The shooting from the butte came rapidly now, badly aimed. The crew frantically untangled harness and ran the horses into the woods in pairs. Tesno kept his eyes on the wagon. Only the wheel blockers were left with it, and they were standing together watching the pandemonium above them.
A man was suddenly crossing the hillside a few yards from the rear of the wagon. He was a lean, quick-moving man in woolly chaps, and he carried a shotgun. His appearance was so sudden that he could only have been lying in the brush there, not far above Tesno.
He barked something at the pair near the rear of the wagon, covering them with the shotgun as they turned. He gestured with the gun toward the wheel block. The men hesitated, then one stooped to remove it.
"Hold it!" Tesno yelled. "Drop the gun!"
He fired as the man whirled toward him. A sickening weakness seized him as the man flounced and the shotgun discharged wildly at the sky. The boiler-wrecker rose on his toes and pitched forward on his face. The man who had stooped over the wheel block straightened without touching it.
Tesno walked swiftly up the hillside, reaching the scene as the crewmen rolled the body on its back.
"He was dead when he hit the ground," one of them said weakly.
Tesno studied the gaping, vacant face, the blood-stained denim shirt, the shaggy, stained chaps. Here was the end of a life. However shabby, there must have been good in it somewhere, he thought, and regret seized him like a sickness. Yet he hid it, denied it, and as men gathered round he said roughly, "Anybody know him?"
Nobody did. Tesno continued to stare, frowning. The limp, long-legged form stirred a slippery memory that he couldn't quite get hold of.
A bullet rang dully against the boiler, spattering harmlessly against the heavy iron. An instant later, the bark of the distant rifle reached them.