d seen the peril of being separated from their friends,
but he was powerless to avert it. As Dancing struck Seagrue down, his
enemies closed in behind the moving vigilantes. Bucks fought his way
to the lineman's side and in another instant the two were beset.
Dancing, hard-pressed, made a dash to break through the circle to
liberty. Half a dozen men sprang at him, and trampling Bucks
completely under foot aimed their blows at his defender.

Dancing saw Bucks fall and, clubbing his way to his side, caught Bucks
from the ground by the coat collar, and dragging him with his left
hand, swung with his right hand his deadly club. Nothing less would
have saved them. The fight, moving every instant after Dancing,
reached the broad wooden steps leading from the jail yard to the
street. Down these the lineman, stubborn and bleeding, drove a
desperate way. And Bucks, able again to handle himself, was putting up
a good fight when, to his horror, Dancing, fighting down the flight of
steps, stumbled and fell.

Half a dozen men, with a yell, jumped for him. Bucks thought the
finish had come. He sprang into the fight and, armed only with a wagon
spoke, cracked right and left wherever he could reach a head. Dancing
he had given over for dead, when to his astonishment the lineman rose
out of the heap about him, shaking off his enemies like rats.

Flames shooting up from the burning jail lighted the scene. Dancing,
bare-headed, and with only a part of his shirt hanging in ribbons from
his left arm, his hair matted in blood across his forehead and his
eyes blazing, was a formidable sight. He had lost his club but he was
at no loss for a weapon. It was said of Bill Dancing in later days
that he could lift a thirty-foot steel rail. Bucks saw him now catch
up a man scrambling in front of him and swing him by the legs like a
battering ram. With this victim, he mowed down men like corks, and,
flinging the man at last bodily into the faces of his friends, he
started like a deer up Cliff Street with Bucks at his heels.

Sure that they now had him, the rioters followed in a swarm. Cliff
Street, only a block long and only half-opened, terminated then at the
cliffs above the gorge of the Medicine River. But darkness under the
brow of the hill helped the fleeing railroad men. Dancing dodged in
and out of the undergrowth that fringed the street line and eluding
his pursuers reached the brow of the cliff unseen. The rioters,
knowing that no escape