The Settling of the Sage

by Hal G. Evarts

Throughout the next half-hour there was not a shot fired in the flat; no general bombardment, no wild shooting, but guerilla warfare where every man held his fire for a definite human target. A man shifted his position in the stockade, raised to peer from a hole breast high, and she saw him pitch down on the ground before the sound of the shot reached her. One of her men had noted the darkening of the crack and had searched him out with a rifle shot. Three shots answered it from the main cabin.

The thud of hoofs on the trail below drew her eyes that way. Waddles was riding out into the basin. He had brought the pack string up to some point near at hand and deserted it to the care of the others while he rode on ahead to join in the fight. He was almost within gunshot of the place before he dismounted and allowed the horse to graze. She watched his progress as he covered the last half-mile on foot. He had discarded his heavy chaps, his blue and white shirt and overalls giving him the appearance of some great striped beetle as he crawled up a shallow ravine. The figures were small from distance, even when viewed through the glasses, thus lending her a feeling of detachment and lessening the personal element and the grim reality of the scene. Rather it was as if she gazed into some instrument which portrayed the moves of mannikins; yet the scene wholly absorbed her interest.

Waddles cautiously raised his head for a view of the stockade and she could see his convulsive duck as a rifle ball tossed up a spurt of gravel round it. The man who had fired the shot went down as the sheriff drilled the spot where a faint haze of smoke had shown.

She presently noted one of her men sitting under a sheltering bank and eating his lunch. She looked at her watch; it was after three,—the day more than half gone and less than a hundred shots had been fired. Five men were down in the stockade.

The sun was sinking and the higher points along the west edge of the basin were sending long shadows out across the flats before there was further action except for an occasional shifting of positions. Those remaining alive in the stockade were saddling the bunch of horses kept inside. These were led close under the fence on her side where she could no longer see them.

The shadows lengthened rapidly and her view through the glasses was beginning to blur when the gates of the stockade swung back and five horses dashed out, running at top speed under the urge of the spurs. A rider leaned low upon the neck of each horse and they scattered wide as they fanned out across the basin, a wild stampede for safety, every man for himself.

She saw one man lurch sidewise and slip to the ground; another straightened in the saddle, swung for two jumps, and slid off backwards across the rump of his mount. She saw the great striped bug which was Waddles rise to his knees in the path of a third. The rider veered his mount and swung from the saddle, clinging along the far side of the running horse. Then man and horse went down together and neither rose. Waddles had shot straight through the horse and reached the mark on the other side. The shooting ceased when six shots had been fired. Four riderless horses were careening round the basin. Five hits out of six, she reflected; perhaps six straight hits.

The stockade was empty, leaving only the four in the house to be accounted for. The dark specks in the brush were working closer to the house, effectually blocking escape. Then she could no longer make them out. The building showed only as a darker blot in the obscurity. A tiny point of light attracted her eye. It grew and spread. She knew that one of her men had crawled up under cover of night and fired the house. It was now but a question of minutes, but the sight oppressed her. She thought of the burning buildings on the Three Bar and rose to make her way back to the pocket where the horses had been left in the care of a deputy.

"It will be over in an hour," she told the horse guard.

All through the day she had scarcely moved and she was tired. The hours of inactivity had proved more wearing than a day in the saddle. Harris and the sheriff came in with their detail.