become infected.

De Spain understood what it meant. He looked regretfully at the
injured foot. Swollen out of shape and angry-looking, the mere
appearance would have told him, had the confirmation been needed,
that his situation was becoming critical. This did not so much
disconcert him as it surprised him and spurred him mentally to the
necessity of new measures. He lay a long time thinking. Against the
infection he could do little. But the one aid at his hand was
abundance of cold water to drink and bathe his wound in, and to this
he resolved now to drag himself. To crawl across the space that
separated him from the pool required all the strength he could summon.
The sun was already well up and its rays shot like spectrum arrows
through the spray of the dainty cataract, which spurted in a jewelled
sheet over a rocky ledge twenty feet above and poured noisily down
from the broad pool along jagged bowlders below.

Crawling, choking with thirst, slowly forward, he reached the water,
and, reclining on his side and one elbow, he was about to lean down to
drink when he suddenly felt, with some kind of an instinctive shock,
that he was no longer alone on the ledge. He had no interest in
analyzing the conviction; he did not even question it. Not a sound had
reached his ears. Only a moment before he had looked carefully all
around. But the field of his vision was closely circumscribed by the
walls about him. It was easy for an invader to come on his retreat
unawares--at all events, somebody, he was almost sure, stood behind
him. The silence meant an enemy. The first thing to expect was a
bullet. It would probably be aimed at the back of his head. At least
he knew this was the spot to aim for to kill a man instantly and
painlessly--yet he shrank from that anticipated crash.

And it was this thought that cost the defenseless man at the moment
the most pain--that feeling, in advance, of the blow of the bullet
that should snuff out his life. Defense was out of the question; he
was as helpless as a baby. An impulse in his fingers to clutch his
revolver he restrained at once--it could only hasten his death. He
wondered, as the seconds passed, why his executioner hesitated to
shoot, but he could not rid himself of the mental horror of being shot
in the base of the brain. Anywhere else he would have almost welcomed
a bullet; anywhere else it might have given him one chance for life
through rolling over after he was struck in an a