le showed back of the left ear and another at the right
temple. A bullet had plowed through the boy's skull.

Softly Flandrau put the head back in the sand and rose to his feet. The
revolver of the dead puncher was in his hand. The attackers had stopped
shooting, but when they saw him rise a rifle puffed once more. The riders
were closing in on him now. The nearest called to him to surrender. Almost
at the same time a red hot pain shot through the left arm of the trapped
rustler. Someone had nipped him from the rear.

Curly saw red. Surrender nothing! He would go down fighting. As fast as he
could blaze he emptied Mac's gun. When the smoke cleared the man who had
ordered him to give up was slipping from his horse. Curly was surprised,
but he knew he must have hit him by chance.

"We got him. His gun's empty," someone shouted.

Cautiously they closed in, keeping him covered all the time. Of a sudden
the plain tilted up to meet the sky. Flandrau felt himself swaying on his
feet. Everything went black. The boy had fainted.

When he came to himself strange faces were all around him, and there were
no bodies to go with them. They seemed to float about in an odd casual
sort of way. Then things cleared.

"He's coming to all right," one said.

"Good. I'd hate to have him cheat the rope," another cried with an oath.

"That's right. How is Cullison?"

This was said to another who had just come up.

"Hard hit. Looks about all in. Got him in the side."

The rage had died out of Curly. In a flash he saw all that had come of
their drunken spree: the rustling of the Bar Double M stock, the
discovery, the death of his friend and maybe of Cullison, the certain
punishment that would follow. He was a horse thief caught almost in the
act. Perhaps he was a murderer too. And the whole thing had been entirely
unpremeditated.

Flandrau made a movement to rise and they jerked him to his feet.

"You've played hell," one of the men told the boy.

He was a sawed-off little fellow known as Dutch. Flandrau had seen him in
the Map of Texas country try a year or two before. The rest were strangers
to the boy. All of them looked at him out of hard hostile eyes. He was
scarcely a human being to them; rather a wolf to be stamped out of
existence as soon as it was convenient. A chill ran down Curly's spine. He
felt as if someone were walking on his grave.

At a shift in the group Flandrau's eyes fell on his friend lying in the
sand with f