At last, after what seemed like an endless eternity of the creeping, dodging progress, he found himself behind the cabin and sheltered by it from the desultory gunfire which still kept up from the opposite slope of the gulch. With his pocket knife he dug the clay chinking from between two of the logs and listened. There was no sound from within, and again his blood ran cold. Had one of the random bullets found its mark and killed Bromley? He remembered, with a tingling shock of terror, that all of the later firing had been on the part of the outlaws; there had been no replies from the cabin.
Hastily enlarging the hole in the chinking, he put an eye to the orifice. The interior was not wholly dark, as he had expected to find it. There was a handful of embers on the hearth, and the glow made a murky twilight in the cabin. Presently he made out the slender figure of the play-boy stretched flat upon the earth floor, face downward, and the blood-chilling shock came again. Then he looked more closely and saw that the prone figure was not that of a dead man. Bromley was alive and alert; he was lying behind a low breastwork built of the provision sacks, and he had one of the rifles at his shoulder with the muzzle thrust through a crack between the logs. Philip gulped and shut his eyes. The sudden revulsion from horrified despair to relief made him blind and dizzy.
Another shot from without steadied him and he called softly through the opening he had made. Bromley heard, and recognized his voice.
“You, Philip? How the mischief ... where are you?”
“At the back—where the chinking is out. Don’t you see?”
“Coming,” said the one-man garrison, and as he crawled slowly across the floor Philip could see that one leg was useless; it was bound with a clumsy handkerchief tourniquet above the knee and was dragging.
“Damn them!” he whispered fiercely. “How badly are you hurt, Harry?”
“Can’t say; haven’t had time to look at it. But the honors are easy, so far: I got one of them to pay for the leg, and got him good—I saw ’em carrying him off. Where the devil did you drop from?—out of the blue?”
“Never mind that part of it now. I want one of the rifles and a belt of ammunition. Hook ’em over here while I dig this hole big enough to take them through!”
The transfer was quickly made, and with the gun in his hands, Philip delayed only long enough to get a briefed story of the attack. Bromley had been routed out of his bunk about an hour earlier by somebody hammering on the door. When he opened in answer to the knocking there was a short and brittle parley. Neighbors had made a blunt demand for a surrender of the mining claim, asserting that it was his discovery, made early in the summer.