and of what Kaiser and I do to
get ready for them: together with the Way we meet them.

Here, now, I must tell of how the outlaws came to Track's End, and of
the fight we, that is to say, Pike and his gang on the one side and I,
Judson Pitcher, on the other side, had that day.

I may speak in prejudice, though I mean to be fair, when I say that I
believe them to have been as bad a gang of cutthroats as you could
well scare up. Though I fought them all as best I could I make no
bones of saying that I should ten thousand times rather have been at
home blowing the bellows, or doing anything else.

I was very lucky with these villains and was not caught away from home
flat on my back, as I had been by those other scoundrels, the Indians;
if I had not been lucky I should not now be here to tell the tale.
Those fellows meant no good to me nor to anybody else. It would have
been no bad thing if they could all have been hanged by the neck.

They came, then, to Track's End to rob, and to murder if needs be, on
Saturday, February 5th. My good luck consisted in this: The evening
before, just as the sun was about to go down, I saw them at Mountain's
from the windmill tower with Tom Carr's field-glass. I had gone up on
purpose to have a look about, as I did two or three times every day
when the weather was so I could see. For three days the weather had
been much better than at any time before, and it had even thawed a
little; so I was not much surprised when I saw horses coming up to the
shack from the west. I made out seven men all told, and some extra led
horses. I could see that the men went into the shack and that many of
the horses lay down. By this I knew they were tired, and guessed that
the gang would probably stay there that night and rest. I was
surprised that they had got through on horses at all. I stayed on the
tower till it was so dark that I could not see any more. The longer I
stayed the louder my heart thumped.

I knew they might, after all, come that night, either with the horses
or on snow-shoes, so I did what I could to get ready for them. The
fires were all going well, and I lit several lamps about town. I
wished a thousand times for the population I was pretending I had. I
thought if I could have even one friend just to talk to perhaps my
heart wouldn't act quite so unreasonably. But after a while it tired
out and quieted down. My knees got stronger and more like good,
sensible knees that you don't have