The watch ticked away the seconds.  From the face of Meldrum the grin was snuffed out by a swift surge of wolfish anger.

“Are you deef and dumb?” he snarled.  “It’s Dan Meldrum talking—­the man yore dad sent to the penitentiary.  I’m going to kill you.  Then I’ll cut another notch on my gun.  Understand?”

The brain of the young lawyer would not function.  His will was paralyzed.  Yet every sense was amazingly alert.  He did not miss a tick of the watch.  Every beat of his heart registered.

“You butted in and tried to spy like yore dad, did you?” the raucous voice continued.  “Thought you could sell us out and git away with it.  Here’s where you learn different.  Jack Beaudry was a man, anyhow, and we got him.  You’re nothing but a pink-ear, a whey-faced baby without guts to stand the gaff.  Well, you’ve come to the end of yore trail.  Beg, you skunk!”

From the mind of Beaudry the fog lifted.  In the savage, malignant eyes glaring at him he read that he was lost.  The clutch of fear so overwhelmed him that suspense was unbearable.  He wanted to shriek aloud, to call on this man-killer to end the agony.  It was the same impulse, magnified a hundred times, that leads a man to bite on an ulcerated tooth in a weak impotence of pain.

The tick-tick-tick of the watch mocked him to frenzied action.  He gripped the arms of the chair with both hands and thrust forward his face against the cold rim of the revolver barrel.

“Shoot!” he cried hoarsely, drunk with terror.  “Shoot, and be damned!”

Before the words were out of his mouth a shot echoed.  For the second time in his life Roy lost consciousness.  Not many seconds could have passed before he opened his eyes again.  But what he saw puzzled him.

Meldrum was writhing on the ground and cursing.  His left hand nursed the right, which moved up and down frantically as if to escape from pain.  Toward the house walked Dingwell and by his side Beulah Rutherford.  Dave was ejecting a shell from the rifle he carried.  Slowly it came to the young man that he had not been shot.  The convict must have been hit instead by a bullet from the gun of the cattleman.  He was presently to learn that the forty-four had been struck and knocked from the hand of its owner.

“Every little thing all right, son?” asked the cowman cheerily.  “We sure did run this rescue business fine.  Another minute and—­But what’s the use of worrying?  Miss Beulah and I were Johnny-on-the-spot all right.”

Roy said nothing.  He could not speak.  His lips and cheeks were still bloodless.  By the narrowest margin in the world he had escaped.

Disgustedly the cattleman looked down at Meldrum, who was trying to curse and weep from pain at the same time.

“Stung you up some, did I?  Hm!  You ought to be singing hymns because I didn’t let you have it in the haid, which I’d most certainly have done if you had harmed my friend.  Get up, you bully, and stop cursing.  There’s a lady here, and you ain’t damaged, anyhow.”