laim until I came here with the surveyor," and
two men stepped from a thicket of myrtle in the rear of Steptoe and
his followers. The speaker, Marshall, was a thin, slight, overworked,
over-aged man; his companion, the surveyor, was equally slight,
but red-bearded, spectacled, and professional-looking, with a long
traveling-duster that made him appear even clerical. They were scarcely
a physical addition to Stacy's party, whatever might have been their
moral and legal support.

But it was just this support that Steptoe strangely clung to in his
designs for the future, and a wild idea seized him. The surveyor was
really the only disinterested witness between the two parties. If
Steptoe could confuse his mind before the actual fighting--from which he
would, of course, escape as a non-combatant--it would go far afterwards
to rehabilitate Steptoe's party. "Very well, then," he said to Marshall,
"I shall call this gentleman to witness that we have been attacked
here in peaceable possession of our part of the claim by these armed
strangers, and whether they are acting on your order or not, their blood
will be on your head."

"Then I reckon," said the surveyor, as he tore away his beard, wig,
spectacles, and mustache, and revealed the figure of Jack Hamlin, "that
I'm about the last witness that Mr. Steptoe-Horncastle ought to call,
and about the last witness that he ever WILL call!"

But he had not calculated upon the desperation of Steptoe over the
failure of this last hope. For there sprang up in the outlaw's brain the
same hideous idea that he voiced to his companions at the Divide. With
a hoarse cry to his followers, he crashed his pickaxe into the brain of
Marshall, who stood near him, and sprang forward. Three or four shots
were exchanged. Two of his men fell, a bullet from Stacy's rifle pierced
Steptoe's leg, and he dropped forward on one knee. He heard the steps
of his reinforcements with their weapons coming close behind him, and
rolled aside on the sloping ledge to let them pass. But he rolled too
far. He felt himself slipping down the mountain-side in the slimy shoot
of the tunnel. He made a desperate attempt to recover himself, but the
treacherous drift of the loose debris rolled with him, as if he were
part of its refuse, and, carrying him down, left him unconscious, but
otherwise uninjured, in the bushes of the second ledge five hundred feet
below.

When he recovered his senses the shouts and outcries above h