vered over him--close, closer. What was
it? His eyes flashed up and down the long curve of motionless figures,
seeking an explanation and finding none. A little shiver ran up and
down his backbone. He could not understand--

A sound, scarcely louder than the footfall of a cat, but jarring
harshly upon his straining, over-acute ears, told him. He swung about
with a sharp cry. There was the explanation. There, just behind him,
barefooted, bent almost double, crouching to leap upon him, a great
Chinaman, a long, curved knife clenched in his hand, was not three
feet away. Even as he swung about the giant Asiatic sprang forward,
the knife flashing up and down. Conniston struck with his rifle--the
range was too short for him to use the thirty-thirty save as a club.
It struck the big man a glancing blow upon the shoulder.

The lean, snarling, yellow face was so close to his that he could feel
the hot, whisky-laden breath. He parried, and the rifle was jerked
from his grasp, falling with a clatter to the bed of the wagon. The
knife struck and bit into the shoulder he had thrown forward. Again it
was raised. Conniston sprang back, and as he leaped he swept up the
revolver from the barrel-top. As the knife fell, cutting a long gash
again in his shoulder, he jammed the muzzle of Lonesome Pete's gun
against the Chinaman's stomach and fired. The Chinaman grunted,
coughed, and sank limply, vomiting blood.

For a moment Conniston forgot the men out yonder, growing suddenly
sick at the sight of the ugly, twitching thing at his feet. And then
as quickly as it had come, the nausea was gone, and he was
clear-headed and watchful. He snatched up his rifle and whirled toward
Ben and Mundy and the men between them.

They had not moved, had taken no single step forward. He remembered
having seen a man near Mundy standing with open mouth and bulging
eyes; the fellow's jaw still sagged, his eyes were fixed in the same
strange stare, his eyelids had not so much as winked.

"That's one!" yelled Conniston. He laughed out loud, the laugh of a
man whose nerves are strained almost to the point of snapping.

"Come on, come on! Who'll be next?"

They muttered among themselves; here and there a man called out
sharply. But still they did not move. A thing like that which they had
just witnessed drives the fumes of alcohol from a man's brain like a
dip in ice-water. They could beat him down, they could take him, they
could kill him as he had killed