As he replaced his hat, his eye caught a glimpse of a man crouching and gliding cautiously forward through the low concealment of the snowbush.  His movements were quick, his head was craned forward, every muscle was taut, his eyes fixed on some object invisible to Oldham with an intensity that evidently excluded from the field of his vision everything but that toward which his lithe and snake-like advance was bringing him.  In his hand he carried the worn and shining Colts 45 that was always his inseparable companion.

Oldham made a single step forward.  At the same moment somewhere above him on the hill a woman screamed.  The cry was instantly followed by two revolver shots.

XXXIV

Ware was an expert gun-man who had survived the early days of Arizona, New Mexico, and the later ruffianism of the border on Old Mexico.  His habit was at all times alert.  Now, in especial, behind his casual conversation, he had been straining his finer senses for the first intimations of danger.  For perhaps six seconds before Amy cried out he had been aware of an unusual faint sound heard beneath rather than above the cheerful and accustomed noises of the forest.  It baffled him.  If he had imposed silence on his companion, and had set himself to listening, he might have been able to identify and localize it, but it really presented nothing alarming enough.  It might have been a squirrel playfully spasmodic, or the leisurely step forward of some hidden and distant cow browsing among the bushes.  Ware lent an attentive ear to the quiet sounds of the woodland, but continued to stand at ease and unalarmed.

The scream, however, released instantly the springs of his action.  With the heel of his left palm he dealt Bob so violent a shoving blow that the young man was thrown forward off his feet.  As part of the same motion his right hand snatched his weapon from its holster, threw the muzzle over his left shoulder, and discharged the revolver twice in the direction from which Ware all at once realized the sound had proceeded.  So quickly did the man’s brain act, so instantly did his muscles follow his brain, that the scream, the blow, and the two shots seemed to go off together as though fired by one fuse.

Bob bounded to his feet.  Ware had whirled in his tracks, had crouched, and was glaring fixedly across the openings at the forks.  The revolver smoked in his hand.

“Oh, are you hurt?  Are you hurt?” Amy was crying over and over, as, regardless of the stiff manzanita and the spiny deer brush, she tore her way down the hill.

“All right!  All right!” Bob found his breath to assure her.

She stopped short, clenched her hands at her sides, and drew a deep, sobbing breath.  Then, quite collectedly, she began to disentangle herself from the difficulties into which her haste had precipitated her.

“It’s all right,” she called to Ware.  “He’s gone.  He’s run.”