We heard a quick stir in the bushes by the roadside.

“What’s that?” Purvis demanded in a half-whisper of excitement.  We stopped.

Then promptly a voice—­a voice which I did not recognize—­broke the silence with these menacing words sharply spoken: 

“Your money or your life!”

“Mr. Purvis” whirled his horse and lashed him up the hill.  Things happened quickly in the next second or two.  Glancing backward I saw him lose a stirrup and fall and pick himself up and run as if his life depended on it.  I saw the stranger draw his pistol.  A gun went off in the edge of the bushes close by.  The flash of fire from its muzzle leaped at the stranger.  The horses reared and plunged and mine threw me in a clump of small poppies by the roadside and dashed down the hill.  All this had broken into the peace of a summer evening on a lonely road and the time in which it had happened could be measured, probably, by ten ticks of the watch.

My fall on the stony siding had stunned me and I lay for three or four seconds, as nearly as I can estimate it, in a strange and peaceful dream.  Why did I dream of Amos Grimshaw coming to visit me, again, and why, above all, should it have seemed to me that enough things were said and done in that little flash of a dream to fill a whole day—­enough of talk and play and going and coming, the whole ending with a talk on the haymow.  Again and again I have wondered about that dream.  I came to and lifted my head and my consciousness swung back upon the track of memory and took up the thread of the day, the briefest remove from where it had broken.

I peered through the bushes.  The light was unchanged.  I could see quite clearly.  The horses were gone.  It was very still.  The stranger lay helpless in the road and a figure was bending over him.  It was a man with a handkerchief hanging over his face with holes cut opposite his eyes.  He had not seen my fall and thought, as I learned later, that I had ridden away.

His gun lay beside him, its stock toward me.  I observed that a piece of wood had been split off the lower side of the stock.  I jumped to my feet and seized a stone to hurl at him.  As I did so the robber fled with gun in hand.  If the gun had been loaded I suppose that this little history would never have been written.  Quickly I hurled the stone at the robber.  I remember it was a smallish stone about the size of a hen’s egg.  I saw it graze the side of his head.  I saw his hand touch the place which the stone had grazed.  He reeled and nearly fell and recovered himself and ran on, but the little stone had put the mark of Cain upon him.