Du Sang answered: “No; we’re from Sheriff Coon’s office at Oroville, looking up a bunch of Duck Bar steers that’s been run somewhere up Deep Creek. Can we stay here all night?”
They dismounted and disarmed Baggs’s suspicions, though the condition of their horses might have warned him had he had his senses. The unfortunate man had probably fixed it in his mind that a ride from Tower W to Deep Creek in sixteen hours was a physical impossibility.
“Stay here? Sure! I want you to stay,” said Baggs bluffly. “Looks to me like I seen you down at Crawling Stone, ain’t I?” he asked of Karg.
Karg was lighting a cigarette. “I used to mark at the Dunning ranch,” he answered, throwing away his match.
“That’s hit. Good! The boy’s cooking supper. Step up to the kitchen and tell him to cut ham for four more.”
“Four?”
“Two of Ed Banks’s men will be here by six o’clock. Heard about the hold-up? They stopped Number Three at Tower W last night and shot Ollie Sollers, as white a boy as ever pulled a throttle. Boys, a man that’ll kill a locomotive engineer is worse’n an Indian; I’d help skin him.”
“The hell you would!” cried Du Sang. “Well, don’t you want to start in on me? I killed Sollers. Look at me; ain’t I handsome? What you going to do about it?”
Before Baggs could think Du Sang was shooting 275 him down. It was wanton. Du Sang stood in no need of the butchery; the escape could have been made without it. His victim had pulled an engine throttle too long to show the white feather, but he was dying by the time he had dragged a revolver from his pocket. Du Sang did the killing alone. At least, Flat Nose, who alone saw all of the murder, afterward maintained that he did not draw because he had no occasion to, and that Baggs was dead before he, Karg, had finished his cigarette. With his right arm broken and two bullets through his chest, Baggs fell on his face. That, however, did not check his murderer. Rising to his knees, Baggs begged for his life. “For God’s sake! I’m helpless, gentlemen! I’m helpless. Don’t kill me like a dog!” But Du Sang, emptying his pistol, threw his rifle to his shoulder and sent bullet after bullet crashing through the shapeless form writhing and twitching before him until he had beaten it in the dust soft and flat and still.