ight. We were hidden about
sixty paces from the jail, a little above it, and we had a fine command
of the door.

About eleven o'clock, when all was still, we heard soft steps back of
the jail, and soon two dark forms stole round in front. They laid down
something that gave forth a metallic clink, like a crowbar. We heard
whisperings and then, low, coarse laughs.

Then the rescuers, who undoubtedly were Miller and Bass, set to work to
open the door. Softly they worked at first, but as that door had been
put there to stay, and they were not fond of hard work, they began to
swear and make noises.

Steele whispered to me to wait until the door had been opened, and then
when all four presented a good target, to fire both barrels. We could
easily have slipped down and captured the rescuers, but that was not
Steele's game.

A trick met by a trick; cunning matching craft would be the surest of
all ways to command respect.

Four times the workers had to rest, and once they were so enraged at the
insistence of the prisoners, who wanted to delay proceedings to send one
of them after a bottle, that they swore they would go away and cut the
job altogether.

But they were prevailed upon to stay and attack the stout door once
more. Finally it yielded, with enough noise to have awakened sleepers a
block distant, and forth into the moonlight came rescuers and rescued
with low, satisfied grunts of laughter.

Just then Steele and I each discharged both barrels, and the reports
blended as one in a tremendous boom.

That little compact bunch disintegrated like quicksilver. Two stumbled
over; the others leaped out, and all yelled in pain and terror. Then the
fallen ones scrambled up and began to hobble and limp and jerk along
after their comrades.

Before the four of them got out of sight they had ceased their yells,
but were moving slowly, hanging on to one another in a way that
satisfied us they would be lame for many a day.

Next morning at breakfast Dick regaled me with an elaborate story about
how the Ranger had turned the tables on the jokers. Evidently in a night
the whole town knew it.

Probably a desperate stand of Steele's even to the extreme of killing
men, could not have educated these crude natives so quickly into the
realization that the Ranger was not to be fooled with.

That morning I went for a ride with the girls, and both had heard
something and wanted to know everything. I had become a news-carrier,
and M