The Timanyoni, a mountain torrent in its upper and lower reaches, becomes a placid river of the plain at Brewster, dividing its flow among sandy islets, and broadening in its bed to make the long bridge connecting the city with the grass-land mesas a low, trestled causeway. On the northern bank of the river the Brewster street, of which the bridge is a prolongation, becomes a country road, forking a few hundred yards from the bridge approach to send one of its branchings northward among the Little Creek ranches and another westward up the right bank of the stream.

At this fork of the road, between eleven and twelve o'clock of the night of alarms, Sheriff Harding's party of special deputies began to assemble; mounted ranchmen for the greater part, summoned by the rural telephones and drifting in by twos and threes from the outlying grass-lands. Under each man's saddle-flap was slung the regulation weapon of the West—a scabbarded repeating rifle; and the small troop bunching itself in the river road looked serviceably militant and businesslike.

While Harding was counting his men and appointing his lieutenants an automobile rolled silently down the mesa road from the north and came to a stand among the horses. The sheriff drew rein beside the car and spoke to one of the two occupants of the double seat, saying:

"Well, Mr. Smith, we're all here."

"How many?" was the curt question.

"Twenty."

"Good. Here is your authority"—handing the legal papers to the officer. "Before we go in you ought to know the facts. A few hours ago a man named M'Graw, calling himself a deputy United States marshal and claiming to be acting under instructions from Judge Lorching's court in Red Butte, took possession of our dam and camp. On the even chance that he isn't what he claims to be, we are going to arrest him and every man in his crowd. Are you game for it?"

"I'm game to serve any papers that Judge Warner's got the nerve to issue," was the big man's reply.

"That's the talk; that's what I hoped to hear you say. We may have the law on our side, and we may not; but we certainly have the equities. Was Stanton arrested?"

"He sure was. Strothers found him in the Hophra House bar, and the line of talk he turned loose would have set a wet blanket afire. Just the same, he had to go along with Jimmie and get himself locked up."

"That is the first step; now if you're ready, we'll take the next."

Harding rode forward to marshal his troop, and when the advance began Starbuck shut off his car lamps and held his place at the rear of the straggling column, juggling throttle and spark until the car kept even pace with the horses and the low humming of the motor was indistinguishable above the muffled drumming of hoof-beats.

For the first mile or so the midnight silence was unbroken save by the subdued progress noises and the murmurings of the near-by river in its bed. Once Smith took the wheel while Starbuck rolled and lighted a cigarette, and once again, in obedience to a word from the mine owner, he turned the flash-light upon the gasolene pressure-gauge. In the fulness of time it was Starbuck who harked back to the talk which had been so abruptly broken off at the waiting halt in the Little Creek road.

"Let's not head into this ruction with an unpicked bone betwixt us, John," he began gently. "Maybe I said too much, back yonder at the foot of the hill."

"No; you didn't say too much," was the low-toned reply. And then: "Billy, I've had a strange experience this summer; the strangest a man ever lived through, I believe. A few months ago I was jerked out of my place in life and set down in another place where practically everything I had learned as a boy and man had to be forgotten. It was as if my life had been swept clean of everything that I knew how to use—like a house gutted of its well-worn and familiar furniture, and handed back to its tenant to be refitted with whatever could be found and made to serve. I don't know that I'm making it understandable to you, but——"

"Yes, you are," broke in the man at the wheel. "I've had to turn two or three little double somersaults myself in the years that are gone."

"They used to call me 'Monty-Boy,' back there in Lawrenceville, and I fitted the name," Smith went on. "I was neither better nor worse than thousands of other home-bred young fellows just like me, nor different from them in any essential way. I had my little tin-basin round of work and play, and I lived in it. I've spent half an hour, many a time, in a shop picking out the exactly right shade in a tie to wear with the socks that I had, perhaps, spent another half-hour in selecting."

"I'm getting you," said Starbuck, not without friendly sympathy. "Go on."

"Then, suddenly, as I have said, the house was looted. And, quite as suddenly, it grew and expanded and took on added rooms and spaces that I'd never dreamed of. I've had to fill it up as best I could, Billy: I couldn't put back any of the old things; they were so little and trivial and childish. And some of the things I've been putting in are fearfully raw and crude. I've just had to do the best I could—with an empty house. I found that I had a body that could stand man-sized hardship, and a kind of savage nerve that could give and take punishment, and a soul that could drive both body and nerve to the limit. Also, I've found out what it means to love a woman."

Starbuck checked the car's speed a little more to keep it well in the rear of the ambling cavalcade.

"That's your one best bet, John," he said soberly.

"It is. I've cleaned out another room since you called me down back yonder in the Little Creek road, Starbuck. I can't trust my own leadings any more; they are altogether too primitive and brutal; so I'm going to take hers. She'd send me into this fight that is just ahead of us, and all the other fights that are coming, with a heart big enough to take in the whole world. She said I'd understand, some day; that I'd know that the only great man is one who is too big to be little; who can fight without hating; who can die to make good, if that is the only way that offers."

"That's Corry Baldwin, every day in the week, John. They don't make 'em any finer than she is," was Starbuck's comment. And then: "I'm beginning to kick myself for not letting you go and have one more round-up with her. She's doing you good, right along."

"You didn't stop me," Smith affirmed; "you merely gave me a chance to stop myself. It's all over now, Billy, and my little race is about run. But whatever happens to me, either this night, or beyond it, I shall be a free man. You can't put handcuffs on a soul and send it to prison, you know. That is what Corona was trying to make me understand; and I couldn't—or wouldn't."

Harding had stopped to let the auto come up. Over a low hill just ahead the pole-bracketed lights at the dam were starring themselves against the sky, and the group of horsemen was halting at the head of the railroad trestle which marked the location of the north side unloading station.

From the halt at the trestle head, Harding sent two of his men forward to spy out the ground. Returning speedily, these two men reported that there were no guards on the north bank of the river, and that the stagings, which still remained in place on the down-stream face of the dam, were also unguarded. Thereupon Harding made his dispositions. Half of the posse was to go up the northern bank, dismounted, and rush the camp by way of the stagings. The remaining half, also on foot, was to cross at once on the railroad trestle, and to make its approach by way of the wagon road skirting the mesa foot. At an agreed-upon signal, the two detachments were to close in upon the company buildings in the construction camp, trusting to the surprise and the attack from opposite directions to overcome any disparity in numbers.

At Smith's urgings, Starbuck went with the party which crossed by way of the railroad trestle, Smith himself accompanying the sheriff's detachment. With the horses left behind under guard at the trestle head, the up-river approach was made by both parties simultaneously, though in the darkness, and with the breadth of the river intervening, neither could see the movements of the other. Smith kept his place beside Harding, and to the sheriff's query he answered that he was unarmed.

"You've got a nerve," was all the comment Harding made, and at that they topped the slight elevation and came among the stone dÉbris in the north-side quarries.

From the quarry cutting the view struck out by the camp mastheads was unobstructed. The dam and the uncompleted power-house, still figuring to the eye as skeleton masses of form timbering, lay just below them, and on the hither side the flooding torrent thundered through the spillway gates, which had been opened to their fullest capacity. Between the quarry and the northern dam-head ran the smooth concreted channel of the main ditch canal, with the water in the reservoir lake still lapping several feet below the level of its entrance to give assurance that, until the spillways should be closed, the charter-saving stream would never pour through the canal.

On the opposite side of the river the dam-head and the camp street were deserted, but there were lights in the commissary, in the office shack, and in Blue Pete Simms's canteen doggery. From the latter quarter sounds of revelry rose above the spillway thunderings, and now and again a drunken figure lurched through the open door to make its way uncertainly toward the rank of bunk-houses.

Harding was staring into the farther nimbus of the electric rays, trying to pick up some sign of the other half of his posse, when Smith made a suggestion.

"Both of your parties will have the workmen's bunk-houses in range, Mr. Harding, and we mustn't forget that Colonel Baldwin and Williams are prisoners in the timekeeper's shack. If the guns have to be used——"

"There won't be any wild shooting, of the kind you're thinking of," returned the sheriff grimly. "There ain't a single man in this posse that can't hit what he aims at, nine times out o' ten. But here's hopin' we can gather 'em in without the guns. If they ain't lookin' for us——"

The interruption was the whining song of a jacketed bullet passing overhead, followed by the crack of a rifle. "Down, boys!" said the sheriff softly, setting the example by sliding into the ready-made trench afforded by the dry ditch of the outlet canal; and as he said it a sharp fusillade broke out, with fire spurtings from the commissary building and others from the mesa beyond to show that the surprise was balked in both directions.

"They must have had scouts out," was Smith's word to the sheriff, who was cautiously reconnoitring the newly developed situation from the shelter of the canal trench. "They are evidently ready for us, and that knocks your plan in the head. Your men can't cross these stagings under fire."

"Your 'wops' are all right, anyway," said Harding. "They're pouring out of the bunk-houses and that saloon over there and taking to the hills like a flock o' scared chickens." Then to his men: "Scatter out, boys, and get the range on that commissary shed. That's where most of the rustlers are cached."

Two days earlier, two hours earlier, perhaps, Smith would have begged a weapon and flung himself into the fray with blood lust blinding him to everything save the battle demands of the moment. But now the final mile-stone in the long road of his metamorphosis had been passed and the darksome valley of elemental passions was left behind.

"Hold up a minute, for God's sake!" he pleaded hastily. "We've got to give them a show, Harding! The chances are that every man in that commissary believes that M'Graw has the law on his side—and we are not sure that he hasn't. Anyway, they don't know that they are trying to stand off a sheriff's posse!"

Harding's chuckle was sardonic. "You mean that we'd ought to go over yonder and read the riot act to 'em first? That might do back in the country where you came from. But the man that can get into that camp over there with the serving papers now 'd have to be armor-plated, I reckon."

"Just the same, we've got to give them their chance!" Smith insisted doggedly. "We can't stand for any unnecessary bloodshed—I won't stand for it!"

Harding shrugged his heavy shoulders. "One round into that sheet-iron commissary shack'll bring 'em to time—and nothing else will. I hain't got any men to throw away on the dew-dabs and furbelows."

Smith sprang up and held out his hand.

"You have at least one man that you can spare, Mr. Harding," he snapped. "Give me those papers. I'll go over and serve them."

At this the big sheriff promptly lost his temper.

"You blamed fool!" he burst out. "You'd be dog-meat before you could get ten feet away from this ditch!"

"Never mind: give me those papers. I'm not going to stand by quietly and see a lot of men shot down on the chance of a misunderstanding!"

"Take 'em, then!" rasped Harding, meaning nothing more than the calling of a foolish theorist's bluff.

Smith caught at the warrants, and before anybody could stop him he was down upon the stagings, swinging himself from bent to bent through a storm of bullets coming, not from the commissary, but from the saloon shack on the opposite bank—a whistling shower of lead that made every man in the sheriff's party duck to cover.

How the volunteer process-server ever lived to get across the bridge of death no man might know. Thrice in the half-minute dash he was hit; yet there was life enough left to carry him stumbling across the last of the staging bents; to send him reeling up the runway at the end and across the working yard to the door of the commissary, waving the folded papers like an inadequate flag of truce as he fell on the door-step.

After that, all things were curiously hazy and undefined for him; blind clamor coming and going as the noise of a train to a dozing traveller when the car doors are opened and closed. There was the tumult of a fierce battle being waged over him; a deafening rifle fire and the spat-spat of bullets puncturing the sheet-iron walls of the commissary. In the midst of it he lost his hold upon the realities, and when he got it again the warlike clamor was stilled and Starbuck was kneeling beside him, trying, apparently, to deprive him of his clothes with the reckless slashings of a knife.

Protesting feebly and trying to rise, he saw the working yard filled with armed men and the returning throng of laborers; saw Colonel Baldwin and Williams talking excitedly to the sheriff; then he caught the eye of the engineer and beckoned eagerly with his one available hand.

"Hold still, until I can find out how dead you are!" gritted the rough-and-ready surgeon who was plying the clothes-ripping knife. But when Williams came and bent down to listen, Smith found a voice, shrill and strident and so little like his own that he scarcely recognized it.

"Call 'em out—call the men out and start the gate machinery!" he panted in the queer, whistling voice which was, and was not, his own. "Possess—possession is nine points of the law—that's what Judge Warner said: the spillways, Bartley—shut 'em quick!"

"The men are on the job and the machinery is starting right now," said Williams gently. "Don't you hear it?" And then to Starbuck: "For Heaven's sake, do something for him, Billy—anything to keep him with us until a doctor can get here!"

Smith felt himself smiling foolishly.

"I don't need any doctor, Bartley; what I need is a new ego: then I'd stand some sha—some chance of finding—" he looked up appealingly at Starbuck—"what is it that I'd stand some chance of finding, Billy? I—I can't seem to remember."

Williams turned his face away and Starbuck tightened his benumbing grip upon the severed artery in the bared arm from which he had cut the sleeve. Smith seemed to be going off again, but he suddenly opened his eyes and pointed frantically with a finger of the one serviceable hand. "Catch him! catch him!" he shrilled. "It's Boogerfield, and he's going to dy-dynamite the dam!"

Clinging to consciousness with a grip that not even the blood loss could break, Smith saw Williams spring to his feet and give the alarm; saw three or four of the sheriff's men drop their weapons and hurl themselves upon another man who was trying to make his way unnoticed to the stagings with a box of dynamite on his shoulder. Then he felt the foolish smile coming again when he looked up at Starbuck.

"Don't let them hurt him, Billy; him nor Simms nor Lanterby, nor that other one—the short-hand man—I—I can't remember his name. They're just poor tools; and we've got to—to fight without hating, and—and—" foolish witlessness was enveloping him again like a clinging garment and he made a masterful effort to throw it off. "Tell the little girl—tell her—you know what to tell her, Billy; about what I tried to do. Harding said I'd get killed, but I remembered what she said, and I didn't care. Tell her I said that that one minute was worth living for—worth all it cost."

The raucous blast of a freak auto horn ripped into the growling murmur of the gate machinery, and a dust-covered car pulled up in front of the commissary. Out of it sprang first the doctor with his instrument bag, and, closely following him, two plain-clothes men and a Brewster police captain in uniform. Smith looked up and understood.

"They're just—a little—too late, Billy, don't you think?" he quavered weakly. "I guess—I guess I've fooled them, after all." And therewith he closed his eyes wearily upon all his troubles and triumphings.