It seemed an age before his rifle was through, and every moment he expected another shot.  He flattened himself out, Indian fashion, and sighted along the barrel.  He was positive that his enemy was watching, yet he could make out nothing that looked like a head anywhere along the log.  At one end was a clump of deeper foliage.  He was sure he saw a sudden slight movement there, and in the thrill of the moment was tempted to send a bullet into the heart of it.  But he saved his cartridge.  He felt the mighty importance of certainty.  If he fired once—­and missed—­the advantage of his unsuspected loophole would be gone.  It would be transformed into a deadly menace.  Even as it was, if his enemy’s next bullet should enter that way—­

He felt the discomfort of the thought, and in spite of himself a tremor of apprehension ran up his spine.  He felt an even greater desire to wring the neck of the inquisitive little sandpiper.  The creature had circled round squarely in front of him and stood there tilting its tail and bobbing its head as if its one insane desire was to look down the length of his rifle barrel.  The bird was giving him away.  If the other fellow was only half as clever as his marksmanship was good—­

Suddenly every nerve in Carrigan’s body tightened.  He was positive that he had caught the outline of a human head and shoulders in the foliage.  His finger pressed gently against the trigger of his Winchester.  Before he breathed again he would have fired.  But a shot from the foliage beat him out by the fraction of a second.  In that precious time lost, his enemy’s bullet entered the edge of his kit—­and came through.  He felt the shock of it, and in the infinitesimal space between the physical impact and the mental effect of shock his brain told him the horrible thing had happened.  It was his head—­his face.  It was as if he had plunged them suddenly into hot water, and what was left of his skull was filled with the rushing and roaring of a flood.  He staggered up, clutching his face with both hands.  The world about him was twisted and black, a dizzily revolving thing—­yet his still fighting mental vision pictured clearly for him a monstrous, bulging-eyed sandpiper as big as a house.  Then he toppled back on the white sand, his arms flung out limply, his face turned to the ambush wherein his murderer lay.

His body was clear of the rock and the pack, but there came no other shot from the thick clump of balsam.  Nor, for a time, was there movement.  The wood warbler was cheeping inquiringly at this sudden change in the deportment of his friend behind the shoulder of shale.  The sandpiper, a bit startled, had gone back to the edge of the river and was running a race with himself along the wet sand.  And the two quarrelsome jays had brought their family squabble to the edge of the timber.