Play a Lone Hand by Luke; Short Page A

revealed him standing, both guns leveled, in the doorway with a kind of scared determination in his posture.
    Then one of the riders glanced up and saw them. He half rose as Giff said in an iron voice, “Sit down!”
    His sudden command, startling in the silence, turned the heads of every crew member toward him. The hungry-looking rider looked up, fork raised halfway to his mouth. Giff took two running steps toward the table, put a foot on the bench, and dived across the table at him. The man already had one leg over the bench and was rising when Giff crashed into him. The rider went over on his side, Giff on top of him, his legs dragging the tin plate of bread off the table. Its clank followed the crash of the two bodies on the floor by seconds.
    The men facing Welling scrambled off the bench, out of the way, as Giff and the rider came erect at the same moment.
    The rider backed up a step to get set, but Giff was on him. With the tactics of a standard barroom brawler, the man lowered his head, his arms windmilling, and tried to charge. Giff’s hook to his face was so swift and vicious that, still moving forward, the man was half turned by the blow and his upper body sprawled on the table.
    The rider’s hand closed on a heavy stoneware platter and he came off the table with it in his hand in a back-handed sweeping side swipe. Giff saw it too late to evade it; he raised his elbow and ducked his head against it as the platter hit his forearm and caromed off it into the wall. He could hear the shouts of the crew now. Since he was still fighting only one man, he supposed that Welling was successfully standing off the others. How long he could continue to do so, Giff didn’t know, and he thought, Make it quick .
    Now that the rider had named his own kind of fight, Giff moved in against him, lifting his knee into the rider’s belly. The man’s grunt could be heard above every sound in the room. He wrapped both arms around Giff’s midriff, clinging desperately to him while he fought for breath. Giff stepped back, braced himself, and with a savage wrench of his upper body, broke the man’s grip. Then he heaved the rider away from him upright, and swung. The blow straightened the rider totally erect. Giff got one brief glance at the man’s tortured face before he smashed his fist into it. The rider back-pedaled, fighting for balance, through the door leading into the kitchen. He grabbed wildly at the door frame but his momentum tore his hold loose.
    Dimly, Giff heard the roar of the crew, followed by the crash of a gun shot and Welling’s voice in a wild yell, “Stand away from him!”
    On the heel of Welling’s yell, the rider crashed to the floor. Giff lunged at him, doubling his knees under him, and landed heavily on the rider’s chest. He heard the wind driven from his lungs in a great tortured sigh. Giff had rolled off the rider and was on his knees. Now he crawled back to him, balled up the man’s shirt in his fist and rose, yanking the rider erect. Balancing him, he swung with all his might at the man’s face. He saw him teeter backward, hit the corner of the big stove, spin around drunkenly, and fall face first into the wall which held a rack of iron skillets. The force of his body crashing into the wall jarred the skillets off their hooks and they rained down on his unconscious form as it slumped to the floor.
    Giff stumbled to the nearest wall and leaned against it, dragging great gusts of air into his heaving lungs. He was aware that his back was exposed and he wheeled as fast as he could, expecting the crew to ignore Welling and rush him. Instead, he saw that Welling had moved around the table and into the kitchen doorway and, back to him, was still holding them off. Unsteadily, Giff shouldered past Welling and confronted the Torreon crew. He reached out and took one of Welling’s guns and pointed it at the nearest Torreon hand. “You come out with me