"Never mind: give me those papers. I'm not going to stand by quietly and see a lot of men shot down on the chance of a misunderstanding!" "Take 'em, then!" rasped Harding, meaning nothing more than the calling of a foolish theorist's bluff. Smith caught at the warrants, and before anybody could stop him he was down upon the stagings, swinging himself from bent to bent through a storm of bullets coming, not from the commissary, but from the saloon shack on the opposite bank--a whistling shower of lead that made every man in the sheriff's party duck to cover. How the volunteer process-server ever lived to get across the bridge of death no man might know. Thrice in the half-minute dash he was hit; yet there was life enough left to carry him stumbling across the last of the staging bents; to send him reeling up the runway at the end and across the working yard to the door of the commissary, waving the folded papers like an inadequate flag of truce as he fell on the door-step. After that, all things were curiously hazy and undefined for him; blind clamor coming and going as the noise of a train to a dozing traveller when the car doors are opened and closed. There was the tumult of a fierce battle being waged over him; a deafening rifle fire and the _spat-spat_ of bullets puncturing the sheet-iron walls of the commissary. In the midst of it he lost his hold upon the realities, and when he got it again the warlike clamor was stilled and Starbuck was kneeling beside him, trying, apparently, to deprive him of his clothes with the reckless slashings of a knife. Protesting feebly and trying to rise, he saw the working yard filled with armed men and the returning throng of laborers; saw Colonel Baldwin and Williams talking excitedly to the sheriff; then he caught the eye of the engineer and beckoned eagerly with his one available hand. "Hold still, until I can find out how dead you are!" gritted the rough-and-ready surgeon who was plying the clothes-ripping knife. But when Williams came and bent down to listen, Smith found a voice, shrill and strident and so little like his own that he scarcely recognized it. "Call 'em out--call the men out and start the gate machinery!" he panted in the queer, whistling voice which was, and was not, his own. "Possess--possession is nine points of the law--that's what Judge Warner said: the spillways, Bartley--shut 'em quick!" "The men are on the job and the machinery is starting right now," said Williams gently. "Don't you hear it?" And then to Starbuck: "For Heaven's sake, do something for him, Billy--anything to keep him with us until a doctor can get here!" Smith felt himself smiling foolishly. "I don't need any doctor, Bartley; what I need is a new ego: then I'd stand some sha--some chance of finding--" he looked up appealingly at Starbuck--"what is it that I'd stand some chance of finding, Billy? I--I can't seem to remember."