite as many as that, not even in a minute, but they are bad enough. A few of them would simply perforate an army of men. They're a machine gun," she went on to explain. "Just a lot of barrels fastened in a bunch together and turned by a crank which feeds in the cartridges and fires them, too. They shoot over a thousand shots a minute."
"I wish we'd 'a' had one the other night," exclaimed Dave, waking at last to a new interest in life. "And I'd 'a' had hold of the crank!"
"Wasn't it bad enough!" remonstrated the girl. "Didn't you do enough damage to satisfy your savage soul for awhile?"