“First off, you tell yer pardner to hold his hand till he hears the big racket beginnin’, and then to blaze away like sin at anything in sight. Next, you keep right on down the gulch and make a round and get on the hill behind that bunch o’ saplin’s. When you’re all set and ready, blaze away, and I’ll whale at ’em from up here, and yer pardner’ll chip in from the cabin. If that don’t stampede them cusses, nothin’ will.” Philip tightened his belt. “I’ll probably get killed trying, but here’s f-for it,” he stammered; and in a chilling frenzy of the teeth-chattering he began to worm his way down the gulch toward the dump and the cabin. How he contrived to drag himself over the short three hundred yards, with every nerve and muscle straining to turn the advance into a shameful retreat, he never knew. Every time another gunshot crashed upon the night silence he fancied he was the target and flattened himself with the blood slowly congealing in his veins. None the less he kept on, hugging the shadows and taking advantage of every inequality of the ground that would afford even the scantiest cover. At last, after what seemed like an endless eternity of the creeping, dodging progress, he found himself behind the cabin and sheltered by it from the desultory gunfire which still kept up from the opposite slope of the gulch. With his pocket knife he dug the clay chinking from between two of the logs and listened. There was no sound from within, and again his blood ran cold. Had one of the random bullets found its mark and killed Bromley? He remembered, with a tingling shock of terror, that all of the later firing had been on the part of the outlaws; there had been no replies from the cabin. Hastily enlarging the hole in the chinking, he put an eye to the orifice. The interior was not wholly dark, as he had expected to find it. There was a handful of embers on the hearth, and the glow made a murky twilight in the cabin. Presently he made out the slender figure of the play-boy stretched flat upon the earth floor, face downward, and the blood-chilling shock came again. Then he looked more closely and saw that the prone figure was not that of a dead man. Bromley was alive and alert; he was lying behind a low breastwork built of the provision sacks, and he had one of the rifles at his shoulder with the muzzle thrust through a crack between the logs. Philip gulped and shut his eyes. The sudden revulsion from horrified despair to relief made him blind and dizzy. Another shot from without steadied him and he called softly through the opening he had made. Bromley heard, and recognized his voice. “You, Philip? How the mischief ... where are you?” “At the back--where the chinking is out. Don’t you see?” “Coming,” said the one-man garrison, and as he crawled slowly across the floor Philip could see that one leg was useless; it was bound with a clumsy handkerchief tourniquet above the knee and was dragging.