He was about to take the risk of moving farther up the hill-path to a less exposed lurking place, was hesitating only because his indolent soul rebelled at the thought of having to drag Ford’s body so many added steps to its burial in the river, when the clink of shod hoofs upon stone warned him that the time for scene-shifting had passed.  Pushing the mustang out of the line of sight from the trail, he flattened himself against the great rock and waited.

Ford rode down the last declivity cautiously, for his horse’s sake.  The trail came out of the hills abruptly, dropping into the rock-strewn river valley within hailing distance of the camp.  Well within the sweep of the masthead lights across the stream, the boulder-strewn flat was as light as day, save where the sentinel rocks flung their shadows; and promptly at the first facing of the bright electrics, Ford’s horse stumbled aside from the path and began to take short cuts between the thick-standing boulders for the river.  This was how the Mexican, instead of having his victim at a complete disadvantage, found himself suddenly uncovered by the flank, exposed, recognized, and hailed in no uncertain tones.

“Hello, Mattacheco! what are you doing here?” Ford had a flash-light picture of the horse standing with his muzzle to the ground; of the man flattened against the rock.  Then he saw the dull gleam of the lights upon blued metal.  “You devil!” he shouted; and unarmed as he was, spurred his tired beast at the assassin.

Here, then, was the weak link in Ruiz Gregorio’s chain twisted to the breaking point at the very outset.  Instead of taking a deliberate pot-shot at an unsuspecting victim, he was obliged to face about, to fire hastily at a charging enemy, and to spring nimbly aside to save himself from being ridden down.  The saving jump was an awkward one:  it brought him into breath-taking collision with the upjerking head of the mustang.  When he had recovered his feet and his presence of mind, the charging whirlwind had dashed through the shallows of the Pannikin, and a riderless horse was clattering across the tracks in the railroad yard.

The Mexican waited prudently to see what the camp would say to the single shot.  It said nothing; it might have been deserted for all the indications there were of life in it.  Ruiz Gregorio snapped the empty shell from his weapon, replacing it with a loaded one, and mounted and rode slowly through the ford.  The riderless horse disappearing across the tracks gave him good hope that the hasty shot had accomplished all that a deliberate one might have.

There was no dead man tumbled in a heap in the railroad yard, as he had hoped to find.  Silence, the silence of desertion, brooded over the masthead arcs.  Painfully the Mexican searched, at the verge of the river, in the black shadows cast by the crowding material cars.  Finally he crossed over to the straggling street of the camp, walking now and leading the spent mustang.  Silence here, too, broken only by the sputtering sizzle of the electrics.  The huge mess tent was dark; there were no lights, save in the closed commissary and in the president’s car:  no lights, and not a man of the camp’s crowding labor army to be seen.