Not a shot had been fired. One after another she picked up the men with her glasses. Occasionally one moved, hitching himself forward to some point which afforded a better view. One or two knelt in the bottom of shallow draws, peering from behind some sheltering bush. Inside the stockade she could see Lang's men kneeling or flattened on the ground as they gazed through cracks in the walls. She made out Harris, crouching in a draw. A thin haze of smoke spurted from his position. Three similar puffs showed along the face of the stockade. Then the sounds of the shots drifted to her,--faint, snappy reports. Harris had dropped flat and shifted his position the instant he fired. A dozen shots answered the smoke-puffs along the stockade. Throughout the next half-hour there was not a shot fired in the flat; no general bombardment, no wild shooting, but guerilla warfare where every man held his fire for a definite human target. A man shifted his position in the stockade, raised to peer from a hole breast high, and she saw him pitch down on the ground before the sound of the shot reached her. One of her men had noted the darkening of the crack and had searched him out with a rifle shot. Three shots answered it from the main cabin. The thud of hoofs on the trail below drew her eyes that way. Waddles was riding out into the basin. He had brought the pack string up to some point near at hand and deserted it to the care of the others while he rode on ahead to join in the fight. He was almost within gunshot of the place before he dismounted and allowed the horse to graze. She watched his progress as he covered the last half-mile on foot. He had discarded his heavy chaps, his blue and white shirt and overalls giving him the appearance of some great striped beetle as he crawled up a shallow ravine. The figures were small from distance, even when viewed through the glasses, thus lending her a feeling of detachment and lessening the personal element and the grim reality of the scene. Rather it was as if she gazed into some instrument which portrayed the moves of mannikins; yet the scene wholly absorbed her interest. Waddles cautiously raised his head for a view of the stockade and she could see his convulsive duck as a rifle ball tossed up a spurt of gravel round it. The man who had fired the shot went down as the sheriff drilled the spot where a faint haze of smoke had shown. She presently noted one of her men sitting under a sheltering bank and eating his lunch. She looked at her watch; it was after three,--the day more than half gone and less than a hundred shots had been fired. Five men were down in the stockade.