For it was plain he was still
being followed. In the endless stretch of rolling hills he twice
caught sight of a rider picking his way toward him. The heart of
the guilty man was like water. He could not face the outraged
father, nor was it possible to escape so dogged a foe by flight.
An alternative suggested itself, and he accepted it with sinking
courage. The child was asleep in his arms now, and he hastily
dismounted, picketed his horse, and stole back a quarter of a
mile, so that the neighing of his bronco might not betray his
presence. Then he lay down in a dense mesquit thicket and waited
for his foe. It seemed an eternity till the man appeared at the
top of a rise fifty yards away. Hastily Anderson fired, and
again. The man toppled from his horse, dead before he struck the
ground. But when the cook reached him he was horrified to see
that the man he had killed was a member of the Rurales, or
Mexican border police. In his guilty terror he had shot the wrong
man.
He fled at once, pursued by a thousand fears. Late the next night
he reached a Chihuahua village, after having been lost for many
hours.
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