Afterward they got a cot under him. With surprising vitality he talked a long time to Whispering Smith, but at last fell into a stupor. At nine o’clock that night he sat up. Ed Banks and 310 Kennedy were standing beside the cot. Du Sang became delirious, and in his delirium called the name of Whispering Smith; but Smith was at Baggs’s cabin with Bill Dancing. In a spasm of pain, Du Sang, opening his eyes, suddenly threw himself back. The cot broke, and the dying man rolled under the feet of the frightened horses. In the light of the lanterns they lifted him back, but he was bleeding slowly at the mouth, quite dead.
The surgeon, afterward, found two fatal wounds upon him. The first shot, passing through the stomach, explained Du Sang’s failure to kill at a distance in which, uninjured, he could have placed five shots within the compass of a silver dollar. Firing for Whispering Smith’s heart, he had, despite the fearful shock, put four bullets through his coat before the rifle-ball from the ground, tearing at right angles across the path of the first bullet, had cut down his life to a question of hours.
Bill Dancing, who had been hit in the head and stunned, had been moved back to the cabin at Mission Spring, and lay in the little bedroom. A doctor at Oroville had been sent for, but had not come. At midnight of the second day, Smith, who was beside his bed, saw him rouse up, and noted the brightness of his eyes as he looked around. “Bill,” he declared hopefully, as he sat beside the 311 bed, “you are better, hang it! I know you are. How do you feel?”
“Ain’t that blamed doctor here yet? Then give me my boots. I’m going back to Medicine Bend to Doc Torpy.”
In the morning Whispering Smith, who had cleansed and dressed the wound and felt sure the bullet had not penetrated the skull, offered no objection to the proposal beyond cautioning him to ride slowly. “You can go down part way with the prisoners, Bill,” suggested Whispering Smith. “Brill Young is going to take them to Oroville, and you can act as chairman of the guard.”
Before the party started, Smith called Seagrue to him. “George, you saved my life once. Do you remember––in the Pan Handle? Well, I gave you yours twice in the Cache day before yesterday. I don’t know how badly you are into this thing. If you kept clear of the killing at Tower W I will do what I can for you. Don’t talk to anybody.”