or so, maybe. I listened for a
while, but there was nothing to be seen and I heard no more shooting.
Now, I knew the pay-wagon was somewhere on that road, and it struck me
that the bunch that got Hans and Rowan and held us up might have tried
the same game on it; and from the noise I judged it hadn't been a
walkaway. It was a wild guess; but I thought I ought to go down and see,
anyway. Single-handed, and in that dark you could almost feel, I knew I
was able to sidestep the trouble, if it should be Indians or anything I
didn't care to get mixed up in.

"I'd gone about a mile down the slope when the lightning began to tear
the sky open. In five minutes the worst of it was right over me, and one
flash came on top of the other so fast it was like a big eye winking
through the clouds. One second the hills and coulees would show plain as
day, and next you'd have to feel to find the ears of your horse. I
pulled up, for I didn't care to go down there with all that
lightning-play to make a shining mark of me, and while I sat there
wondering how long it was going to last, a long, sizzling streak went
zig-zagging up out of the north and another out of the east, and when
they met overhead and the white glare spread over the clouds, it was
like the sun breaking out over the whole country. It lit up every ridge
and hollow for two or three seconds, and showed me four riders tearing
up the slope at a high run. I don't think they saw me at all, for they
passed me, in the dark that shut down after that flash of lightning, so
close that I could hear the pat-a-pat of the hoofs. And when the next
flash came they were out of sight.

"Right after that the rain hit me like a cloudburst. That was over
quick, and by the time it had settled to a drizzle I was down in the
paymaster's camp. Things were sure in an uproar there. Two men killed,
two more crippled, and the paymaster raving like a maniac. I hadn't been
far wide of the mark. The men that passed me on the ridge had held up
the outfit--and looted fifty thousand dollars in cold cash."

"Fifty thousand--the devil!" I broke in. "And they got away with it?"

"With all the ease in the world," MacRae answered calmly. "They made a
sneak on the camp in the dark, clubbed both sentries, and had their guns
on the rest before they knew what was wrong. They got the money, and
every horse in camp. The shooting I heard came off as they started away
with the plunder. Some of the troopers grabbed up th