Toward the flat-topped mountain, with the feeling of his fate upon him,
Bill Sandersen pushed his mustang through the late evening, while the
darkness fell. He had long since stopped thinking, reasoning. There was
only the strong, blind feeling that he must meet Sinclair face to face
and decide his destiny in one brief struggle.

So he kept on until his shadow fell faintly on his path before him,
long, shapeless, grotesque. He turned and saw the moon coming up above
the eastern mountains, a wan, sickly moon hardly out of her first
quarter, and even in the pure mountain air her light was dim.

But it gave thought and pause to Sandersen. First there was the
outcropping of a singular superstition which he had heard long before
and never remembered until this moment: that a moon seen over the left
shoulder meant the worst of bad luck. It boded very ill for the end of
this adventure.

Suppose he were able only partially to surprise the big cowpuncher from
the north, and that there was a call for fighting. What chance would he
have in the dim and bewildering light of that moon against the surety
of Sinclair who shot, he knew, as other men point the finger
--instinctively hitting the target? It would be a mere butchery,
not a battle.

Sending his mustang into a copse of young trees, he dismounted. His
mind was made up not to attempt the blow until the first light of dawn.
He would try to reach the top of the flat-crested mountain well before
sunup, when there would be a real light instead of this ghostly and
partial illumination from the moon.

Among the trees he sat down and took up the dreadful watches of the
night. Sleep never came near him. He was turning the back pages of his
memory, reviewing his past with the singular clearness of a man about
to die. For Sandersen had this mortal certainty resting upon his mind
that he must try to strike down Sinclair, and that he would fail. And
failure meant only one alternative--death. He was perfectly confident
that this was the truth. He knew with prophetic surety that he would
never again see the kind light of the sun, that in a half-light, in the
cold of the dawn, a bullet would end his life.

What he saw in the past was not comforting. A long train of vivid
memories came up in his mind. He had accomplished nothing. In the total
course of his life he had not made a man his friend, or won the love of
a woman. In all his attempts to succeed in life there had been nothing