He raised the lamp, held the cigarette over the chimney top and puffed till he got a light; so doing he smoked the chimney.  To inspect the damage he raised the lamp higher.  Swifter than thought he hurled it at his warder’s head.  The blazing lamp struck Applegate between the eyes.  Pringle’s fist flashed up and smote him grievously under the jaw; he fell crashing; the half-drawn gun clattered from his slackened fingers.  Pringle caught it up and plunged into the dark through the practical door.

He ran down the adobe wall of the water pen; a bullet whizzed by; he turned the corner; he whisked over the wall, back into the water pen.  Shouts, curses, the sound of rushing feet without the wall.  Pringle crouched in the deep shadow of the wall, groped his way to the long row of watering troughs, and wormed himself under the upper trough, where the creaking windmill and the splashing of water from the supply pipe would drown out the sound of his labored breath.

Horsemen boiled from the yard gate with uproar and hullabaloo; Pringle heard their shouts; he saw the glare of soap weeds, fired to help their search.

The lights died away; the shouts grew fainter:  they swelled again as the searchers straggled back, vociferous.  Pringle caught scraps of talk as they watered their horses.

“Clean getaway!”

“One bad actor, that hombre!”

“Regular Go-Getter!”

“Batting average about thirteen hundred, I should figger.”

“Life-size he-man!  Where do you suppose——­”

“Saw a lad make just such another break once in Van Zandt County——­”

“Say!  Who’re you crowdin’?”

“Hi, fellers!  Bill’s giving some more history of the state of Van Zandt!”

“Applegate’s pretty bad hurt.”

“——­in a gopher hole and near broke my fool neck.”

“Where’d this old geezer come from, anyway?  Never heard of him before!”

“‘Tain’t fair, just when we was all crowdin’ up for supper!  He might have waited.”

“This will be merry hell and repeat if he hooks up with Foy,” said Creagan’s voice, adding a vivid description of Pringle.

Old Nueces answered, raising his voice: 

“He’s afoot.  We got to beat him to it.  Let’s ride!”

“That’s right,” said the sheriff.  “But we’ll grab something to eat first.  Saddle up, Hargis, and lead us to your little old cave.  Robbins, while we snatch a bite you bunch what canteens we’ve got and fill ’em up.  Then you watch the old man and that girl, and let Breslin come with us.  You can eat after we’ve gone.”

“Don’t let the girl heave a pillow at you, Robbins!” warned a voice.

“Better not stop to eat,” urged Nueces.

“We can lope up and get to the foot of Thumb Butte before Pringle gets halfway—­if he’s going there at all.  Most likely he’s had a hand in the Marr killing and is just running away to save his own precious neck,” said the sheriff.  “We’ll scatter out around the hill when we get to the roughs, and go up afoot till every man can see or hear his neighbor, so Pringle can’t get through.  Then we’ll wait till daylight.”