vance and had begun to regret having left
his horse so early, when he heard the report of a gun near at hand and
a bullet hissed viciously over his head as he stooped to go under a low
branch.

He threw up his arms, the rifle falling from his hands, pitched forward
and rolled down the side of the hill and behind a fallen tree trunk
which lay against a thicket. As soon as he had gained this position he
glanced in the direction from whence the shot had come and, finding
himself screened from sight on that side, quickly jerked off his boots and
planted them among the bushes, where they looked as if he had crawled in
almost out of sight. That done, he crawled along the ground under the
protection of the tree trunk and then squirmed under it, when he pushed
himself, feet first, deep into a tangled thicket and waited, Colt in
hand, for a sign of his enemy's approach.

A quarter of an hour had passed in silence when a shot, followed by
another, sounded from the hillside. After the lapse of a like interval
another shot was fired, this time from the opposite direction. He saw a
twig fall by the boots and heard the spat! of the bullet as it hit a
stone. Two more shots sounded in rapid succession, and then another long
interval of silence. Half an hour passed, but he was not impatient. He
most firmly believed that his man would, sooner or later, come out to
examine the boots, and time was of no consequence: he wanted the man.

Whoever he was, he was certainly cautious, he did not believe in taking
any chances. It was almost certain that he would not leave until he had
been assured that he had accomplished his purpose, for it would be most
disconcerting at some future time to unexpectedly meet the man he thought
he had murdered. Another shot whizzed into the place where the body
should have been, according to the silent testimony of the boots. It
sounded much closer to the thicket, but in the same direction of the
last few shots. Then, after ten minutes of silence, a twig snapped,
and directly behind the thicket in which The Orphan was hidden! The
foreman's nerves were tense now, his every sense was alert, for his
was a most dangerous position. He quickly glanced over his shoulder into
the thicket and found that he could not penetrate the mass of leaves and
branches, which reassured him. He was very glad that he had forced himself
well into the cover, for soon the leaves rustled and a pebble rolled not
more than four feet off, an