retreats, the vigilantes fired one after another of the gaudy places
that lined the upper street. Met by close shooting at every turn, the
rioters were driven up the hill and fighting desperately were pursued
to cover by men now as savage as themselves. The scattered clashes
were brief and deadly. The whole upper town was on fire. Men fleeing
for their lives skulked in the shadows of the side streets and the
constant scattering report of fire-arms added to the terrors of the
night.

Hour after hour the conflagration raged and day broke at last on the
smoking ruins of the town of Medicine Bend. The work of the
vigilantes had been mercilessly thorough. Along the railroad track
stiffened bodies hanging from the cross-bars of telegraph poles in
the gloom of the breaking day told a ghastly story of justice
summarily administered to the worst of the offenders. In the gloom
of the smoking streets stragglers roamed unmolested among the
ruins; for of the outlaws, killed or hunted out of the town, none
were now left to oppose the free passage of any one from end to end of
Medicine Bend.

CHAPTER XXV

The victory was dear, but none murmured at its cost. Medicine Bend for
once had been purged of its parasites.

At the railroad head-quarters Stanley, before daylight, was directing
the resumption of operations so interrupted by the three days of
anarchism on the mountain division. New men were added every hour to
the pay-roll, and the smaller tradesmen of the town, ruined by the
riots, were given positions to keep them until the town could be
rebuilt.

The pressure on the operating department increased twofold with the
resumption of traffic. Winter was now upon the mountains, but
construction could not be stopped for winter. The enormous prizes for
extending the line through the Rockies to meet the rival railroad
heading east from California, spurred the builders to every effort to
lengthen their mileage, and something unheard of was attempted,
namely, mountain railroad-building in midwinter.

Levake, the leader among the mountain outlaws, was nursed back to life
by the surgeon he had so nearly murdered. But his respite was a brief
one. When new officers of the law were elected in Medicine Bend, the
murderer was tried for one of his many crimes and paid on the scaffold
the penalty of his cold-blooded cruelty. Rebstock, the fox, and his
companion Seagrue escaped the exterminating raid of the vigilantes but
fought shy