Page:Saga of Billy the Kid.djvu/143

ment and let her fingers wander among the keys. Snatches of old tunes took form beneath her touch like fugitive ghosts. Before she knew it she was playing "Home, Sweet Home." She sang a bar or two softly—"There's no place like home." The music seemed the voice of her tragedy. Her home was burning. In a little while, with all its associations of love and happiness, it would be a mere heap of ashes and blackened timbers. As the last note trembled into silence, she bowed her head upon the piano and her tears dropped upon the keys.

There was a crash at the west side of the house. Portions of the red-hot adobe walls had fallen outward leaving two great gaps. Through the gaps the Murphy men rained bullets. . . . McSween read a chapter in the Bible and offered up a prayer. . . . Billy the Kid and his little band, half-blinded by whirls of smoke, pumped their Winchesters. . . . A fragment of the roof caved in, narrowly missing the Kid. He stepped to one side with a smile. A Murphy bullet knocked a cigarette from between his lips. "Now that's too bad," he said cheerfully. "I'll have to roll another."

"Colonel Dudley is our only hope, boys," said Mrs. McSween at last. "That's almost no hope at all. I have no faith in him. But he is the only one who can save us now. The cowards of the Murphy crowd are watching and waiting to murder us all. Soon there will be no walls left to hide us. Then we must die unless help comes. Colonel Dudley can rescue us if he will—if he will. I'm going to his camp and ask him—beg him on my knees—to save us."

She caught up her bonnet and put it on—adjusted it neatly on her head, saw that it was on straight.

"You must not go, my dear," said McSween. "The