en the sounds of the shots drifted to her,--faint, snappy
reports. Harris had dropped flat and shifted his position the instant
he fired. A dozen shots answered the smoke-puffs along the stockade.

Throughout the next half-hour there was not a shot fired in the flat;
no general bombardment, no wild shooting, but guerilla warfare where
every man held his fire for a definite human target. A man shifted his
position in the stockade, raised to peer from a hole breast high, and
she saw him pitch down on the ground before the sound of the shot
reached her. One of her men had noted the darkening of the crack and
had searched him out with a rifle shot. Three shots answered it from
the main cabin.

The thud of hoofs on the trail below drew her eyes that way. Waddles
was riding out into the basin. He had brought the pack string up to
some point near at hand and deserted it to the care of the others while
he rode on ahead to join in the fight. He was almost within gunshot of
the place before he dismounted and allowed the horse to graze. She
watched his progress as he covered the last half-mile on foot. He had
discarded his heavy chaps, his blue and white shirt and overalls giving
him the appearance of some great striped beetle as he crawled up a
shallow ravine. The figures were small from distance, even when viewed
through the glasses, thus lending her a feeling of detachment and
lessening the personal element and the grim reality of the scene.
Rather it was as if she gazed into some instrument which portrayed the
moves of mannikins; yet the scene wholly absorbed her interest.

Waddles cautiously raised his head for a view of the stockade and she
could see his convulsive duck as a rifle ball tossed up a spurt of
gravel round it. The man who had fired the shot went down as the
sheriff drilled the spot where a faint haze of smoke had shown.

She presently noted one of her men sitting under a sheltering bank and
eating his lunch. She looked at her watch; it was after three,--the
day more than half gone and less than a hundred shots had been fired.
Five men were down in the stockade.

The sun was sinking and the higher points along the west edge of the
basin were sending long shadows out across the flats before there was
further action except for an occasional shifting of positions. Those
remaining alive in the stockade were saddling the bunch of horses kept
inside. These were led close under the fence on her side w