nders sounded, when, with a loud shout,
Lige Willetts leaped from an upper window on that side of the burning
saloon and landed on the woodshed, and, immediately climbing the roof
of the house itself, applied a fiery brand to the time-worn clapboards.
Ross Schofield dropped on the shed, close behind him, his arm lovingly
enfolding a gallon jug of whiskey, which he emptied (not without evident
regret) upon the clapboards as Lige fired them. Flames burst forth
almost instantly, and the smoke, uniting with that now rolling out
of every window of the saloon, went up to heaven in a cumbrous, gray
column.

As the flames began to spread, there was a rapid fusillade from the rear
of the house, and a hundred men and more, who had kept on through the
fields to the north, assailed it from behind. Their shots passed clear
through the flimsy partitions, and there was a horrid screeching, like a
beast's howls, from within. The front door was thrown open, and a lean,
fierce-eyed girl, with a case-knife in her hand, ran out in the face of
the mob. At sound of the shots in the rear they had begun to advance on
the house a second time, and Hartley Bowlder was the nearest man to the
girl. With awful words, and shrieking inconceivably, she made straight
at Hartley, and attacked him with the knife. She struck at him again
and again, and, in her anguish of hate and fear, was so extraordinary
a spectacle that she gained for her companions the four or five seconds
they needed to escape from the house. As she hurled herself alone at
the oncoming torrent, they sped from the door unnoticed, sprang over the
fence, and reached the open lots to the west before they were seen by
Willetts from the roof.

"Don't let 'em fool you!" he shouted. "Look to I your left! There they
go! Don't let 'em get away."

The Cross-Readers were running across the field. They were Bob Skillett
and his younger brother, and Mr. Skillett was badly damaged: he seemed
to be holding his jaw on his face with both hands. The girl turned, and
sped after them. She was over the fence almost as soon as they were,
and the three ran in single file, the girl last. She was either
magnificently sacrificial and fearless, or she cunningly calculated that
the regulators would take no chances of killing a woman-child, for she
kept between their guns and her two companions, trying to cover and
shield the latter with her frail body.

"Shoot, Lige," called Watts. "If we fire from here we'll