her sat immediately behind them--dear old
Hal Gosling never could resist any appeal to his sympathies. The seat
directly across the aisle from the two prisoners was occupied by
Gosling and Manning. With the car well filled with passengers and
their men ironed, the Marshal and his Deputy were off their guard.
When out of Austin barely an hour, the train at full speed, the two
women slipped pistols into the hands of the two convicted bandits,
unseen by the officers. But others saw the act, and a stir of alarm
among those near by caused Gosling to whirl in his seat next the aisle,
reaching for the pistol in his breast scabbard. But he was too late.
Before he was half risen to his feet or his gun out, the prisoners
fired and killed him.

Then ensued a terrible duel, begun at little more than arm's length,
between Manning and the two prisoners, who presently began backing
toward the rear door. Quickly the car filled with smoke, and in it
pandemonium reigned, women screaming, men cursing, all who had not
dropped in a faint ducking beneath the car seats and trying their best
to burrow in the floor. When at length the two prisoners reached the
platform and sprang from the moving train, Johnny Manning, shot full of
holes as a sieve, lay unconscious across Hal Gosling's body; and the
sister of one of the bandits hung limp across the back of the seat the
prisoners had occupied, dead of a wild shot.

But Johnny had well avenged Hal's death and his own injuries; one of
the prisoners was found dead within a few yards of the track, and the
other was captured, mortally wounded, a half-mile away.

After many uncertain weeks, when Manning's system had successfully
recovered from the overdose of lead administered by the departed, he
quietly resumed his star and belt, and no one ever discovered that the
incident had made him in the least gun-shy.

Whenever the history of the Territory of New Mexico comes to be
written, the name of Colonel Albert J. Fountain deserves and should
have first place in it. Throughout the formative epoch of her
evolution from semi-savagery to civilization, an epoch spanning the
years from 1866 to 1896, Colonel Fountain was far and away her most
distinguished and most useful citizen. As soldier, scholar, dramatist,
lawyer, prosecutor, Indian fighter, and desperado-hunter, his was the
most picturesque personality I have ever known. Gentle and
kind-hearted as a woman, a lover of his books and his ease