the
front wave of the living, leaping tide could be seen.

Larkin swung the girl's horse alongside Pinte, and without a thought or a
pang shot them both. They fell one on top of the other. Then the stranger
in the mask led his animal in front of the two that had fallen and put a
bullet through its brain. All now leaped behind this still throbbing
barricade.

"Got a gun, Julie?" demanded Bud.

"Yes."

"Give it to me and load mine from your belt." They exchanged weapons and
the girl with practiced hand slipped the cartridges into their chambers.
The unknown had drawn two guns from some place in his equipment, and now
the three peered over their shelter.

The advance line of animals was scarcely twenty-five yards away, and, with
a clutch of horror at his heart, Bud recognized that they were not cattle
as he had supposed, but sheep--his own two thousand.

In the instant that remained he remembered the shots and shouting of a
quarter-hour before, and realized that the animals had been stampeded
deliberately.

"Let 'er go," he screamed above the tumult, "and yell like blazes!"

On the word yellow fire streamed out from the four guns and, accompanying
it, a perfect bedlam of shrieks and cries. The sheep were now upon them,
and the hail of bullets dropped some in their headlong career, piling
them up against the horses and adding to the barricade. But it could not
stop all, and a stream of the animals made its way over the bodies up to
the very mouths of the spitting guns.

Now others stumbled and fell, to be instantly engulfed by the swirling
flood behind; small, sharp feet were caught between the limbs of the
struggling mass that eddied about the dead horses. Still the yellow fire
stabbed out into the faces of the middlers--for now the leaders were
already piling up mangled and dying in the rocky river-bed--but, past each
side of this island of expiring creatures, thundered a vast, heaving
stream, turbulent, silent, irrevocable.

The man in the mask with a revolver in each hand was firing steadily, and
Larkin, thrilled at the sight of his apparent coolness, turned to look at
him.

To his amazement he found that the mask had fallen or been snatched away.
Again the man fired, and Bud Larkin's jaw fell as he gazed on the queer,
unmistakable features of the man who had saved his life that night.

It was Smithy Caldwell.

The sheep mind has the power of tenacity, but not that of change. There
was scarcely a shot