Whatever it was
that Brocky was trying to say was lost in the din. And then again came
a volley of rifle-shots.
Norton rose slowly to his feet, studying the situation with frowning
eyes. A bullet hissed high overhead, another cut by his side, another
went shrieking off into the night. But while they whined in his ears
he laid his rude plans.
The arroyo wound and twisted this way and that through the broken
uplands. Where Brocky Lane had placed his men so as to defy the union
of the two bands of outlaws it described a wide rude arc curving about
the spur from Mt. Temple. Here the cowboys, with some twenty or thirty
feet separating each man from his nearest fellow, were extended along a
line which must be about two hundred yards long. The Mexicans to the
eastward, where del Rio and Kid Rickard and Moraga were, were bunched
in the protecting shadows of a field of boulders such as those where
the sheriff's men lay.
"We could stick here all night and get nothing done," said Norton to
the men close to him. "Rickard's gang could have charged down on
Brocky long ago if they'd had the stomach for that sort of thing.
They've got the numbers on us; they more than had the count on Brocky's
outfit; with those jaspers on the mountainside they could have turned
the trick.
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