e line ..."

He was clicking persistently and patiently, "E-T," "E-T," "E-T,"
alternating now and then with the Horse Creek call and his own private
code letter, when Adair came up from his post at one of the rear
windows. The golden youth was the bearer of tidings, but Ford held up
his hand for silence: some one was breaking in to reply from
Frisbie's--Frisbie, himself, as the minimized tickings speedily
announced.

Ford snipped out his call for help in the fewest possible words:

Arm M'Grath's gang and bring it by train to Horse Creek, quick.
MacMorroghs are trying to dynamite us in the Nadia. FORD.

Almost without a break in the insect-like tickings the reply came:

Stand them off; help coming.

The thing done, the master workman in Ford snatched at the helm.

Did you catch and hold the pick-and-shovel men from this camp?

he clicked anxiously.

Got them all herded here and ready to go back to work--for more
pay,

answered Frisbie; and Ford ticked one more word, "Hurry," and closed the
key with a sigh of relief. Then, and not until then, Adair said: "Is
that all, for the present? If it is, I'm sorry to have to report that
the beggars outside have hit upon your gas-pipe scheme. They are rolling
a round, black thing with a string attached down upon us from the
commissary. The slant of the hill is just enough to keep it coming where
the ground is smooth."

From sheer force of habit, Ford disconnected his field telegraph, cased
and pocketed it. Then there was an instant adjournment to the rear
windows on the camp side. Happily, the rolling bomb was as yet only on
the way. Pebbles and roughnesses intervened here and there to stop or to
turn it aside, and since it was out of reach of their longest pole, the
dynamiters would start it on again by throwing stones at it.

Hereupon ensued a struggle which, under other conditions, would have
figured as horse-play. One after another the three men in the car heaved
cushions, pillows, obstructions of any sort, in the path of the rolling
menace. And behind the commissary barricade the dynamiters patiently
twitched the bomb by the firmly fastened fuse this way and that to avoid
the obstacles, or sent it forward under the impact of well-directed
missiles.

Ford was the first of the three to recognize the futility of the cushion
barricades.

"They'll beat us--they'll drop it in the ditch right here under us in
spite of fate!" he jur