ut before Ballard could grapple
with it, the fighting guest cut in quietly.

"One of their bullets seems to have nipped me in the arm," he said,
admitting the fact half reluctantly and as if it were something to be
ashamed of. "Will you help me tie it up?"

Ballard came out of the speculative fog with a bound.

"Good heavens, Bigelow! are you hit? Why didn't you say something?" he
exclaimed, diving into the pockets of his duck coat for matches and a
candle-end.

"It wasn't worth while; it's only a scratch, I guess."

But the lighted candle-end proved it to be something more; a ragged
furrow plowed diagonally across the forearm. Ballard dressed it as well
as he could, the water-boy holding the candle, and when the rough job of
surgery was done, was for sending the Forestry man back to the valley
head and Castle 'Cadia with the wound for a sufficient reason. But
Bigelow developed a sudden vein of stubbornness. He would neither go
back alone, nor would he consent to be escorted.

"A little thing like this is all in the day's work," he protested.
"We'll go on, when you're ready; or, rather, we'll go and hunt for the
owner of that horse whose saddle I suppose I must have emptied. I'm just
vindictive enough to hope that its rider was the fellow who pinked me."

As it happened, the hope was to be neither confirmed nor positively
denied. A little farther up the dry arroyo the candle-end, sputtering to
its extinction, showed them a confusion of hoof tramplings in the
yielding sand, but nothing more. Dead or wounded, the horse-losing rider
had evidently been carried off by his companions.

"Which proves pretty conclusively that there must have been more than
two," was Ballard's deduction, when they were again pushing cautiously
down the inner valley toward its junction with the great canyon. "But
why should two, or a dozen of them, fire on us in the dark? How could
they know whether we were friends or enemies?"

Bigelow's quiet laugh had a touch of grimness in it.

"Your Elbow Canyon mysteries have broken bounds," he suggested. "Your
staff should include an expert psychologist, Mr. Ballard."

Ballard's reply was belligerent. "If we had one, I'd swap him for a
section of mounted police," he declared; and beyond that the narrow
trail in the cliff-walled gorge of the Boiling Water forbade
conversation.

Three hours farther down the river trail, when the summer dawn was
paling the stars in the narrow strip of sky overhe