For the twentieth time in as many minutes he looked about him.  He was in the center of a flat area of sand.  Fifty feet from him the river murmured gently over yellow bars and a carpet of pebbles.  Fifty feet on the opposite side of him was the cool, green wall of the forest.  The sunshine playing in it seemed like laughter to him now, a whimsical sort of merriment roused by the sheer effrontery of the joke which fate had inflicted upon him.

Between the river and the balsam and spruce was only the rock behind which he was cringing like a rabbit afraid to take to the open.  And his rock was a mere up-jutting of the solid floor of shale that was under him.  The wash sand that covered it like a carpet was not more than four or five inches deep.  He could not dig in.  There was not enough of it within reach to scrape up as a protection.  And his enemy, a hundred yards or so away, was a determined wretch—­and the deadliest shot he had ever known.

Three times Carrigan had made experiments to prove this, for he had in mind a sudden rush to the shelter of the timber.  Three times he had raised the crown of his hat slightly above the top of the rock, and three times the marksmanship of the other had perforated it with neatness and dispatch.  The third bullet had carried his hat a dozen feet away.  Whenever he showed a patch of his clothing, a bullet replied with unerring precision.  Twice they had drawn blood.  And the humor faded out of Carrigan’s eyes.

Not long ago he had exulted in the bigness and glory of this country of his, where strong men met hand to hand and eye to eye.  There were the other kind in it, the sort that made his profession of manhunting a thing of reality and danger, but he expected these—­forgot them—­when the wilderness itself filled his vision.  But his present situation was something unlike anything that had ever happened in his previous experience with the outlawed.  He had faced dangers.  He had fought.  There were times when he had almost died.  Fanchet, the half-breed who had robbed a dozen wilderness mail sledges, had come nearest to trapping him and putting him out of business.  Fanchet was a desperate man and had few scruples.  But even Fanchet—­before he was caught—­would not have cornered a man with such bloodthirsty unfairness as Carrigan found himself cornered now.  He no longer had a doubt as to what was in the other’s mind.  It was not to wound and make merely helpless.  It was to kill.  It was not difficult to prove this.  Careful not to expose a part of his arm or shoulder, he drew a white handkerchief from his pocket, fastened it to the end of his rifle, and held the flag of surrender three feet above the rock.  And then, with equal caution, he slowly thrust up a flat piece of shale, which at a distance of a hundred yards might appear as his shoulder or even his head.  Scarcely was it four inches above the top of the rock before there came the report of a rifle, and the shale was splintered into a hundred bits.