Nogales seemed agreeable to the suggestion. Indeed, he was very expeditious in starting. While Jack never took his eye off the sight of his barrel, Nogales walked across the gleaming interval between the two parties waving Prather's handkerchief. Leddy rose on his knee watchfully, rifle in hand, while he spoke with Nogales. Then Nogales started back with his head thrown up jubilantly, but stopped when he was within calling distance and sang out, truculently:

"Leddy get you both! He get everything!"

He turned on his heel and soon was another lump around the water-hole.

"That makes nine, Firio!" said Jack.

He smiled in relief to be rid of Nogales; smiled in happy confidence, as if he were truly the ancestor's child.

"_Si_!" answered Firio, as if he had just as soon there were a regiment against them. He was happy beyond words. He patted his rifle barrel; he spread out his big red bandanna beside his elbow and on it nicely arranged a couple of extra charges of cartridges.

Prather remained flat on the bottom of the _arroyo_, overwhelmed. It was some time before he could speak.

"I--I don't understand! It isn't possible!" he said finally.

"Everything is possible with Leddy. It seems that there can be peace between him and me in this valley in only one way," Jack answered.

"But me! I suppose he found out that I--" Prather stopped without finishing the sentence. "What am I to do?" he asked Jack in livid appeal.

"Why, it is three against nine, if you choose!" Jack answered. "You have a rifle, and it is for your life."

"My life!" Prather gasped, another wave of fear submerging him.

"Yes. We have no horses with which to make our escape and we should be winged as soon as we exposed ourselves. Leddy means that we shall die of thirst, or die fighting."

Through all this dialogue Jack had been speaking to the head that lay between his eye and a target. As Prather reached up a trembling hand to take his rifle from the back of his burro one of the lumps around the water-hole rose, possibly to change position. When it became the silhouette of a kneeling man, Jack fired and the figure plunged forward like an automaton that had had its back broken.

"Eight!" whispered Firio.

"Duck!" Jack told him; for a response instantly came in a volley that kicked up the dust around their heads.

But Jack's rifle lay in limp hands.

"Eight!" he repeated, dazedly. "And I shot to kill--to kill!"

His face blanched with horror at the thing that he had done. It seemed as if the strength had been struck out of him. He appeared ready to let destiny overtake him rather than fire again. Then as in a flash, the ancestor in him reappeared and in his features was written that very process of fate which Dr. Bennington had said was in him. Again his hand was firm on the barrel and his eye riveted on the sight, as he drew himself up until he lay even with the bank of the _arroyo_.

The volley from the cotton-woods had swept over Prather's head at the instant that he had taken hold of his rifle. It dropped from his grasp.

He burrowed in the sand under the pressure of that near and sinister rush of singing breaths.

"I can't! I can't!" he said helplessly.

He was leaden flesh, without the power to move. At his words Jack glanced back to see a dropped jaw and gla.s.sy, staring eyes.

"You are suffering!" exclaimed Jack. "Are you hit?"

"No!" Prather managed to say, and reached out for his rifle in clumsy desperation, as if he were feeling for it in the dark.

"Take your time!" said Jack encouragingly, as one would to a victim of stage fright. "There isn't any danger for the moment, while advantage of position is with us--the sun over our shoulders and in their faces."

The lumps around the water-hole grew smaller. Evidently, as a result of the lesson, they were creeping backward on their stomachs to a less exposed position. Two had quite disappeared, or else the brilliant play of light had melted them into the golden carpet of reflected sunshine on which they rested. Directly, Jack saw two figures creeping over the rim of the pasturage basin.

"So, that's it!" he said to Firio.

Firio nodded his understanding of Leddy's plan to take them in flank under cover of the _arroyo_.

"We shall have to respond in kind!" said Jack.

He left his hat where his head had been and began crawling along the side of the _arroyo_, but paused to call to Prather, who, now that no bullets were flying, was trying the mechanism of his rifle with a somewhat steadier hand:

"Prather, if you could manage to get up there beside Firio and join him in pouring out a magazine full at the right moment, it would help! If not, put your hat up there beside mine. You can do that without exposing yourself."

Jack's tone was that of one who urges a tired man to take a few more steps, or an invalid without any appet.i.te to try another sup of broth. It had no hint of irony.

"No matter," said Firio. "Leddy know he can't fight. Leddy know there is only two of us!" His tone was without satire, but its sting was sharper than satire; that of an Indian shrug over a negligible quant.i.ty. It started Prather on all fours laboriously toward him.

"I am going to the turn in the _arroyo_ that commands the next turn,"

Jack explained. "When I whistle you empty your magazines. Keep your heads down and fire fast, no matter if not accurately, so as to disturb their aim at me!"

"_Si_!" said Firio. "I know!" No one could deny that he was having a very good time making war in the company of Senor Jack. "Yes, Mister Prather,"

he added, when, after toiling painfully on his belly for the few feet he had to go, Prather lay with his stark face near Firio's; a face strangely like that of John Wingfield, Sr. when he saw Jasper Ewold from the drawing-room doorway. "For your life, Mister Prather! _Si_! Up a little more! Chin high as mine, so! Eye on sight, so!"

Prather obeyed in an abyssmal sort of shame which, for the time being, conquered his fear, though not his palsy; for his rifle barrel trembled on its rest.

Meanwhile, Jack had crept to the bend in the _arroyo_. He was listening.

It would not do to show his head as a warning of his presence. Faintly he heard men moving in the sand, moving slowly and cautiously. At the moment he chose as the right one, with rifle c.o.c.ked and finger on trigger, he gave his signal. Then he sprang to the top of the bank, fully exposed to the marksmen at the water-hole. For no half measure would do. He must have a full view of the bottom of the next bend. There he saw two crawling figures. He fired twice and dropped down with three or four stinging whispers in his ears and a second volley overhead as he was under cover. Again he sprang up over the bank in the temptation to see the result of his aim. One of the would-be flankers lay prostrate and still, face downward. The other was disappearing beyond the second bend.

"Seven, now!" he thought miserably, in comprehension of the whole business as ridicule in human savagery. "They won't trouble us again immediately. They will wait on darkness and thirst," he concluded; and called, as he turned back, to Firio: "It worked like a charm, O son of the sun! They could not fire at all straight with your bullets flying about their heads, disturbing their--" His speech ended at sight of Prather, half rolling, half tumbling down the slope, his hands over his face, while he uttered a prolonged moan.

"Bullet hit a rock under sand!" said Firio, as Jack hastened to a.s.sist Prather, who had come to a halt at the very bottom of the _arroyo_ and lay gasping on his side. Jack took hold of Prather's wrists to draw his hands away from the wound.

"My G.o.d! Out here, like a rat in a trap!" Prather groaned. "When I have all life before me! In sight of millions and power--a rat in a trap out on this d.a.m.nable desert, as if I were of no more account than a rancher!"

"Let me see!" said Jack; for Prather was holding his hands tight against his face, as if he feared that all the blood in his body would pour out if he removed them. "Let me see! Maybe it is not so bad!"

Prather let his hands drop and the right one which was over the cheek with the mole was splashed red between the fingers. On the cheek was a raw spot, from which ran a slight trickle. The mole had gone. A splinter of rock, or perhaps a bullet, with its jacket split, ricocheting sidewise, had torn it clean from the flesh.

"Not at all dangerous!" said Jack.

"No?" exclaimed Prather, in utter relief.

"It will heal in a fortnight!"

A small medicine case was among the regular supplies that were always packed on that omnibus of a burro, Jag Ear. While Jack was bandaging the wound, Firio, who kept watch, had no news to report.

"Nothing matters! They will get us, anyway!" Prather moaned. The shock of being hit had quite finished any pretence at concealing his mortal fear of the outcome.

"Oh, I wouldn't say that! We already have them down to seven!" said Jack encouragingly, as he made a pillow of a blanket and bade Prather rest his head on it.