saw me standing
there on the rim. He turned and looked at me, and he waved."

"Waved?" Rick asked.

"Yep. It was a real jaunty wave."

Rick shook his head in bewilderment. "My, that was friendly."

"I thought so," Scotty agreed. "Come on, boy. We've got to make tracks
out of here. Time is running out."

Rick collected his shirt and jumped into the jeep. Scotty backed around
and headed toward the base as fast as the road allowed. Not until they
were down on relatively level ground did they try to converse.

"The rifleman must have read about David and Goliath," Rick said. "Why
else would he run off?"

Scotty chuckled. "He was helpless. He was in deadly peril, as the
storybooks say. Seriously, I think he _was_ helpless."

Rick stared at his pal. Scotty could mean only one thing. "Then he had
no intention of hitting us?"

"I doubt it. He was shooting at short range, and even a poor shot
couldn't very well have missed as often as he did. Besides, I don't
think you'd find many poor shots with rifles in this country."

"Then he must have been trying to scare us off," Rick said thoughtfully.
"When you started heaving rocks at him, he knew we weren't scaring very
much."

"Not much," Scotty said ruefully. "I don't know about you, but my
innards turned to custard."

Rick grinned. He knew exactly what Scotty meant. "If things had happened
a little more slowly, I'd have dropped dead from sheer fright. But I
didn't have time. Anyway, when you started with your sling, he had a
choice of shooting for keeps or getting out of there. So he got. Is that
how you figure it?"

"Exactly right. What other explanation is there? Stones against rifle
slugs isn't much of a contest. I only tried it because there wasn't
anything else to do."

"We could have stayed under cover until Mac and Pancho arrived," Rick
pointed out.

"Negative. All he had to do was shift position and he'd have had a clear
shot at us."

That was true, Rick realized. "But why did he try to scare us off?"

"It beats me. He wasn't a guard, I'm sure. If he was guarding something,
he wouldn't have ridden off and left us there. And there wasn't anything
personal in it, because he waved at me like an old pal. It was a kind
of humorous wave. You know? Real jaunty."

Rick asked the obvious question. "Was it the Earthman?"

And Scotty made the obvious answer. "I didn't have a chance to ask him.
Anyway, he didn't wear armor."

Rick had been keeping his eye on