anying him.

"That leaves seven, Levins," he said grimly. "Looks like my trip to Santa
Fe is off, eh?" he laughed. "Well, I've always had a yearning to be
besieged, and I'll make it mighty interesting for those fellows. Do you
think you can cover that slope, so they can't get up there while I'm
reconnoitering? It would be certain death for me to stick my head around
that corner again."

At Levins' emphatic affirmative he was helped to the shelter of a recess,
from where he had a view of the slope, though himself protected by a
corner of one of the houses; placed a rifle in the wounded man's hands,
and carrying his own, vanished into one of the dark passages that weaved
through the pueblo.

He went only a short distance. Emerging from an opening in one of the
adobe houses he saw a parapet wall, sadly crumpled in spots, facing the
plains, and he dropped to his hands and knees and crept toward it,
secreting himself behind it and prodding the wall cautiously with the
barrel of his rifle until he found a joint in the stone work where the
adobe mud was rotted. He poked the muzzle of the rifle through the
crevice, took careful aim, and had the satisfaction of hearing a savage
curse in the instant following the flash. He threw himself flat
immediately, listening to the spatter and whine of the bullets of the
volley that greeted his shot. They kept it up long--but when there was a
momentary cessation he crept back to the entrance of the adobe house,
entered, followed another passage and came out on the ledge farther along
the side of the pueblo. He halted in a dense shadow and looked toward the
spot where the men had been. They had vanished.

There was nothing to do but to wait, and he sank behind a huge block of
stone in an angle of the ledge, noting with satisfaction that he could see
the slope that he had set Levins to guard.

"I'm the boss of this fort if I don't go to sleep," he told himself grimly
as he stretched out. He lay there, watching, while the moonlight faded,
while a gray streak in the east slowly widened, presaging the dawn.
Stretched flat, his aching muscles welcoming the support of the cool stone
of the ledge, he had to fight off the drowsiness that assailed him.

An hour dragged by. He knew the deputies were watching, no doubt having
separated to conceal themselves behind convenient boulders that dotted the
plains at the foot of the slope. Or perhaps while he had been in the
passages of the pueblo, chang