Marie.

He went to speak again, but there came an interruption--a thing that was
like the cold touch of lead in his own heart. From up on the mountain where
the old mountaineer had walked into the face of death there came the
sharp, splitting report of a rifle; and in that same instant it was
followed by another and still a third--quick, stinging, whiplike
reports--and he knew that not one of them had come from the gun of Donald
MacDonald!

And then he saw that the rocks behind the tepee had become suddenly alive
with men!

CHAPTER XXIX

Sheer amazement made Aldous hold his fire in that first moment. Marie had
said that two men were after MacDonald. He had heard three shots nearly a
mile away, and she was still sobbing that DeBar was dead. That accounted
for _three_. He had expected to see only Quade, and FitzHugh, and one other
behind the tepee. And there were six! He counted them as they came swiftly
out from the shelter of the rocks to the level of the plain. He was about
to fire when he thought of Joanne and Marie. They were still behind him,
crouching upon the ground. To fire from where he stood would draw a
fusillade of bullets in their direction, and with another warning cry to
Joanne, he sped twenty paces to one side so that they would not be within
range. Not until then did the attacking party see him.

At a hundred and fifty yards he had no time to pick out Quade or Mortimer
FitzHugh. He fired first at a group of three, and one of the three crumpled
down as though his skull had been crushed from above. A rifle spat back at
him and the bullet sang like a ripping cloth close over his head. He
dropped to his knees before he fired again, and a bullet clove the air
where he had stood. The crack of rifles did not hurry him. He knew that he
had six cartridges, and only six, and he aimed deliberately. At his second
shot the man he had fired at ran forward three or four steps, and then
pitched flat on his face. For a flash Aldous thought that it was Mortimer
FitzHugh. Then, along his gun barrel, he saw FitzHugh--and pulled the
trigger. It was a miss.

Two men had dropped upon their knees and were aiming more carefully. He
swung his sight to the foremost, and drove a bullet straight through his
chest. The next moment something seemed to have fallen upon him with
crushing weight. A red sea rose before his eyes. In it he was submerged;
the roar of it filled his ears; it blinded him; and in the suffocating
e