“Hello!” he said. “What ye doin’?”
She stood erect by the barricade, her hands behind her back once more, her lips firmly compressed, and did not answer him.
Long before, Pool Clayton had become little better than a shaking jelly bag, through excess of fright. He hardly knew what the man said, and he had not discovered what his courageous mother was doing.
The man walked up to the barricade, and, stooping over, looked Pizen Jane in the face.
“Hello!” he repeated. “What you doin’?”
Then her hands flew out, and, catching the knife from his belt, she drove it into his shoulder, inflicting a wound that tumbled him back, gasping and half paralyzed.
Before the outlaws on the other side of the barricade knew just what had occurred, Pizen Jane had cut the cords that held her, had stricken loose those that bound Pool Clayton, and was climbing over the barricade, the knife and the sentry’s revolver in her hands.
“Git out o’ my way!” she snarled, striking at one of the men who sought to oppose her progress.
He fell back out of the way of the knife. Then she sprang down, and in another instant she was running toward the huts.
One of the outlaws pitched up a rifle and was on the point of shooting her.