"Pull the rag off your face, Broderick!" shouted Thornton savagely.
And oddly enough Ben Broderick, with a swift realization that a bandana hiding his face now could no longer befriend him and might flap across his eyes at a time when he should see straight and quick, yanked it away. And with the same gesture, he jerked his lifted gun down and started firing, straight at Thornton.
Of the five rifles trained upon those in the stage not a one was silent now. Hap Smith jumped to his feet and fired as fast as he could work the trigger; the man at his side leaped down into the road, crouched at the wagon wheel and poured shot after shot into the brush whence he had seen the muzzles of two guns. Before Ben Broderick's pistol had broken the silence Buck Thornton had fired from the hip; and Two-Hand Billy Comstock, his reins on his saddle horn, was freshening his right to his title, firing with one gun after the other in regular, mechanical fashion.
Hap Smith was the first man down; he toppled, steadied himself, fired again and collapsed, sliding down against the dash board and thence to the ground. His horses had plunged, leaped and in a tangle of straining harness tugged this way and that a moment and then with the stage jerking and toppling after them went down over a six-foot bank and into the thicket of willows along the creek bed. With them went Blackie, his face showing a moment, grey with fear….
Hap Smith, alive simply because the trampling horses had whirled the other way, lifted himself a half dozen inches from the road bed, struggled with his gun and fainted…. The guard saw a head exposed from behind a tree and sent a 30-30 rifle ball crashing through it; on the instant another bullet from another quarter compacted with his own body and he went down, shot through the shoulder….
Thornton's eyes were for Ben Broderick alone. And, it would seem, Broderick's for Thornton. But in their expressions there was nothing of similarity; in Thornton's was a stern readiness to mete out punishment while from Broderick's there looked forth a sudden furtiveness, a feverish desire for escape.
Broderick had never drawn to himself the epithet of coward. But now he knew what he was doing, where wisdom pointed and what was his one chance. There was still a good fifty yards between him and the man who rode down upon him, a long shot for a revolver when the horses which both men bestrode were rearing and plunging wildly. Broderick bent forward suddenly, whirled his horse, drove his spurs deep into the grey's sides and in a flash had cleared the fallen log, shot around the bend in the road and, taking his desperate chance with all of the cool defiance of danger which was a part of the man, sent his mount leaping down the steepening bank, into the willow thicket and on across. Shouting mightily and wrathfully, after him came Buck Thornton. But Broderick had the few yards' headstart and, for the moment his destiny was with him. Thornton saw only a thicket of willows wildly disturbed as Broderick went threshing through them and knew that for the present at least Broderick was beyond pursuit.
Swinging about angrily he rode back to join Comstock. Already the battle there in the cañon was over, the smell of powder was gone from the still air, the last reverberating echo of a shot had died away. And in the road lay three men, two of them severely wounded while the other was already dead. Stooping over this man, a queer look in his eyes, stood Comstock.
"I hankered to bring him in alive," he muttered. "But, after all it's just as well. And it had to be him or me."
"Pollard?" asked Thornton quickly. But Comstock shook his head. Then Thornton, riding close, looking down from the saddle, saw the white upturned face. This time as his eyes came back to Comstock, Comstock nodded.