unbroken succession of
the corn-husk cigarettes.

One small cloud flecked the sky of satisfaction. His instructions had
been explicit. If Ford should resign, quit, wash his hands of the
Pacific Southwestern, he might be suffered to escape. If not--there was
only one condition attached to the alternative: what was done must be
done neatly, with despatch, and at a sufficient distance from any of the
MacMorrogh camps to avert even the shadow of suspicion.

Now the upper crossing of waylayings was within a stone's throw of the
end-of-track yards; nay, within an amateur's pistol-shot of the
commissary buildings. But Ruiz Gregorio, weighing all the possibilities,
found them elastic enough to serve the purpose. A well-calculated shot
from behind a sheltering boulder, the heaving of the body into the swift
torrent of the Pannikin, and the thing was done. What damning evidence
might afterward come to the light of day, if, indeed, it should ever
come to light, would be fished out of the stream far enough from any of
the MacMorrogh camps.

Thus Ruiz Gregorio Maria y Alvarez, lolling lazily in his saddle while
the hard-breathing mustang picked a toilsome path among the strewn
boulders and through the sliding shale beds. He went even further: an
alibi might not be needful, but it would be easy to provide one. Young
Jack Benson, if no other, would know that Ford had taken one of the
shorter trails from Copah to the camp at Horse Creek. _Bueno!_ He, Ruiz
Gregorio, could slip across the river in the dusk when the thing was
done, skirt the headquarters camp unseen, and present himself a little
later at Senor Frisbie's camp of the track-layers, coming, as it were,
direct from Copah, almost upon the heels of Senor Benson. After that,
who could connect him with the dead body of a man fished out of a river
twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away?

There was a weak link in the chain. Ruiz Gregorio's child-like plot
turned upon one pivot of hazard--hazard most likely to be ignored by so
good a marksman as the "man-killer." One shot he might permit himself,
with little danger of drawing a crowd from the mess tent and the
sleeping shanties in the Horse Creek camp. Two would bring the men to
their doors. Any greater number would be taken as the signal of a free
fight needing spectators. Hence the first shot must suffice.

The Mexican bore this in mind when, arriving at his post opposite the
camp in the early dusk, he chose his ambushing boulde