The Mountain Divide

  CHAPTER XXIV

  The men in the barricade were lined up for orders. Ammunition waspassed and volunteers were called to form a charging party. Thevigilantes formed in the glare of the burning shops.

  From the head-quarters of the rioters in Front Street came scatteringshots and cries as a huge volume of sparks shot up into the black sky.Ten men under Hawk and ten under Dancing made the supporting party forthe vigilantes, who asked only that a line of retreat be keptopen. This Stanley had undertaken to provide. Atkinson, making awide detour back of the station, led his men down the railroadtracks and, reaching a point where concealment was no longerpossible, double-quicked up Fort Street and charged with his partyacross the little park.

  They had already been seen. A line of men, posted behind the placesthat line Front Street at that point, opened fire. It was the worstpossible answer to make to men in the temper of the scattered linethat swept up the street in the glare of the burning buildings.Wounded men dropped out of the charge, but those that went on carriedwith them a more implacable determination. Re-forming their line undercover of the cedars at the corner of Fort Street, they directed aneffective fire into the dance halls adjoining, and the rioters hidingwithin scurried from them like rats.

  But the vigilantes were intent first of all on capturing and burningthe hall known as the Three Horses, and the rioters rallied to itsdefence. As the place was assailed, the doors were barred and a sharpfire was poured through the windows. The assailants were driven back.Bill Dancing, heated and stubborn, refused to retreat and, picking upa sledge dropped by a fleeing vigilante, attacked the barred doorssingle-handed.

  The street, swept by the bullets of the fray, rang with the splittingblows of the heavy hammer, as the lineman, his long hair flying fromhis forehead, swung at the thick panels. Within, the gamblers tried toshoot him from the windows, but he stood close and his friends keptup a constant supporting fire that drove the defenders back.

  From above they hurled chairs and tables down on Dancing, but his headseemed furniture-proof, and scorning to waste time in dodging hehammered away, undaunted, until he splintered the panels and the stoutlock-stiles gave. The vigilantes, running up, tore through the doorchains with crowbars and rushed the building.

  The fight in the big room lasted only a moment. The rioters crowdedtoward the rear and escaped as best they could. Vigilantes withtorches made short work of the rest of it. Dancing stove in a cask ofalcohol, and as the attacking party ran out of the front door a torchwas flung back into the spreading pool.

  A great burst of fire lighted the street. The next moment the longbuilding was in flames.

  Emboldened by this success and driving the outlaws from their furtherretreats, the vigilantes fired one after another of the gaudy placesthat lined the upper street. Met by close shooting at every turn, therioters were driven up the hill and fighting desperately were pursuedto cover by men now as savage as themselves. The scattered clasheswere brief and deadly. The whole upper town was on fire. Men fleeingfor their lives skulked in the shadows of the side streets and theconstant scattering report of fire-arms added to the terrors of thenight.

  Hour after hour the conflagration raged and day broke at last on thesmoking ruins of the town of Medicine Bend. The work of thevigilantes had been mercilessly thorough. Along the railroad trackstiffened bodies hanging from the cross-bars of telegraph poles inthe gloom of the breaking day told a ghastly story of justicesummarily administered to the worst of the offenders. In the gloomof the smoking streets stragglers roamed unmolested among theruins; for of the outlaws, killed or hunted out of the town, nonewere now left to oppose the free passage of any one from end to end ofMedicine Bend.