He had escaped with his life, but the bronco was completely exhausted.  Billie unsaddled and freed the cowpony.  He knew it would not wander far now.  Stretched out at full length on the buffalo grass, the cowboy drank into his lungs the clean, cold night air.  His tongue was swollen, his lips cracked and bleeding.  The alkali dust, sifting into His eyes, had left them red and sore.  Every inch of his unshaven face, his hands, and his clothes was covered with a fine, white powder.  For a long drink of mountain water he would gladly have given a month’s pay.

Within the hour Billie resaddled and took the back trail.  There was no time to lose.  He must get back to camp, notify Webb where the stampede was moving, and join the other riders in an all-night and all-day round-up of the scattered herd.  Since daybreak he had been in the saddle, and he knew that for at least twenty-four hours longer he would not leave it except to change from a worn-out horse to a fresh one.

When Prince reached camp shortly after midnight he found that the stampede of the cattle had for the moment fallen into second place in the minds of his companions.  They were digging a grave for the body of Tim McGrath.  The young Irishman had been shot down just as the attack on the herd began.  It was a reasonable guess to suppose that he had come face to face with the raiders, who had shot him on the theory that dead men tell no tales.

But the cowpuncher had lived till his friends reached him.  He had told them with his dying breath that Mysterious Pete had shot him without a word of warning and that after he fell from his horse Peg-Leg Warren rode up and fired into his body.

Jim Clanton called his friend to one side.  “I’m goin’ to sneak out an’ take a lick at them fellows, Billie.  Want to go along?”

“What’s yore notion?  How’re you goin’ to manage it?”

“Me, I’m goin’ to bushwhack Warren or some of his killers from the chaparral.”

Prince had seen once before that cold glitter in the eyes of the hill man.  It was the look that comes into the face of the gunman when he is intent on the kill.

“I wouldn’t do that if I was you, Jim,” Billie advised.  “This ain’t our personal fight.  We’re under orders.  We’d better wait an’ see what the old man wants us to do.  An?  I don’t reckon I would shoot from ambush anyhow.”

“Wouldn’t you?  I would,” The jaw of the younger man snapped tight.  “What chance did they give poor Tim, I’d like to know?  He was one of the best-hearted pilgrims ever rode up the trail, an’ they shot him down like a coyote.  I’m goin’ to even the score.”

“Don’t you, Jim; don’t you.”  Billie laid a hand on the shoulder of his partner in adventure.  “Because they don’t fight in the open is no reason for us to bushwhack too.  That’s no way for a white man to attack his enemies.”

But the inheritance from feudist ancestors was strong in young Clanton.  He had seen a comrade murdered in cold blood.  All the training of his primitive and elemental nature called for vengeance.