y effort made to secure troops in the emergency. But the Indian
uprising had taken every available infantryman and trooper into the
north and there was not now sufficient time to get them together for
action. The railroad men, Stanley knew, must depend on themselves and
upon such assistance as the decent element in the town could render.

Meantime the outlaws were not idle. They spent the day whipping the
gamblers and their hangers-on into line, upon the prediction that if
they themselves were dispersed scant quarter would be shown their
disorderly associates.

Scott spent the day leisurely. Stanley had asked him not to move
until his own arrangements for a defensive fight were completed. That
the outlaws had secret sources of information even in the railroad
circles, came out startlingly. A special train--an express car pulled
by an engine--entered the railroad yard at dusk that evening, when a
party of men running out from the cover of the freight warehouse
attempted to rush it for arms and ammunition.

They were met at the car doors by six of the best men that could be
picked up along the line during the day run of the special across the
plains. Stanley had wired instructions to head-quarters to send him
six men that feared neither smoke nor powder, and six stalwarts taken
on at Grand Island, North Platte, and Julesburg guarded the car and
tumbled like cats out of a bag upon the surprised raiders.

The encounter was spirited, but it took only a moment to convince the
assaulting party that they had made a mistake. Clubbing their heavy
revolvers, the guards, any one of whom in close quarters could account
for two ordinary men, threw themselves from the car step directly
into the crowd and struck right and left. There was no regard for
persons, and in the half-dark the Medicine Bend ruffians, surprised
and confused, were soon fighting one another.

But one-sided as the contest was, it did not go fast enough to suit
the guards, who, seizing the clubs thrown away by the rabble, charged
them in a line and drove them up the street. Railroad men who came
running from the station to help were too late. The flurry was over
and they found nothing to do but to cheer their new aids.

Nor were the gamblers asleep. Word had gone out both east and west of
the approaching crisis between the disorderly and the law-and-order
elements, and every passenger train into Medicine Bend brought
mysterious men from towns and railroad camp