he held
what spare ammunition he had left. He ought to creep out noiselessly to
the edge of the willows, suddenly face his pursuers, then, while there
was a beat left in his heart, kill, kill, kill. These men all had
rifles. The fight would be short. But the marksmen did not live on earth
who could make such a fight go wholly against him. Confronting them
suddenly he could kill a man for every shot in his gun.

Thus Duane reasoned. So he hoped to accept his fate--to meet this end.
But when he tried to step forward something checked him. He forced
himself; yet he could not go. The obstruction that opposed his will was
as insurmountable as it had been physically impossible for him to climb
the bluff.

Slowly he fell back, crouched low, and then lay flat. The grim and
ghastly dignity that had been his a moment before fell away from him. He
lay there stripped of his last shred of self-respect. He wondered was
he afraid; had he, the last of the Duanes--had he come to feel fear? No!
Never in all his wild life had he so longed to go out and meet men face
to face. It was not fear that held him back. He hated this hiding,
this eternal vigilance, this hopeless life. The damnable paradox of the
situation was that if he went out to meet these men there was absolutely
no doubt of his doom. If he clung to his covert there was a chance, a
merest chance, for his life. These pursuers, dogged and unflagging as
they had been, were mortally afraid of him. It was his fame that made
them cowards. Duane's keenness told him that at the very darkest and
most perilous moment there was still a chance for him. And the blood in
him, the temper of his father, the years of his outlawry, the pride of
his unsought and hated career, the nameless, inexplicable something in
him made him accept that slim chance.

Waiting then became a physical and mental agony. He lay under the
burning sun, parched by thirst, laboring to breathe, sweating and
bleeding. His uncared-for wound was like a red-hot prong in his
flesh. Blotched and swollen from the never-ending attack of flies and
mosquitoes his face seemed twice its natural size, and it ached and
stung.

On one side, then, was this physical torture; on the other the old hell,
terribly augmented at this crisis, in his mind. It seemed that thought
and imagination had never been so swift. If death found him presently,
how would it come? Would he get decent burial or be left for the
peccaries and the coyotes?