to forget. But your butter-fingered
Mexican has left us no choice. Ford knows enough now to send some of us
over the road for life. If he got into that car alive, he must never
come out of it alive."

Brian MacMorrogh had unlocked a cupboard in the corner of the room. It
was a well-filled gun-rack, and he was passing the Winchesters out to
his brothers.

"'Tis so," he said briefly. Then: "There's the two naygurs in the car:
what av thim, Misther Eckstein?"

Eckstein took one of the guns and emptied the magazine to make sure of
the loading.

"We are thirteen to one; the negroes don't count," he replied coldly.
"Call in your men and we'll go and do what's got to be done."

XXV

THE SIEGE OF THE NADIA

With a horse that could have been handled Ford would not have run away
when the charge upon the Mexican failed of its purpose. So far from it,
he tried to wheel and charge again while the man was reeling from his
collision with the rearing mustang.

But the bronco from the Copah stable, with the flash and crash of the
pistol-shot to madden it, took the bit between its teeth and
bolted--safely through the shallows of the stream crossing and up to the
level of the railroad yard beyond, but swerving aside at the first of
the car shadows to fling its rider out of the saddle. Ford gathered
himself quickly and rolled under a car. His right arm had no feeling in
it, whether from the shot or the fall he could not determine.

The numbness had become a prickling agony when he heard the Mexican
splashing through the river to begin his search. Ford's field of vision
was limited by the car trucks, but he kept the man in sight as he could.
It filled him with sudden and fiery rage to be hunted thus like a
defenseless animal, and more than once he was tempted to make a dash for
the engineers' quarters on the hillside above the commissary--a rifle
being the thing for which he hungered and thirsted.

But to show himself under the lights was to invite the fate he had so
narrowly escaped. He knew Mattacheco's skill as a marksman: the Mexican
would not be rattled twice in the same half-hour. Ford gripped the
benumbed arm in impotent writhings.

"Now, by recognizing him, I've fixed it so that he is obliged to kill
me," he muttered. "It's my life, or his neck for a halter, and he knows
it. The blood-thirsty devil! If I could only get to Brissac's
bunk-shanty and lay my hands on a gun ..."

There seemed to be no chance of d