resembles a female. Do you?"

I did not, even when I focused the field-glasses on that bunch at that
short distance. Certainly she was not there--at least she was not to be
seen, and I could almost read the expression on each man's features, so
close did the glasses draw them up. And failing to see her started me
thinking that after all she might have given them the slip. I hoped it
might be so. Lyn was no chicken-hearted weakling, to sit down and weep
unavailingly in time of peril. Bred on the range, on speaking-terms with
the turbulent frontier life, her wits weren't likely to forsake her in a
situation of that kind.

While the light of day grew stronger and the smoke eddied in heavier
wreaths above, one of them swung up on a horse and came down the bottom
at a fast lope. We had no means of knowing what his mission might be,
but I did know that the square shoulders, the lean eagle face, could
only belong to one man; and I dropped the glasses and drew a bead on his
breast. I hesitated a second, squinting along the barrel of the carbine;
I wanted him to round the point that jutted out from the other side of
the canyon, so that his partners could not see his finish. If they did
not see him go down, nor observe the puff of smoke from behind the rock,
they might think he had fired a shot himself. And while I waited,
grumbling at the combination of circumstances that made it necessary to
shoot down even a cold-blooded brute like him in such a way, Mac took
the matter out of my hands in his own characteristic fashion.

Lessard turned the point, and as the carbine-hammer clicked back under
the pull of my thumb, MacRae sprang to his feet from behind a squatty
clump of sage, right in Lessard's path. Nervy as men are made, MacRae
worshiped at the shrine of an even break, a square deal for friend or
foe. And Lessard got it. There among the sage-brush he got a fair chance
for his life, according to the code of men who settle their differences
at the business end of a six-shooter. But it wasn't Lessard's hour.
Piegan Smith and I saw his hand flash to his pistol, saw it come to a
level, heard the single report of MacRae's gun. It was a square
deal--which Lessard had not given us. He crumpled in the saddle;
sprawled a moment on the neck of his horse, and dropped to the ground.
MacRae sank behind the sage again, and we waited for the others.

CHAPTER XXI.

AN ELEMENTAL ALLY.

But they did not come. One of them must have