hance. No faintest movement could escape the
sheepman's eyes, no least stir fail to apprise his ears. Yet for many
minutes he waited in vain, and the delay told him that he had to do with
a trained hunter rather than a mere reckless cow-puncher. For somewhere
in the rough country before him his enemy lay motionless, every faculty
alive to the least hint of his presence.

It was the whirring flight of a startled dove that told Bannister the
whereabouts of his foe. Two hundred yards from him the bird rose,
and the direction it took showed that the man must have been trailing
forward from the opposite quarter. The sheepman slipped back into the
dry creek bed, retraced his steps for about a stone-throw, and again
crawled up the bank.

For a long time he lay face down in the grass, his gaze riveted to the
spot where he knew his opponent to be hidden. A faint rustle not born
of the wind stirred the sage. Still Bannister waited. A less experienced
plainsman would have blazed away and exposed his own position. But not
this young man with the steel-wire nerves. Silent as the coming of
dusk, no breaking twig or displaced brush betrayed his self-contained
presence.

Something in the clump he watched wriggled forward and showed
indistinctly through an opening in the underscrub. He whipped his rifle
into position and fired twice. The huddled brown mass lurched forward
and disappeared.

"Wonder if I got him? Seems to me I couldn't have missed clean," thought
Bannister.

Silence as before, vast and unbroken.

A scramble of running feet tearing a path through the brush, a crouching
body showing darkly for an eyeflash, and then the pounding of a horse's
retreating feet.

Bannister leaped up, ran lightly across the intervening space, and with
his repeater took a potshot at the galloping horseman.

"Missed!" he muttered, and at once gave a sharp whistle that brought his
pony to him on the trot. He vaulted to the saddle and gave chase. It was
rough going, but nothing in reason can stop a cow-pony. As sure footed
as a mountain goat, as good a climber almost as a cat, Buck followed the
flying horseman over perilous rock rims and across deep-cut creek beds.
Pantherlike he climbed up the steep creek sides without hesitation, for
the round-up had taught him never to falter at stiff going so long as
his rider put him at it.

It was while he was clambering out of the sheer sides of a wash that
Bannister made a discovery. The man he pu