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 Moore was floundering in the distracting durance of a sanguinary dream; it was at that very second that he, in his vision, rose to his elbow, shot through in forty places by Cal Withers and his men, to lift his faithful bulldog and send a bullet into the cowman's mocking face. The roar of his big-bore gun snapped Baldy Evans's fantastic speculations as the sudden lunge of an engine breaks a coupling-link on a frosty morning.

Baldy had forgotten his arrangement with the shops and roundhouse men for blowing the whistle when the shooting began. This sudden roar of a gun in the gray of early morning reminded him of it with a sharpness so much like an accusation of neglect of duty that it was almoset tragic. Baldy jumped for the whistle, and pulled it wide open, jarring the windows of McPacken with the sound.