sound or caught a
motion. Nevertheless, he understood. Somewhere near, just to the west,
lay death, death in ambush; but he did not hesitate. Whatever his
faults, the man was no coward. A revolver in either hand, the reins in
his teeth, he spurred straight for the river.

It took him but a minute to cover the distance--a minute until, almost
by the rivers bank, he saw ahead on the brown earth the sprawling form
of a dead man. With a jerk he drew up alongside, and, the muzzles of big
revolvers following his eye, sent swiftly about him a sweeping glance.
Of a sudden, three hundred yards out, seemingly from the surface of the
river itself, he caught a tiny rising puff of smoke, heard
simultaneously a sound he knew so well,--the dull spattering impact of a
bullet,--realized that the pony beneath him was sinking, felt the shock
as his own body came to earth, and heard just over his head the singing
passage of a rifle-ball.

Unconscious profanity flowed from the rancher's lips in a stream; but
meanwhile his brain worked swiftly, and, freeing himself, he crawled
back hand over hand until a wave in the ground covered the river from
view; then springing to his feet he ran toward the others, approaching
now as fast as spurs would bring them, waving, shouting a warning as he
went. Within a minute they were all together listening to his story.
Within another, the rifles from off their saddles in their hands, the
ponies left in charge of lank Bob Hoyt, the eight others now remaining
moved back as Stetson had come: at first upright, then, crawling, hand
over hand until, peeping over the intervening ridge, they saw lying
before them the mingled ice patches and open running water of the
low-lying Missouri. Beside them at their left, very near, was the body
of Pete; but after a first glance and an added invective no man for the
present gave attention. He was dead, dead in his tracks, and their
affair was not with such, but with the quick.

At first they could see nothing which explained the mystery of death,
only the forbidding face of the great river; then gradually to one after
another there appeared tell-tale marks which linked together into clues.

"Ain't that a hoss-carcass?" It was cowboy Buck who spoke. "Look, a
hundred yards out, down stream."

Gilbert's swift glance caught the indicated object.

"Yes, and another beyond--farther down--amongst that ice-pack! Do you
see?"

"Where?" Mick Kennedy trained his one eye like a