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“Tell them yourself.”

“Dammit, tell them!” Scallen clenched his jaw and jabbed the short barrel into Kidd’s back. “I’m not fooling. If they don’t come out, I’ll kill you!”

Kidd felt the gun barrel hard against his spine and suddenly he shouted, “Charlie!”

It echoed in the street, but after there was only the silence. Kidd’s eyes darted over the shadowed porches. “Dammit, Charlie—hold on!”

Scallen prodded him up the warped plank steps to the shade of the platform and suddenly he could feel them near. “Tell him again!”

“Don’t shoot, Charlie!” Kidd screamed the words.

From the other side of the station they heard the trainman’s call trailing off, “…Gila Bend. Sentinel, Yuma!”

The whistle sounded loud, wailing, as they passed into the shade of the platform, then out again to the naked glare of the open side. Scallen squinted, glancing toward the station office, but the train dispatcher was not in sight. Nor was anyone. “It’s the mail car,” he said to Kidd. “The second to last one.” Steam hissed from the iron cylinder of the engine, clouding that end of the platform. “Hurry it up!” he snapped, pushing Kidd along.

Then, from behind, hurried footsteps sounded on the planking, and, as the hiss of steam died away—“Stand where you are!”

The locomotive’s main rods strained back, rising like the legs of a grotesque grasshopper, and the wheels moved. The connecting rods stopped on an upward swing and couplings clanged down the line of cars.

“Throw the gun away, brother!”

Charlie Prince stood at the corner of the station house with a pistol in each hand. Then he moved around carefully between the two men and the train. “Throw it far away, and unhitch your belt,” he said.

“Do what he says,” Kidd said. “They’ve got you.”

The others, six of them, were strung out in the dimness of the platform shed. Grim faced, stubbles of beard, hat brims low. The man nearest Prince spat tobacco lazily.

Scallen knew fear at that moment as fear had never gripped him before; but he kept the shotgun hard against Kidd’s spine. He said, just above a whisper, “Jim—I’ll cut you in half!”

Kidd’s body was stiff, his shoulders drawn up tightly. “Wait a minute…” he said. He held his palms out to Charlie Prince, though he could have been speaking to Scallen.

Suddenly Prince shouted, “Go down!”

There was a fraction of a moment of dead silence that seemed longer. Kidd hesitated. Scallen was looking at the gunman over Kidd’s shoulder, seeing the two pistols. Then Kidd was gone, rolling on the planking, and the pistols were coming up, one ahead of the other. Without moving Scallen squeezed both triggers of the scattergun.

Charlie Prince was going down, holding his hands tight to his chest, as Scallen dropped the shotgun and swung around drawing his Colt. He fired hurriedly. Wait for a target! Words in his mind. He saw the men under the platform shed, three of them breaking for the station office, two going full length to the planks… one crouched, his pistol up. That one! Get him quick! Scallen aimed and squeezed the heavy revolver and the man went down. Now get the hell out!

Charlie Prince was facedown. Kidd was crawling, crawling frantically and coming to his feet when Scallen reached him. He grabbed Kidd by the collar savagely, pushing him on, and dug the pistol into his back. “Run, damn you!”

Gunfire erupted from the shed and thudded into the wooden caboose as they ran past it. The train was moving slowly. Just in front of them a bullet smashed a window of the mail car. Someone screamed, “You’ll hit Jim!” There was another shot, then it was too late. Scallen and Kidd leapt up on the car platform and were in the mail car as it rumbled past the end of the station platform.

Kidd was on the floor, stretched out along a row of mail sacks. He rubbed his shoulder awkwardly with his manacled hands and watched Scallen, who stood against the wall next to the open door.

Kidd studied the deputy for some minutes. Finally he said, “You know, you really earn your hundred and a half.”

Scallen heard him, though the iron rhythm