We could easily have slipped down and captured the rescuers, but that was not Steele's game.
A trick met by a trick; cunning matching craft would be the surest of all ways to command respect.
Four times the workers had to rest, and once they were so enraged at the insistence of the prisoners, who wanted to delay proceedings to send one of them after a bottle, that they swore they would go away and cut the job altogether.
But they were prevailed upon to stay and attack the stout door once more.

Finally it yielded, with enough noise to have awakened sleepers a block distant, and forth into the moonlight came rescuers and rescued with low, satisfied grunts of laughter.
Just then Steele and I each discharged both barrels, and the reports blended as one in a tremendous boom.
That little compact bunch disintegrated like quicksilver.

Two stumbled over; the others leaped out, and all yelled in pain and terror.

Then the fallen ones scrambled up and began to hobble and limp and jerk along after their comrades.
Before the four of them got out of sight they had ceased their yells, but were moving slowly, hanging on to one another in a way that satisfied us they would be lame for many a day.
Next morning at breakfast Dick regaled me with an elaborate story about how the Ranger had turned the tables on the jokers.

Evidently in a night the whole town knew it.
Probably a desperate stand of Steele's even to the extreme of killing men, could not have educated these crude natives so quickly into the realization that the Ranger was not to be fooled with.
That morning I went for a ride with the girls, and both had heard something and wanted to know everything.