he one in the second can and repeated the operation.

This was the essence of his plan of defense. With guns the defenders
on the hillside would be outnumbered and probably killed in an attack.
The information that the assailants were to steal up the canyon,
however, was the key that would unlock a desperate situation, and his
mind had grasped the mode and means of defeating the enemy.

With the first shots quiet had returned. The night seemed for Weir as
peaceful as ever, the earth bathed in moonlight, the camp at rest.
Only before him there was the sputter of the two fuses, one at the
right, one at the left, as the trains of fire burned towards the holes
in the canisters. He watched these calculatingly. His cigar no longer
of service had been cast aside.

All at once he rose erect again. A few men were starting along the
wall to climb the hillside, but the greater number were gathered about
Burkhardt and the Mexican leader. Now Weir glanced at them and now at
the fuses.

"I warn you to leave this dam and camp, Burkhardt," he shouted, when a
few seconds had passed. "Don't say I didn't give you warning."

Every head jerked upward at this surprising reappearance and voice.
They had supposed him fled, the men down there, and were having a last
hasty conference, doubtless as to the wisdom of now first attacking
the camp. A grim smile came on the engineer's face. Their astonishment
was comic--or would have been at a moment less perilous and fraught
with less grave consequences.

An oath ripped from Burkhardt's lips. An angry curse it might have
been at Madden that he had failed to arrest and hold the engineer
according to plan. He gestured right and left, yelling something to
the men around him. He himself began to run towards one end of the
dam.

Weir stooped, picked up one of the canisters, blew on the fuse now
burned so near the hole. Some men perhaps at this instant would have
quailed for their own safety and at the prospect of hurling death
among others. For death this tin cylinder meant for those below. But
there was no tremor in Steele Weir's arm or heart.

He was the man of metal who had won the name "Cold Steel"--calm,
implacable, of steel-like purpose. With such enemies he could hold no
other communion than that which gave death. For such there was no
mercy. By the same sort of law that they would execute let them
suffer--the law of lawlessness and force. Destruction they would give,
destruction let them