r dead--Black Roger, the forest fiend who had
destroyed half a dozen lives in a blind passion of vengeance nearly
fifteen years ago. For ten of those fifteen years it had been thought
that Black Roger was dead. But mysterious rumors had lately come out of
the North. He was alive. People had seen him. Fact followed rumor. His
existence became certainty. The Law took up once more his hazardous
trail, and David Carrigan was the messenger it sent.

"Bring him back, alive or dead," were Superintendent McVane's last
words.

And now, thinking of that parting injunction, Carrigan grinned, even as
the sweat of death dampened his face in the heat of the afternoon sun.
For at the end of those sixty minutes that had passed since his midday
pot of tea, the grimly, atrociously unexpected had happened, like a
thunderbolt out of the azure of the sky.

II

Huddled behind a rock which was scarcely larger than his body,
groveling in the white, soft sand like a turtle making a nest for its
eggs, Carrigan told himself this without any reservation. He was, as he
kept repeating to himself for the comfort of his soul, in a deuce of a
fix. His head was bare--simply because a bullet had taken his hat away.
His blond hair was filled with sand. His face was sweating. But his
blue eyes were alight with a grim sort of humor, though he knew that
unless the other fellow's ammunition ran out he was going to die.

For the twentieth time in as many minutes he looked about him. He was
in the center of a flat area of sand. Fifty feet from him the river
murmured gently over yellow bars and a carpet of pebbles. Fifty feet on
the opposite side of him was the cool, green wall of the forest. The
sunshine playing in it seemed like laughter to him now, a whimsical
sort of merriment roused by the sheer effrontery of the joke which fate
had inflicted upon him.

Between the river and the balsam and spruce was only the rock behind
which he was cringing like a rabbit afraid to take to the open. And his
rock was a mere up-jutting of the solid floor of shale that was under
him. The wash sand that covered it like a carpet was not more than four
or five inches deep. He could not dig in. There was not enough of it
within reach to scrape up as a protection. And his enemy, a hundred
yards or so away, was a determined wretch--and the deadliest shot he
had ever known.

Three times Carrigan had made experiments to prove this, for he had in
mind a sudden rush to