An hour later the band, now numbering forty-two men, started for the 88 ranch. They rode northwest, intending to pass through Farewell, for it was quite possible that Brown Jug and the gray had been taken into town.
As they neared the town a rattle of shots came down the wind. With one accord the forty-two drove the spurs into their mounts.
At the top of the slight rise above the little town they halted. The windows of Bill Lainey's hotel and Piney Jackson's blacksmith shop were banked in drifting smoke through which red tongues of flame flashed at intervals. From the cover of boulders, wagon-bodies, the hotel corral, and the Happy Heart Saloon, rule-working citizens were pouring lead into the two places. Farther up the street several Winchesters in the Blue Pigeon Store were replying to the fire from the opposite houses and from a barn in the rear of the store.
"Sheriff Block an' his outfit are lockin' horns with some friends o' mine, I guess," observed Loudon.
"That ain't no way for a sheriff to act," said Scotty. "Let's go down an' tell him so. Friends o' Tom's, boys."
Loudon was already galloping down the slope. In his wake scattered hoof-beats became a thuttering drum. Men whooping and yelling, wild-eyed horses straining every muscle, the charge swept down upon the besiegers of Lainey's Hotel and Jackson's blacksmith shop.
The sheriff's friends broke like a covey of quail. The rifles in the hotel and blacksmith shop chattered like mad. Loudon headed toward the hotel corral to whose shelter two men had retreated. But there was no one there when he reached it.
He rode past the corral and galloped along the rear of the buildings fronting on the street. Twice he was shot at, one bullet nicking his horse's hip. But he contrived to reach the other end of the town unwounded, raced across the street, and dismounted behind the sheriff's corral. His feet had barely touched the ground when Johnny Ramsay, Laguerre, and Chuck Morgan joined him.
"Yuh idjit!" cried Johnny. "Don't yuh know no better'n that? Don't yuh suppose they can hit yuh at twenty yards? Yuh wasn't that far away from the backs of them houses. Ain't yuh got no sense at all?"
"Well, they didn't hit me, an' I notice three other idjits didn't have no better sense. Duck!"