“Throw ‘em out!” said Perley quietly, waving the go-ahead signal to the engine crew.
And out they went—down the embankment after the first.
Lee jumped to the ground and banged the door shut, just as the drawbars began to snap tight along the train and the local jolted into motion. He waited beside Perley to swing the caboose as it came up. And while he waited he watched and grinned.
Funny? I don’t know; it depends on the way you look at it, depends on what you call fun. Lee thought it was funny—then. The air was full of curses, Indian yells, shouts, oaths; and there was one jumbled mess of arms, and legs, and barrels. The Indians were after their fill, and this time Clancy and the stragglers were in the game for keeps.
Up ahead the engine crew hung grinning out of the gangway. Behind, the other brakeman was occupying a reserved seat on the top of the caboose. A quarter of a mile away over by the camp, men, attracted by the shouting, were beginning to run toward the track. Inconsistent kind of a mix-up, eh?—Indians, miners, whisky barrels, and railroaders. I don’t know; call it funny if you like, though perhaps you can size it up better when I’m through.
By this time the caboose was up to where Perley and Lee were standing. Perley motioned Lee aboard, and then swung on himself.
Just as he did so, Clancy’s red shirt loomed up out of the mêlée, his arm lifted, and over the clack of the car trucks pounding the steel came the tinkle of breaking glass from the shattered pane in the door—the bullet had passed between the heads of the two men on the platform, missing them by a hair’s breadth. Another shot followed the first, another and another, dangerously close; splintering the woodwork around them; and then Perley fired. The half-breed spun round like a top, clapped his hand to his face and pitched over.
Then the curve of the track shut out the scene, but for five minutes after they were out of sight they still got the whoops of the redskins, the shouts and curses of the miners, and the crackle of guns like the quick fire of a Gatling. You see it came to that before it was through, and there was some blood spilled—a lot of it—and, not counting Clancy’s, it wasn’t all “blanket” blood, either.
Clancy? I’m coming to him. No, he wasn’t killed—if he had been I’d never be telling you this story.
It was two or three days before Lee and Perley got the details of what happened. The redskins fought like fiends after the miners began to fire on them and had killed one or two, and, though they were finally subdued, the casualties, as I’ve said, weren’t all on their side by a hanged sight.