for his foe. Nothing was to be seen of him. Slowly and patiently
his eyes again went over the semi-circle before him, for where
death may lurk behind every foot of vegetation, every bump or
hillock, the plainsman leaves as little as may be to chance. No
faintest movement could escape the sheepman's eyes, no least stir
fail to apprise his ears. Yet for many minutes he waited in vain,
and the delay told him that he had to do with a trained hunter
rather than a mere reckless cow-puncher. For somewhere in the
rough country before him his enemy lay motionless, every faculty
alive to the least hint of his presence.

It was the whirring flight of a startled dove that told Bannister
the whereabouts of his foe. Two hundred yards from him the bird
rose, and the direction it took showed that the man must have
been trailing forward from the opposite quarter. The sheepman
slipped back into the dry creek bed, retraced his steps for about
a stone-throw, and again crawled up the bank.

For a long time he lay face down in the grass, his gaze riveted
to the spot where he knew his opponent to be hidden. A faint
rustle not born of the wind stirred the sage. Still Bannister
waited. A less experienced plainsman would have blazed away and
exposed his own position. But not this young man with the
steel-wire nerves. Silent as the coming of dusk, no breaking twig
or displaced brush betrayed his self-contained presence.

Something in the clump he watched wriggled forward and showed
indistinctly through an opening in the underscrub. He whipped his
rifle into position and fired twice. The huddled brown mass
lurched forward and disappeared.