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 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 creekbed, 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.
"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 lesssurely.He could see the man looking over his shoulder, once, twice, and then again, with that hurried, fearful glance that measures the approach of retribution.Barring accidents, the man was his.
But the unforeseen happened.Buck stepped in the hole of a prairie dog and went down.Over his head flew the rider like a stone from a catapult.
How long Ned Bannister lay unconscious he never knew.But when he came to himself it was none too soon.He sat up dizzily and passed his hand over his head.Something had happened.
What was it? Oh, yes, he had been thrown from his horse.A wave of recollection passed over him, and his mind was clear once more.Presently he got to his feet and moved rather uncertainly toward Buck, for the horse was grazing quietly a few yards from him.
But half way to the pony he stopped.Voices, approaching by way of the bed of Dry Creek, drifted to him.
"He must 'a' turned and gone back.Mebbe he guessed we was there." And a voice that Bannister knew, one that had a strangely penetrant,cruel ring of power through the drawl, made answer: "Judd said before he fainted he was sure the man was Ned Bannister.I'd ce'tainly like to meet up with my beloved cousin right now and even up a few old scores.By God, I'd make him sick before I finished with him!""I'll bet y'u would, Cap," returned the other, admiringly."Think we'd better deploy here and beat up the scenery a few as we go?"There are times when the mind works like lightning, flashes its messages on the wings of an electric current.For Bannister this was one of them.The whole situation lighted for him plainly as if it had been explained for an hour.
