"Wonder if I got him? Seems to me I couldn't have missed clean,"
thought Bannister.

Silence as before, vast and unbroken.

A scramble of running feet tearing a path through the brush, a
crouching body showing darkly for an eyeflash, and then the
pounding of a horse's retreating feet.

Bannister leaped up, ran lightly across the intervening space,
and with his repeater took a potshot at the galloping horseman.

"Missed!" he muttered, and at once gave a sharp whistle that
brought his pony to him on the trot. He vaulted to the saddle and
gave chase. It was rough going, but nothing in reason can stop a
cow-pony. As sure footed as a mountain goat, as good a climber
almost as a cat, Buck followed the flying horseman over perilous
rock rims and across deep-cut creek beds. Pantherlike he climbed
up the steep creek sides without hesitation, for the round-up had
taught him never to falter at stiff going so long as his rider
put him at it.

It was while he was clambering out of the sheer sides of a wash
that Bannister made a discovery. The man he pursued was wounded.
Something in the manner of the fellow's riding had suggested this
to him, but a drop of blood splashed on a stone that happened to
meet his eye made the surmise a certainty.

He was gaining now--not fast, almost imperceptibly, but none the