nch of the ground. He knew how well his quarry had
concealed himself to render surprise impossible. But Stone's very
safety in this respect made his retreat more difficult. A man lying in
wait under the Double-draw, staked practically everything on one
chance: that the man he sought to kill should cross the bridge. It
were then easy to pick him off from behind. But if the intended
victim, suspicious, should get unseen into the creek bed, the skulker
could hardly avoid a fight.

Three hundred yards above the bridge, the creek walls open in an
ellipse, narrowing abruptly where the bridge spans them. This open
space has been scoured by floods until the bedrock lies like a polished
floor and it was now dry except where the piers of the bridge stood in
stagnant pools. Once within this amphitheater whose vertical walls
rise twenty to thirty feet, no fighting cover is available.

Behind a rocky point that guarded the upper entrance of the opening,
stood Laramie. He was watching the shadow cast by a shrub that sprang,
shallow-rooted, from a crevice in the bedrock. For an interminable
time he waited, only noting the slow swing of the narrow shadow as the
morning sun, flooding the rock-basin, rose in majestic course.
Gradually the deflection of the slender indicator, moving like a finger
on the rock dial, marked the turn of the sun well past the shoulder of
the point at which Laramie must emerge. When that moment came he
looked sharply out, sprang from behind the point and ran sidewise into
the narrow shadow thrown from the curving wall.

Stone, uneasy and alert, stood under the bridge, his rifle across his
arm. The two men saw each other almost at the same instant. For
Stone, it was the climax of a hatred long nursed because of a supremacy
long challenged. And for him it was an open field with weapons in
which his skill was as matchless as Laramie's was held to be, at close
quarters, with a Colt's revolver.

Nor had Laramie underestimated the chances of an encounter under such
circumstances. He counted only on the slight advantage of a
surprise--knowing from disagreeable experiences how a surprise jars the
poise; and there persisted in his mind, what he had never until then
hinted to another, that Stone, shooting as an assassin from cover and
Stone himself facing death, might shoot differently. On these slender
hopes he covered Stone, as the ex-rustler jumped his rifle to his
check, and cried to him to pitch u