question.

His answer was lost in the wind sweep, but one word of it she
caught. That word was "Mac."



CHAPTER 7. THE MAN FROM THE SHOSHONE FASTNESSES

Though the sharpshooter's rifle cracked twice during his run for
the cottonwood, the sheepman reached the tree in safety. He could
dodge through the brush as elusively as any man in Wyoming. It
was a trick he had learned on the whitewashed football gridiron.
For in his buried past this man had been the noted half-back of a
famous college, and one of his specialties had been running the
ball back after a catch through a broken field of opponents. The
lesson that experience had then thumped into him had since saved
his life on more than one occasion.

Having reached the tree, Bannister took immediate advantage of
the lie of the ground to snake forward unobserved for another
hundred feet. There was a dip from the foot of the tree, down
which he rolled into the sage below. He wormed his way through
the thick scrub brush to the edge of a dry creek, into the bed of
which he slid. Then swiftly, his body bent beneath the level of
the bank, he ran forward in the sand. He moved noiselessly, eyes
and ears alert to aid him, and climbed the bank at a point where
a live oak grew.

Warily he peeped out from behind its trunk and swept the plain