It was a rough cattle trail he followed, strewn here with boulders and there tilted down at breakneck angle of slippery shale.  Sometimes it fell abruptly into washes and more than once rose so sharply that a heather cat could scarce have clambered up.  But Thursday flung his horse recklessly at the path, taking chances of a fall that might end the mad race.  He could not wait to pick a way.  His one hope lay in speed, in reaching the fork before the enemy.  He sacrificed everything to that.

From the top of a sharp pitch he looked down into the twin canon of Escondido.  A sharp bend cut off the view to the left, so that he could see for only seventy-five or a hundred yards.  But his glance followed the gulch up for half a mile and found no sign of life.  He was in time.

Swiftly he made his preparations.  First he led the exhausted horse back to a clump of young cottonwoods and tied it safely.  From its place beside the saddle he took the muley gun and with the rifle in his other hand he limped swiftly back to the trail.  Every step was torture, but he could not stop to think of that now.  His quick eye picked a perfect spot for an ambush where a great rock leaned against another at the edge of the bluff.  Between the two was a narrow opening through which he could command the bend in the trail below.  To enlarge this he scooped out the dirt with his fingers then reloaded the rifle and thrust it into the crevice.  The sawed-off shotgun lay close to his hand.

Till now he had found no time to get nervous, but as the minutes passed he began to tremble violently and to whimper.  In spite of his experience he was only a boy and until to-day had never killed a man.

“Doggone it, if I ain’t done gone an’ got buck fever,” he reproached himself.  “I reckon it’s because Billie Prince ain’t here that I’m so scairt.  I wisht I had a drink, so as I’d be right when the old muley gun gits to barkin’.”

A faint sound, almost indistinguishable, echoed up the gulch to him.  Miraculously his nervousness vanished.  Every nerve was keyed up, every muscle tense, but he was cool as water in a mountain stream.

The sound repeated itself, a faint tinkle of gravel rolling from a trail beneath the hoof of a horse.  At the last moment Thursday changed his mind and substituted the shotgun for the rifle.

“Old muley she spatters all over the State of Texas.  I might git two at once,” he muttered.

The light, distant murmur of voices reached him.  His trained ear told him just how far away the speakers were.

An Apache rounded the bend, a tall, slender young brave wearing only a low-cut breech-cloth and a pair of moccasins.  Around his waist was strapped a belt full of cartridges and from it projected the handle of a long Mexican knife.  The brown body of the youth was lithe and graceful as that of a panther.  He was smiling over his shoulder at the next rider in line, a heavy-set, squat figure on a round-bellied pinto.  That smile was to go out presently like the flame of a blown candle.  A third Mescalero followed.  Like that of the others, his coarse, black hair fell to the shoulders, free except for a band that encircled the forehead.