His head was bare--simply because a bullet
had taken his hat away. His blond hair was filled with sand. His
face was sweating. But his blue eyes were alight with a grim sort
of humor, though he knew that unless the other fellow's ammunition
ran out he was going to die.
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.
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