Up a deserted Main Street they blazed their way. A couple of small store windows "holed" before them, one, struck at an angle, falling to pieces. More gas lights went dark.
Morton Stamford, busy in his scrubby little office on the weekly accounts of publication day, heard the shooting and threw up his window to watch the cowboys thunder past. When Dakota whirled in his saddle and sent a bullet on either side of his head, Stamford cudgelled his panicky brain for a reasonable and dignified excuse for retirement from the limelight. Failing to find one, he stuck there, with his head through the window. After the clamour had passed on into Main Street he carefully traced the bullets through the partition to the outer office and tried to hoke them as souvenirs from the brick wall with a paper knife. Then he tiptoed to the window and, standing well back, pulled it down and locked it, though by that time the shooting had dimmed away.
Thrilled with the incident, Stamford hastily planned a letter to an old newspaper friend down East who could make use of vivid little bits like that, with sundry touches of imagination that would be certain to rouse an Eastern outcry. He could draw pictures like that any time he wanted, and his friends back East had long since decided that he was either a fool or a hero.
Suddenly he remembered that he had not dined. It was then he became aware of a revival of the clamour in another direction. And as it did not seem to be coming to him, he went out to it. On Toronto Street he stood for a minute to locate the disturbance, but, hunger getting the better of his curiosity, he began to trot toward the Provincial Hotel.
Round the corner above him careened the cowboys into Toronto Street, now lifeless save for the little figure of Morton Stamford hurrying to dinner.
Dakota saw him. It was nothing short of insult, this indifferent little tenderfoot waggling his legs down the street before them. Stamford was only half way to safety when Dakota whirled up behind him on the sidewalk and, expecting him to duck to the shelter of a doorway, wheeled off to one side only in time to escape riding him down. Judas' sides brushed Stamford's shoulder, so near a thing was it for the editor.
In a flash Dakota was around, and three shots in quick succession close to Stamford's feet were sufficient to warn any but the rankest tenderfoot what was expected of him. A fourth removed his stiff hat. The next struck the edge of his boot sole. Something told him he was dangerously unconventional. He looked up with a smile into the faces of the crowding cowboys.
"You don't seem to like me, Dakota."
"Like you, you little sawed-off! Never paid so much 'tention to a tenderfoot in my born days afore. I fair love you. Same time, I'd like to see you back again that wall and h'ist your hands. These is our streets to-night."
Stamford continued to grin about him.