Again two hours of unbroken monotony passed.  The sun had almost reached the meridian, and the man behind the barricade had all but decided he must have miscalculated somehow, when in the dim distance as before there appeared a tiny dark object, but this time directly from the east.  For five minutes Ben watched it fixedly, his hand shading his eyes; then, slowly as moves the second-hand of a great clock, a change indescribable came over his face.  No need was there now to ask whether it was a human being that was approaching.  There was no mistaking that slow, swinging man-motion.  At last the moment was approaching for which the youth had been striving so madly for the last few days, the moment he had for years been conscious would some day come.  It would soon be his; and with the thought his teeth set firmer, and a fierce joy tugged at his heart.

Five minutes, ten minutes dragged by; yet no observer, however close, could have seen a muscle stir in the long body of the waiting man.  Like a great panther cat he lay there, the blue eyes peering just over the surface of the ambush.  Not ten paces away could an observer have told the tip of that motionless sombrero from the protruding top of a boulder.  Gradually the approaching figure grew more distinct.  A red handkerchief showed clearly about the man’s neck.  Then a slight limp in the left leg intruded itself, and a droop of the shoulders that spoke weariness.  He was very near by this time, so near that the black beard which covered his face became discernible, likewise the bizarre breadth of the Mexican belt above the baggy chaperejos.  The crunch of the snow-crust marked his every foot-fall.

And still Ben Blair had not stirred.  Slowly, as the other had approached, the big blue eyes had darkened until they seemed almost brown.  Involuntarily the massive chin had moved forward; but that was all.  On the surface he was as calm as a lake on a windless night; but beneath,—­God! what a tempest was raging!  Each one of those minutes he waited so impassively marked the rush of a year’s memories.  Human hate, primal instinct all but uncontrollable, throbbed in his accelerated pulse-beats.  Like the continuous shifting scenes in a panorama, the incidents of his life in which this man had played a part appeared mockingly before his mind’s eye.  Plainly, as though in his physical ear, he heard the shuffle of an uncertain hand upon a latch; he saw a figure with bloodshot eyes lurch into a rude floorless room, saw it approach a bunk whereon lay a sick woman, his mother; heard the swift passage of angry words, words which had branded themselves into his memory forever.  Once more he was on all fours, scurrying for his life toward the dark opening of a protecting kennel.  As plainly as though the memory were of yesterday, he gazed into the blazing mouth of a furnace, felt its scorching breath on his cheek.  Swiftly the changing scenes danced before his eyes.  A rifle-shot, real almost as though