left:

"Let us hope, for your sake, that you are not mistaken about that. I
should be dreadfully vexed if you were deceiving me. The voice is the
voice of Pringle, but how about the face? I can only see your back."

"I would raise my head, so you could take a nice look by the
well-known cold gray light of the justly celebrated dawn," rejoined
Pringle, "if I wasn't reasonably sure that a rifle shot would promptly
mar the classic outlines of my face. They're all around you, Foy.
Hargis, he gave you away. Don't show a finger nail of yourself. Let me
crawl up behind that big rock ahead and then you can identify me."

"It's you, all right," said Foy when Pringle reached the rock and
straightened himself up.

"I told you so," said Pringle, peering into the shadows of the cleft.
"I can't see you. And how am I going to get to you? There are twenty
men with point-blank range. I'm muddy, scratched, bruised, tired and
hungry, sleepy and cross--and there's thirty feet in the open between
here and you, and it nearly broad daylight. If I try to cross that
I'll run twenty-five hundred pounds to the ton, pure lead. Well, we
can put up a pretty nifty fight, even so. You go back to the other
outlet of your cave and I'll stay here. I'm kinder lonesome, too....
Toss me some cartridges first. I only got five. I left in a hurry. You
got forty-fives?"

"Plenty. But you can't stay there. They'll pot you from the top of the
bluff, first off. Besides, you got a canteen, I see. You back up to
that mountain mahogany bush, slip under it, and worm down through
the rocks till you come to a little scrub-oak tree and a big granite
bowlder. They'll give you shelter to cross the ridge into a deep
ravine that leads here where I am. You'll be out of sight all the way
up once you hit the ravine. I'd--I'd worm along pretty spry if I was
you, going down as far as the scrub oak--say, about as swift as
a rattlesnake strikes--and pray any little prayers you happen to
remember. And say, Pringle, before you go ... I'm rather obliged to
you for coming up here; risking taking cold and all. If it'll cheer
you up any I'll undertake that anyone getting you on the trip will
think there's one gosh-awful echo here."

"S'long!" said Pringle.

He wriggled backward and disappeared.

Ten minutes later he writhed under the bush at Foy's feet.

"Never saw me!" he said. "But I'll always sleep in coils after
this--always supposing we got any after this coming to us."