hots.

Norton rose slowly to his feet, studying the situation with frowning
eyes. A bullet hissed high overhead, another cut by his side, another
went shrieking off into the night. But while they whined in his ears
he laid his rude plans.

The arroyo wound and twisted this way and that through the broken
uplands. Where Brocky Lane had placed his men so as to defy the union
of the two bands of outlaws it described a wide rude arc curving about
the spur from Mt. Temple. Here the cowboys, with some twenty or thirty
feet separating each man from his nearest fellow, were extended along a
line which must be about two hundred yards long. The Mexicans to the
eastward, where del Rio and Kid Rickard and Moraga were, were bunched
in the protecting shadows of a field of boulders such as those where
the sheriff's men lay.

"We could stick here all night and get nothing done," said Norton to
the men close to him. "Rickard's gang could have charged down on
Brocky long ago if they'd had the stomach for that sort of thing.
They've got the numbers on us; they more than had the count on Brocky's
outfit; with those jaspers on the mountainside they could have turned
the trick. But that sort hasn't the desire for a scrap unless they can
pull it from behind a rock. And, by the same token, they won't last
five minutes in the face of a charge. Get me?"

"But the ginks on the mountain will pick us off pretty lively as we hit
the trail down the slope here," said a thoughtful voice.

Then Norton explained further. He meant to eliminate the other crowd;
it could be done. When he gave the word every man was to jump to his
feet and make the first half of his charge the bloodless one down into
the arroyo toward Brocky Lane. Then, Norton's men and Brocky's united,
they could surge up the creek's banks and make their flying attack,
coming in between the two other factions so that the men on the
mountain must hold their fire or kill as many of their own crowd as of
the others.

The suggestion was accepted without discussion. When Norton said
"Ready," they were ready; when he jumped to his feet and ran down
toward the arroyo, they ran with him. A shout of laughter went up from
each side of the dry water-course as jeering voices announced
triumphantly that the Gringoes were afraid. And with the shouts came
rifle-shots.

But to the last man of them they reached the arroyo safely, and ducking
low, trotted on to join the cowboys. In a