Timing wasn’t easy to judge, but Hammer had developed a sense for it which had enabled him to pull several coups in the past and served him now. When he figured the other groups were near the outskirts of town, he raised his hand in signal, slipped the safety catch on his gun, and started down the hill at a rapid trot.

The white mists rolled over the ground, but they needed nothing to muffle the soft pad of their feet, most bare and all trained in quietness. Grass whispered under their pace, a staked-out cow lowed, and a rooster greeted the first banners of day. Otherwise there was silence, and the town dreamed on in the cool twilight.

They came onto the cracked pavement of the road, and it was strange to be going on concrete again. They passed an outer zone of deserted houses. As Hammer had noticed elsewhere, Southvale had drawn into a compact defensive mass during the black years and not grown out of it since. As long as there were no fortified outposts, such an arrangement was easy to overrun. Still, the outlaws were enormously outnumbered, and had to counter-balance the disadvantage by the cold ruthlessness of direct action. Hammer stopped at the edge of habitation, told off half a dozen men to patrol the area, and led the rest on to the middle of town. They went more slowly now, senses strainingly alert, every nerve and muscle taut with the expectancy of danger.

Hoofs clattered from a side street. Hammer gestured to a bowman, who grinned and bent his weapon. A mounted policeman came into view a few blocks down. He wasn’t impressive, he had no sign of office except gun and tarnished badge, he was sleepy and eager to report to the station and then get home. His wife would have breakfast ready—

The bow twanged, a great bass throb of music in the silent misty street. The policeman pitched out of his saddle, the arrow through his breast, the astonishment on his face so ridiculous that a couple of gangmen guffawed. Hammer cursed; the horse had reared, screamed, and then galloped on down the street. The clattering echoes beat at the walls of the house like alarm-crying sentries.

A man stuck his head out the window of a dwelling. He was drowsy, but he saw the unkempt band outside and yelled—a choked gurgle it was, drowned in an arrow’s blood-track before it had been properly born.

“Snagtooth an’ Mex, get in that house an’ silence anyone else!” rapped Hammer. “You five”—he swept an arm in an unconsciously imperial gesture—“take care o’ anyone else here who heard. The rest come on!”

* * *

They ran down the street, disregarding noise but not making much anyway. The town had changed considerably, but Hammer remembered the layout. The police station, he thought briefly and wryly, he knew very well—just about every Saturday night, in the old days.

They burst onto that block and raced for the station. There it was, the same square and solid structure, dingy now with years, the trimmings gone, but there were horses hitched before it and the door stood ajar—