stronger than reason told the girl that here was no playful puncher
shooting up the scenery to ventilate his exuberance. Her imagination
conceived something more deadly; a sinister picture of men pumping lead
in a grim, close-lipped silence; a lusty plainsman, with murder in
his heart, crumpling into a lifeless heap, while the thin smoke-spiral
curled from his hot rifle.

So the girl imagined the scene as she ran swiftly forward through the
pines to the edge of the butte bluff whence she might look down upon the
coulee that nestled against it. Nor had she greatly erred, for her first
sweeping glance showed her the thing she had dreaded.

In a semicircle, well back from the foot of the butte, half a dozen
men crouched in the cover of the sage-brush and a scattered group of
cottonwoods. They were perhaps fifty yards apart, and the attention
of all of them was focused on a spot directly beneath her. Even as she
looked, in that first swift moment of apprehension, a spurt of smoke
came from one of the rifles and was flung back from the forked pine
at the bottom of the mesa. She saw him then, kneeling behind his
insufficient shelter, a trapped man making his last stand.

From where she stood the girl distinguished him very clearly, and under
the field-glasses that she turned on him the details leaped to life.
Tall, strong, slender, with the lean, clean build of a greyhound, he
seemed as wary and alert as a panther. The broad, soft hat, the scarlet
handkerchief loosely knotted about his throat, the gray shirt, spurs
and overalls, proclaimed him a stockman, just as his dead horse at the
entrance to the coulee told of an accidental meeting in the desert and a
hurried run for cover.

That he had no chance was quite plain, but no plainer than the cool
vigilance with which he proposed to make them pay. Even in the matter
of defense he was worse off than they were, but he knew how to make
the most of what he had; knew how to avail himself of every inch of
sagebrush that helped to render him indistinct to their eyes.

One of the attackers, eager for a clearer shot, exposed himself a trifle
too far in taking aim. Without any loss of time in sighting, swift as a
lightning-flash, the rifle behind the forked pine spoke. That the bullet
reached its mark she saw with a gasp of dismay. For the man suddenly
huddled down and rolled over on his side.

His comrades appeared to take warning by this example. The men at both
ends of the cres