as in the saddle plying her pinto with the quirt.

But before she reached the first cottonwoods she saw them coming. Her
glasses swept the distant group, and with a shiver she made out the
dreadful truth. They were coming slowly, carrying something between
them. The girl did not need to be told that the object they were
bringing home was their dead or wounded.

A figure on horseback detached itself from the huddle of men and
galloped towards her. He was coming to break the news. But who was the
victim? Bannister or McWilliams she felt sure, by reason of the sinking
heart in her; and then it came home that she would be hard hit if it
were either.

The approaching rider began to take distinct form through her glasses.
As he pounded forward she recognized him. It was the man nicknamed
Denver. The wind was blowing strongly from her to him, and while he was
still a hundred yards away she hurled her question.

His answer was lost in the wind sweep, but one word of it she caught.
That word was "Mac."

CHAPTER 7. THE MAN FROM THE SHOSHONE FASTNESSES

Though the sharpshooter's rifle cracked twice during his run for the
cottonwood, the sheepman reached the tree in safety. He could dodge
through the brush as elusively as any man in Wyoming. It was a trick he
had learned on the whitewashed football gridiron. For in his buried past
this man had been the noted half-back of a famous college, and one of
his specialties had been running the ball back after a catch through a
broken field of opponents. The lesson that experience had then thumped
into him had since saved his life on more than one occasion.

Having reached the tree, Bannister took immediate advantage of the lie
of the ground to snake forward unobserved for another hundred feet.
There was a dip from the foot of the tree, down which he rolled into the
sage below. He wormed his way through the thick scrub brush to the edge
of a dry creek, into the bed of which he slid. Then swiftly, his body
bent beneath the level of the bank, he ran forward in the sand. He moved
noiselessly, eyes and ears alert to aid him, and climbed the bank at a
point where a live oak grew.

Warily he peeped out from behind its trunk and swept the plain for his
foe. Nothing was to be seen of him. Slowly and patiently his eyes again
went over the semi-circle before him, for where death may lurk behind
every foot of vegetation, every bump or hillock, the plainsman leaves
as little as may be to c