He reached across the horse and shook Billy’s hand; then he gave his saddle a shake to see that it was set to his liking.

“Adiós, boys,” he said—and he burst from that cabin like a wolf from its den, swinging into the saddle just as the horse cleared the doorway.

The gunfighters were right behind him, pouring fire up at the Texans as fast as they could shoot. The Texans, though they must have expected the move, were caught off balance—it was a few seconds before their rifles began to blaze.

“If they cut Joe down or hang him I’ll kill them all,” Billy said, in a shaky voice.

Then he dropped on his belly and wiggled out of the door like a snake. I doubt the Texans even saw him, for it was full dusk and they had their hands full trying to run down the scattered gunmen. Bursting cartridges flashed like fireflies up and down the darkening arroyo.

Vivian Maldonado and I sat until the firing stopped. To the south it continued for several minutes—it was Hill Coe, making his gallant stand.

But there was a final thundercrash—eight or ten rifles fired almost at once; then, only the silence of the summer night.

“Let’s leave this boy now,” Vivian said, referring to the corpse of Barbecue Campbell.

It was so quiet on the prairie that I felt a stab of loneliness—what if all were dead, Texans and gunfighters alike? Viv and I climbed up out of the gully and looked around.

“I see their campfire,” Vivian said. Sure enough there was a flicker, half a mile to the east.

To my surprise he started walking toward it.

“Aren’t we going the wrong way?” I asked.

“I’m hungry,” Vivian said. “I’m going to give up. They’ll find us in the morning anyway. Or if they don’t, we’ll starve. At least if we give up they might feed us first and hang us some later time,” he added.

I felt rather dubious about his reasoning, but I was hungry too and would have just wandered around getting hungrier if I’d left him, so I followed him toward the distant light.

When we got to the campfire only one Texan was there, a young wrangler not much older than Billy. They had left him to watch the spare horses.

“Dern, where’d you two possums come from?” he asked when we walked in with our hands up. He was so scared he could scarcely talk, but he officially took us prisoner. He shot off his rifle a few times to summon help, and then kept it pointed directly at us.

“Help yourself to the beans,” he said.