from
the west and he ran his eyes along the bluff.

Nothing stirred for a minute and then a round rock suddenly moved and
altered its shape. He thrust out his rifle and drew down on it
carefully, but the dusk put a blur on his sights. His foresight was
beginning to loom, his hindsight was not clean, and he knew that would
make him shoot high. He waited, all a-tremble, the sweat running off his
face and mingling with the blood from his arm; and then the man rose up,
head and shoulders against the sky, and he knew his would-be murderer
was Lynch. Wunpost held his gun against the light until the sights were
lined up fine, then swung back for a snap-shot at Lynch; and as the
rifle belched and kicked he caught a flash of a tumbling form and
clutching hands thrown up wildly against the sky. Then he stooped down
and ran, helter-skelter down the wash, regardless of what might be in
his way; and as he plunged around a curve he stampeded a pack-mule which
had run that far and stopped.

It was the smallest of his mules, and the wildest as well, Old Walker
and his mate having gone off up the canyon in a panic which would take
them to the ranch; but it was a mule and, being packed, it could not run
far down hill so Wunpost walked up on it and caught it. Far out in the
open, where no enemy could slip up on him, he halted and made a saddle
of the pack, and as he mounted to go he turned to Tucki Mountain and
called down a curse on Lynch. Then he rode back down the trail that led
to Death Valley, for the fear of the hills had come back.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE RETURN OF THE BLOW-HARD

Nothing was seen of John C. Calhoun for nearly a week and then, late one
evening, he stepped in on Judson Eells in his office at the Blackwater
Bank.

"Why--why, Mr. Calhoun!" he gasped, "we--we all thought you were dead!"

"Yes," returned Calhoun, whose arm was in a sling, "I thought so myself
for a while. What's the good word from Mr. Lynch?"

Eells dropped back in his chair and stared at him fixedly.

"Why--we haven't been able to locate him. But you, Mr. Calhoun--we've
been looking for you everywhere. Your riding mule came back with his
saddle all bloody and a bullet wound across his hip and the Campbells
were terribly distressed. We've had search-parties out everywhere but no
one could find you and at last you were given up for dead."

"Yes, I saw some of those search-parties," answered Wunpost grimly, "but
I noticed that they all pack