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There was but one answer: back there along the trail somewhere, at some point by which Lockwood had galloped headlong and unheeding, lying up there in the chaparral with Reno’s bullets in his body.

There was no time now to go on to the Hill. Chino, if he was not past help, needed it without an instant’s loss of time. Lockwood spun the horse about. Once more the ford, once more the canon slopes, once more the sharp turn by Cold Canon, once more the thick darkness under the redwoods. Steadily he galloped on, searching the roadside.

Then all at once he reined in sharply, bringing the horse to a standstill, one ear turned down the wind. The night’s silence was broken by a multitude of sounds–the laboured breathing of the spent bronco, the saddle creaking as the dripping flanks rose and fell, the touch of wind in the tree-tops and the chorusing of the myriad tree-toads. But through all these, distinct, as precise as a clock-tick, Lockwood had heard, and yet distinguished, the click of a horse’s hoof drawing near, and the horse was at a gallop: Reno at last.

Lockwood drew his pistol. He stood in thick shadow. Only some twenty yards in front of him was there any faintest break in the darkness; but at that point the blurred moonlight made a grayness across the trail, just a tone less deep than the redwoods’ shadows.

With his revolver cocked and trained upon this patch of grayness, Lockwood waited, holding his breath.

The gallop came blundering on, sounding in the night’s silence as loud as the passage of an express train; and the echo of it, flung back from the canon side, confused it and distorted it till, to Lockwood’s morbid alertness, it seemed fraught with all the madness of flight, all the hurry of desperation.

Then the hoof-beats rose to a roar, and a shadow just darker than the darkness heaved against the grayness that Lockwood held covered with his pistol. Instantly he shouted aloud:

“Halt! Throw up your hands!”

His answer was a pistol shot.

He dug his heels to his horse, firing as the animal leaped forward. The horses crashed together, rearing, plunging, and Lockwood, as he felt the body of a man crush by him on the trail, clutched into the clothes of him, and, with the pistol pressed against the very flesh, fired again, crying out as he did so:

“Drop your gun, Reno! I know you. I’ll kill you if you move again!”

And then it was that a wail rose into the night, a wail of agony and mortal apprehension:

“Signor Lockwude, Signor Lockwude, for the love of God, don’t shoot! ‘Tis I–Chino Zavalla.”

VI. THE DISCOVERY OF FELICE

An hour later, Felice, roused from her sleep by loud knocking upon her door, threw a blanket about her slim body, serape fashion, and opened the cabin to two gaunt scarecrows, who, the one, half supported by the other, himself far spent and all but swooning, lurched by her across the threshold and brought up wavering and bloody in the midst of the cabin floor.

“Por Dios! Por Dios!” cried Felice. “Ah, love of God! what misfortune has befallen Chino!” Then in English, and with a swift leap of surprise and dismay: “Ah, Meester Lockwude, air you hurt? Eh, tell me-a! Ah, it is too draidful!”

“No, no,” gasped Lockwood, as he dragged Chino’s unconscious body to the bed Felice had just left. “No; I–I’ve shot him. We met–there on the trail.” Then the nerves that had stood strain already surprisingly long snapped and crisped back upon themselves like broken harp-strings.

“I’ve shot him! I’ve shot him!” he cried. “Shot him, do you understand? Killed him, it may be. Get the doctor, quick! He’s at the office. I passed Chino on the trail over to the Hill. He’d hid in the bushes as he heard me coming from behind, then when I came back I took him. Oh, I’ll explain later. Get the doctor, quick.”