eze to temper the dry air. And before midday Jean was laboring, wet
with sweat, parching with thirst, dusty and hot and tiring. It amazed
him, the doggedness and tenacity of life shown by this wounded rustler.
The time came when under the burning rays of the sun he was compelled
to abandon the walk across the tips of the manzanita bushes and take to
the winding, open threads that ran between. It would have been poor
sight indeed that could not have followed Queen's labyrinthine and
broken passage through the brush. Then the time came when Jean espied
Queen, far ahead and above, crawling like a black bug along the
bright-green slope. Sight then acted upon Jean as upon a hound in the
chase. But he governed his actions if he could not govern his
instincts. Slowly but surely he followed the dusty, hot trail, and
never a patch of blood failed to send a thrill along his veins.

Queen, headed up toward the Rim, finally vanished from sight. Had he
fallen? Was he hiding? But the hour disclosed that he was crawling.
Jean's keen eye caught the slow moving of the brush and enabled him to
keep just so close to the rustler, out of range of the six-shooters he
carried. And so all the interminable hours of the hot afternoon that
snail-pace flight and pursuit kept on.

Halfway up the Rim the growth of manzanita gave place to open, yellow,
rocky slope dotted with cedars. Queen took to a slow-ascending ridge
and left his bloody tracks all the way to the top, where in the
gathering darkness the weary pursuer lost them.

Another night passed. Daylight was relentless to the rustler. He
could not hide his trail. But somehow in a desperate last rally of
strength he reached a point on the heavily timbered ridge that Jean
recognized as being near the scene of the fight in the canyon. Queen
was nearing the rendezvous of the rustlers. Jean crossed tracks of
horses, and then more tracks that he was certain had been made days
past by his own party. To the left of this ridge must be the deep
canyon that had frustrated his efforts to catch up with the rustlers on
the day Blaisdell lost his life, and probably Bill Isbel, too.
Something warned Jean that he was nearing the end of the trail, and an
unaccountable sense of imminent catastrophe seemed foreshadowed by
vague dreads and doubts in his gloomy mind. Jean felt the need of
rest, of food, of ease from the strain of the last weeks. But his
spirit drove him implacably.

Queen's ra