“Pards, I got him!” he said, in strange, half-strangled whisper.  “I got him!...  Hell-Bent Wade!  My respects!  I’ll meet you—­thar!”

His reeling motion brought his gaze in line with Belllounds.  The violence of his start sent drops of blood flying from his gory temple.

“Ahuh!  The cards run—­my way.  Belllounds, hyar’s to your—­lyin’ eyes!”

The gun wavered and trembled and circled.  Folsom strained in last terrible effort of will to aim it straight.  He fired.  The bullet tore hair from Belllounds’s head, but missed him.  Again the rustler aimed, and the gun wavered and shook.  He pulled trigger.  The hammer clicked upon an empty chamber.  With low and gurgling cry of baffled rage Folsom dropped the gun and sank face forward, slowly stretching out.

The red-bearded rustler had leaped behind the stone chimney that all but hid his body.  The position made it difficult for him to shoot because his gun-hand was on the inside, and he had to press his body tight to squeeze it behind the corner of ragged stone.  Wade had the advantage.  He was lying prone with his right hand round the corner of the framework.  An overhang of the bough-ends above protected his head when he peeped out.  While he watched for a chance to shoot he loaded his empty gun with his left hand.  The rustler strained and writhed his body, twisting his neck, and suddenly darting out his head and arm, he shot.  His bullet tore the overhang of boughs above Wade’s face.  And Wade’s answering shot, just a second too late, chipped the stone corner where the rustler’s face had flashed out.  The bullet, glancing, hummed out of the window.  It was a close shave.  The rustler let out a hissing, inarticulate cry.  He was trapped.  In his effort to press in closer he projected his left elbow beyond the corner of the chimney.  Wade’s quick shot shattered his arm.

There was no asking or offering of quarter here.  This was the old feud of the West—­of the vicious and the righteous in strife—­both reared in the same stern school.  The rustler gave his body such contortion that he was twisted almost clear around, with his right hand over his left shoulder.  He punched the muzzle of his gun into a crack between two stones, and he pried to open them.  The dry clay cement crumbled, the crack widened.  Sighting along the barrel he aimed it with the narrow strip of Wades shoulder that was visible above the framework.  Then he shot and hit.  Wade shrank flatter and closer, hiding himself to better advantage.  The rustler made his great blunder then, for in that moment he might have rushed out and killed his adversary.  But, instead, he shot again—­another time—­a third.  And his heavy bullets tore and splintered the boughs dangerously close to the hunter’s head.  Then came an awkward, almost hopeless task for the rustler, in maintaining his position while reloading his gun.  He did it, and his panting attested to the labor and pain it cost him.