“Kill them gals!” shouted Harkness, as he sprang to his feet, leveling his pistol at Mainwaring, who, with his revolver out, was on his feet just as quickly.
Mainwaring, hearing the cry, “Kill the girls!” had sprung between them and the woman, and Bill Harkness, following his body with his pistol, fired just as the woman turned, and his ball, instead of hitting Mainwaring, pierced her body.
In a second, with a terrible cry, Buffalo Bill sprang forward. As the woman fell, Harkness, turning to meet the onset, received a blow from the knife of the daring scout, which sent him reeling to the earth, while the cavern, filled with soldiers, Pawnee Indians, and scouts, rang with rapid shots as the robbers came rushing out to defend their stronghold.
“Up above—up above, and wipe ’em all out, now your hand is in!” cried Steve Hathaway, who knew the route to the top of the cliff.
“Traitor, your place is below!” cried Bill Harkness, raising up, with a dying effort, and firing his last shot.
As he saw Steve Hathaway fall he dropped back, with a gurgling death rattle in his throat.
“He wasn’t the traitor!” yelled the woman Lize, who had crept up to Bill in her dying agony. “There he stands!”
And she wrenched the revolver from the hands of the dead man and fired at Dolph Lowell just as he, seeing his danger, leveled his gun at her and fired.
Both shots were sure, and while Mainwaring rushed to the girls, to see that they were unharmed, he saw the man fall who would have held a seventy-five-thousand-dollar claim on him.