hing the man narrowly, the rider noted his nervous glance, and his
shrinking, dreading manner. Harlan's eyes gleamed with suspicion, and in
a flash he was off the black and standing before Laskar, forbidding and
menacing.

"Take off your gun-belt an' chuck it under my horse!" he directed
sharply. "There's somethin' goin' on here that ain't been mentioned. I'm
findin' out what it is."

He watched while the man unbuckled his cartridge belt and threw it--the
pistol still in the holster--into the sand at Purgatory's hoofs. Then he
stepped to the man, sheathed one of his pistols, and ran the free hand
over the other's clothing in search of other weapons. Finding none, he
stooped and took up Dolver's pistol and rifle that had fallen from the
man's hands when he had tumbled off the rock, throwing them near where
the cartridge belt had fallen.

"You freeze there while I take a look around this rock!" he commanded,
with a cold look at the man.

Half a dozen steps took him around the base of the rock. He went boldly,
though his muscles were tensed and his eyes alert for surprises. But he
had not taken a dozen steps in all when he halted and stiffened, his lips
setting into straight, hard lines.

For, stretched out on his left side in the sand close to the base of the
rock--under the flattened summit which had afforded him protection from
the bullets the man with the rifle had been sending at him--was a man.

The man was apparently about fifty, with a seamed, pain-lined face. His
beard was stained with dust, his hair was gray with it; his clothing
looked as though he had been dragged through it. He was hatless, and one
of his boots was off. The foot had been bandaged with a handkerchief, and
through the handkerchief the dark stains of a wound appeared.

The man's shirt was open in front; and the rider saw that another wound
gaped in his chest, near the heart. The man had evidently made some
attempt to care for that wound, too, for a piece of cloth from his shirt
had been cut away, to permit him to get at the wound easily.

The man's left side seemed to be helpless, for the arm was twisted
queerly, the palm of the hand turned limply upward; but when the rider
came upon him the man was trying to tuck a folded paper into one of the
cylinders of a pistol.

He had laid the weapon in the sand, and with his right hand was working
with the cylinder and the paper. When he saw the rider he sneered and
ceased working with the pisto