wn back
and feet drumming; heard him give one strange bubbling, strangled
scream--it was the blood in his throat made this outcry sound thus--and
saw him fall on his face, twitching and heaving, not thirty feet from
where Dudley Stackpole stood, his pistol upraised and ready for more
firing.

As to how many shots, all told, were fired the woman never could say
with certainty. There might have been four or five or six, or even
seven, she thought. After the opening shot they rang together in almost
a continuous volley, she said. Three empty chambers in Tatum's gun and
two in Stackpole's seemed conclusive evidence to the sheriff and the
coroner that night and to the coroner's jurors next day that five shots
had been fired.

On one point, though, for all her fright, the woman was positive, and to
this she stuck in the face of questions and cross-questions. After Tatum
stopped as though jolted to a standstill, and dropped his weapon,
Stackpole flung the barrel of his revolver upward and did not again
offer to fire, either as his disarmed and stricken enemy advanced upon
him or after he had fallen. As she put it, he stood there like a man
frozen stiff.

Having seen and heard this much, the witness, now all possible peril for
her was passed, suddenly became mad with fear. She ran into her cabin
and scrouged behind the headboard of a bed. When at length she
timorously withdrew from hiding and came trembling forth, already
persons out of the neighborhood, drawn by the sounds of the fusillade,
were hurrying up. They seemed to spring, as it were, out of the ground.
Into the mill these newcomers carried the two Tatums, Jess being
stone-dead and Harve still senseless, with a leg dangling where the
bones were snapped below the knee, and a great cut in his scalp; and
they laid the two of them side by side on the floor in the gritty dust
of the meal tailings and the flour grindings. This done, some ran to
harness and hitch and to go to fetch doctors and law officers, spreading
the news as they went; and some stayed on to work over Harve Tatum and
to give such comfort as they might to Dudley Stackpole, he sitting dumb
in his little, cluttered office awaiting the coming of constable or
sheriff or deputy so that he might surrender himself into custody.

While they waited and while they worked to bring Harve Tatum back to his
senses, the men marveled at two amazing things. The first wonder was
that Jess Tatum, finished marksman as he