A footfall set rolling a pebble.  He looked up quickly, and almost of its own volition, as it seemed, the rifle leaped to both of his hands.  A man stood looking at him across the plateau of the summit.  He, too, held a rifle ready for instant action.

“So it’s you!” Healy cried with an oath.

“Have you killed him?”

The outlaw lied, with swift, unblazing passion:  “Yes, Buck Weaver, and tossed his body to the buzzards.  Your turn now!”

“Then who is that with you there?”

“The woman you love, the woman that turned you and him down for me,” taunted his rival.  “After I’ve killed you we’re going off to be married.”

“Only a coyote would stand behind a woman’s skirts and lie.  I can’t kill you there, and you know it.”

Healy asked nothing better than an even break.  He might have killed with impunity from where he stood.  Yet pantherlike, he swiftly padded six paces to the left, never lifting his eyes from his antagonist.

Buck waited, motionless.  “Are you ready?”

The outlaw’s weapon flashed to the level and cracked.  Almost simultaneously the other answered.  Weaver felt a bullet fan his cheek, but he knew that his own had crashed home.

The shock of it swung Healy half round.  The man hung in silhouette against the sky line, then the body plunged to the turf at full length.  Buck moved forward cautiously, fearing a trick, his eyes fastened on the other.  But as he drew nearer he knew it was no ruse.  The body lay supine and inert, as lifeless as the clay upon which it rested.

Once sure of this Buck turned immediately to Phyllis.  A faint crackling of bushes stopped him.  He waited, his eyes fixed on the edge of the precipice from which the sound had come.  Next there came to him the slipping of displaced rubble.  He was all eyes and ears, tense and alert in every pulse.

From out of the gulf a hand appeared and groped for a hold.  Weaver stepped noiselessly to the edge and looked down.  A torn and bleeding face looked up into his.

“Good heavens, Keller!”

Buck was on his knees instantly.  He caught the ranger’s hand with both of his and dragged him up.  The rescued man sank breathless on the ground and told his story in gasped fragments.

“—­caught on a ledge—­hung to some bushes growing there—­climbed up—­lay still when Healy looked over—­a near thing—­makes me sick still!”

“It was a millionth chance that saved you—­if it was a chance.”

“Where’s Healy?”

Weaver pointed to the body.  “We fought it out.  The luck was with me.”

A faint, glad, terrified little cry startled them both.  Phyllis was staring with dilated eyes at the man restored to her from the dead.  He got up and walked across to her with outstretched hands.

“My little girl.”

“Oh, Larry!  I don’t understand.  I thought——­”

He nodded.  “I reckon God was good to us, sweetheart.”