“Six o’clock.--It is just about an hour since they killed Billy, and, while bullets have been buzzing around in here pretty lively ever since, I am still untouched. I just wrote a letter to my mother. “Seven o’clock.--As I was writing in this book before a bullet smashed up my left arm pretty badly, but I have it tied up and the bleeding stopped. Now I have got my revenge, too, for as I shifted from one end of the shack to the other I caught one fellow trying to run up here with a bunch of burning brush in his hands. He’ll not need brush to keep warm where he is now. “Nine o’clock.--Still on deck, but getting kind of wobbly on the pins from loss of blood. Have been hit four times. “Nine-forty a.m.--Well, good-bye everyone. They set a load of hay on fire and let it run down the hill against the side of the shack and the roof is all ablaze. I am waiting till the smoke settles over the main bunch a little thicker and then I will try to get in amongst them with my six-shooter, if I can, before they down me. Good-bye.--BEN.” A whiff of wind from the north blew a heavy cloud of smoke low down over a bunch of White Caps lying in the shelter of a small creek some fifty yards from the cabin, and when it lifted Ben Champion stood amongst them with a smoking revolver in his hand. A moment later he lay dead on the sand with over forty bullets through his body, but in that short space of time his deadly Colt had sent two more of the White Caps to their last reckoning. [Illustration: “BEN CHAMPION APPEARED IN THE DOORWAY WITH A SIX-SHOOTER IN EITHER HAND STREAMING FIRE AND LEAD.”] While the White Caps were burying their dead, the horses and wagons were brought up and the outfit cooked their breakfast on the embers of the burning logs. Then, placing their wounded comrade in a supply wagon, they moved up the river in search of more victims. Surrounding two ranches, they crept up to them, only to find them vacant; they were too late, for their firing had attracted the attention of a rancher named Whitmore as he stopped to water his horse at the ford a mile below Champion’s ranch, and he had ridden up close enough to see the finish of the unequal fight, and had then spurred his horse up the river, warning the settlers that the much-talked-of White Cap invasion had begun. The news spread over the country like wildfire, and, instead of fleeing from the danger-zone, the ranchers and cow-punchers buckled on their guns and headed for the scene of the fight. They started in ones and twos, but as they got closer in they began to gather in bunches of ten or twelve, all spoiling for a fight, if there was a prospect of avenging the death of their comrades.