Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/238

222 they are plain fools. You couldn't hit an elephant at this distance tonight."

Rice was on his knees, bending over the prone body of bis old friend.

"Dead," he said, and his voice was strangely quiet, "or fainted. If they got you, Turk, by God I'll get a man or two of them for you."

He got up and went to the flume, careless of the bullets which his action might draw to him, filled his hat and came back, wetting Turk's face and wrists. In a moment Steele heard a little chuckle from him. Turk had stirred and cursed and demanded again to be told where his rifle was. It was promptly slipped into his hand and Rice returned to Steele's side.

"He's all right," he said positively. "Can't kill old Turk that easy. Now, let's give 'em hell, Bill."

Fighting in the dark is uncertain work at best. And when a man attacked does not know who the attacker is or how many there are of him the demand to know just that becomes insistent, imperative. With a poor drunken fool who was also, perhaps, a mere tool, Steele felt that he had no quarrel. If he could only know if this were Joe Embry's work, if perhaps Joe Embry himself held to the background, watching, directing, taking but slim chances and reaping what good might come to him?

"All we got to do," Rice was growling, "is bust the flume back there, turn the water back into the hole an' then go get 'em, Bill!"

"And do the same thing every night as long as they want to take a wallop at us?" returned Steele. "That