"Fine! Couldn't be better," he continued, as he rapidly unwound it. "Why, there must be fifty feet or more here. Now let's see. Where is the blow-off valve of this boiler?"
"This is it, isn't it?" asked Jack, indicating a valve, with wheel-controlled outlet near the base of the boiler.
"That's it. Now then for a monkey wrench and then we are all ready to give those greasers the surprise of their lives in case they try an attack upon this side of the stockade."
"What are you going——"
That was as far as Jack got in his question. As the words left his lips, there came from without the sharp sound of a shot.
Bang!
"Phew!" whistled Buck. "That's the overture. The performance is about ter begin."
In the meantime, the members of the party left at the peep-holes by Buck Bradley and Jack, had been trying their level best to obtain some inkling of which side the insurrectos meant to storm first. But, for all the sign the long, waving grass gave, or the bushes imparted, they might as well have gazed at the sky. Had they not known that the insurrectos were out there somewhere, they would have deemed the hillside barren of life.
Suddenly, however, as Coyote Pete's keen eye was sweeping the open space before the stockade, the grass quite near at hand parted, and a wiry little Mexican stepped out.
It was a good evidence of the control that Madero exercised over his men that this fellow, although he must have known he was placing his life in deadly peril, advanced to within a few feet of the stockade without a tremor.