As the flames began to spread, there was a rapid fusillade from the rear
of the house, and a hundred men and more, who had kept on through the
fields to the north, assailed it from behind. Their shots passed clear
through the flimsy partitions, and there was a horrid screeching, like a
beast's howls, from within. The front door was thrown open, and a lean,
fierce-eyed girl, with a case-knife in her hand, ran out in the face of
the mob. At sound of the shots in the rear they had begun to advance on
the house a second time, and Hartley Bowlder was the nearest man to the
girl. With awful words, and shrieking inconceivably, she made straight at
Hartley, and attacked him with the knife. She struck at him again and
again, and, in her anguish of hate and fear, was so extraordinary a
spectacle that she gained for her companions the four or five seconds they
needed to escape from the house. As she hurled herself alone at the
oncoming torrent, they sped from the door unnoticed, sprang over the
fence, and reached the open lots to the west before they were seen by
Willetts from the roof.
"Don't let 'em fool you!" he shouted. "Look to I your left! There they go!
Don't let 'em get away."
The Cross-Readers were running across the field. They were Bob Skillett
and his younger brother, and Mr. Skillett was badly damaged: he seemed to
be holding his jaw on his face with both hands. The girl turned, and sped
after them. She was over the fence almost as soon as they were, and the
three ran in single file, the girl last. She was either magnificently
sacrificial and fearless, or she cunningly calculated that the regulators
would take no chances of killing a woman-child, for she kept between their
guns and her two companions, trying to cover and shield the latter with
her frail body.
"Shoot, Lige," called Watts. "If we fire from here we'll hit the girl.
Shoot!"
Willetts and Ross Schofield were still standing on the roof, at the edge,
out of the smoke, and both fired at the same time. The fugitives did not
turn; they kept on running, and they had nearly reached the other side of
the field, when suddenly, without any premonitory gesture, the elder
Skillett dropped flat on his face. The Cross-Roaders stood by each other
that day, for four or five men ran out of the nearest shanty into the
open, lifted the prostrate figure from the ground, and began to carry it
back with them. But Mr. Skillett was alive; his curses were heard above
all other sounds. Lige and Schofield fired again, and one of the rescuers
staggered. Nevertheless, as the two men slid down from the roof, the
burdened Cross-Readers were seen to break into a run; and at that, with
another yell, fiercer, wilder, more joyous than the first, the Plattville
men followed.