perhaps, too late. But I didn't tell her anything; there wasn't time.
Frosty, waiting disapprovingly a length ahead, looked back and beckoned
again insistently. At the same instant a door behind the girl opened with
a jerk, and King himself bulked large and angry in the lamplight. Beryl
shrank backward with a little cry--and I knew she had not meant to do me a
hurt.

"Come on, you fool!" cried Frosty, and struck his horse savagely. I jabbed
in my spurs, and Shylock leaped his length and fled down that familiar
trail to the "gantlet," as I had always called it mentally after that
second passing. But King, behind us, fired three shots quickly, one after
another--and, as the bullets sang past, I knew them for a signal.

A dozen men, as it seemed to me, swarmed out from divers places to dispute
our passing, and shots were being fired in the dark, their starting-point
betrayed by vicious little spurts of flame. Shylock winced cruelly, as we
whipped around the first shed, and I called out sharply to Frosty, still a
length ahead. He turned just as my horse went down to his knees.

I jerked my feet from the stirrups and landed free and upright, which was
a blessing. And it was then that I swung morally far back to the
primitive, and wanted to kill, and kill, with never a thought for parley
or retreat. Frosty, like the stanch old pal he was, pulled up and came
back to me, though the bullets were flying fast and thick--and not wide
enough for derision on our part.

"Jump up behind," he commanded, shooting as he spoke. "We'll get out of
this damned trap."

I had my doubts, and fired away without paying him much attention.