Prather remained flat on the bottom of the arroyo, overwhelmed.  It was some time before he could speak.

“I—­I don’t understand!  It isn’t possible!” he said finally.

“Everything is possible with Leddy.  It seems that there can be peace between him and me in this valley in only one way,” Jack answered.

“But me!  I suppose he found out that I—­” Prather stopped without finishing the sentence.  “What am I to do?” he asked Jack in livid appeal.

“Why, it is three against nine, if you choose!” Jack answered.  “You have a rifle, and it is for your life.”

“My life!” Prather gasped, another wave of fear submerging him.

“Yes.  We have no horses with which to make our escape and we should be winged as soon as we exposed ourselves.  Leddy means that we shall die of thirst, or die fighting.”

Through all this dialogue Jack had been speaking to the head that lay between his eye and a target.  As Prather reached up a trembling hand to take his rifle from the back of his burro one of the lumps around the water-hole rose, possibly to change position.  When it became the silhouette of a kneeling man, Jack fired and the figure plunged forward like an automaton that had had its back broken.

“Eight!” whispered Firio.

“Duck!” Jack told him; for a response instantly came in a volley that kicked up the dust around their heads.

But Jack’s rifle lay in limp hands.

“Eight!” he repeated, dazedly.  “And I shot to kill—­to kill!”

His face blanched with horror at the thing that he had done.  It seemed as if the strength had been struck out of him.  He appeared ready to let destiny overtake him rather than fire again.  Then as in a flash, the ancestor in him reappeared and in his features was written that very process of fate which Dr. Bennington had said was in him.  Again his hand was firm on the barrel and his eye riveted on the sight, as he drew himself up until he lay even with the bank of the arroyo.

The volley from the cotton-woods had swept over Prather’s head at the instant that he had taken hold of his rifle.  It dropped from his grasp.  He burrowed in the sand under the pressure of that near and sinister rush of singing breaths.

“I can’t!  I can’t!” he said helplessly.

He was leaden flesh, without the power to move.  At his words Jack glanced back to see a dropped jaw and glassy, staring eyes.

“You are suffering!” exclaimed Jack.  “Are you hit?”

“No!” Prather managed to say, and reached out for his rifle in clumsy desperation, as if he were feeling for it in the dark.

“Take your time!” said Jack encouragingly, as one would to a victim of stage fright.  “There isn’t any danger for the moment, while advantage of position is with us—­the sun over our shoulders and in their faces.”

The lumps around the water-hole grew smaller.  Evidently, as a result of the lesson, they were creeping backward on their stomachs to a less exposed position.  Two had quite disappeared, or else the brilliant play of light had melted them into the golden carpet of reflected sunshine on which they rested.  Directly, Jack saw two figures creeping over the rim of the pasturage basin.