heart, crumpling into a lifeless heap, while the thin
smoke-spiral curled from his hot rifle.

So the girl imagined the scene as she ran swiftly forward through
the pines to the edge of the butte bluff whence she might look
down upon the coulee that nestled against it. Nor had she greatly
erred, for her first sweeping glance showed her the thing she had
dreaded.

In a semicircle, well back from the foot of the butte, half a
dozen men crouched in the cover of the sage-brush and a scattered
group of cottonwoods. They were perhaps fifty yards apart, and
the attention of all of them was focused on a spot directly
beneath her. Even as she looked, in that first swift moment of
apprehension, a spurt of smoke came from one of the rifles and
was flung back from the forked pine at the bottom of the mesa.
She saw him then, kneeling behind his insufficient shelter, a
trapped man making his last stand.

>From where she stood the girl distinguished him very clearly,
and under the field-glasses that she turned on him the details
leaped to life. Tall, strong, slender, with the lean, clean build
of a greyhound, he seemed as wary and alert as a panther. The
broad, soft hat, the scarlet handkerchief loosely knotted about
his throat, the gray shirt, spurs and overalls, proclaimed him a
stockman, just as his dead horse at the entrance to the coulee
told of an accidental meeting in the desert and a hurried run for
cover.

That he had no chance was quite plain, but no plainer than the