Abington looked down a sheer wall of rock to a deep basin where grass grew and a round pool of water held like a mirror the rose-tinted reflection of the cloud straight overhead. One steep trail led down the farther hillside to the pool and as he gazed a mountain sheep went bounding up that trail. On the brink of the pool stood a man foreshortened to the height of a boy. He seemed to be staring after the sheep.
“Bill! Oh, Bill!” Abington shouted between cupped hands. For the moment he had quite forgotten Bill’s treachery, in his human reaction to the sight of a familiar figure after the ordeal he had just passed through. “Oh, Bill! Hey!”
The man’s face was upturned, staring. Then he raised his rifle and fired point-blank at Abington. The bullet struck a rock close by, ricochetted and nicked Abington across the forearm.
“You poisonous reptile!” snarled Abington, and whipped out his automatic.
At his first shot the figure went sprawling; tried to get up, fell back and lay still. Abington watched him, a bit heartsick over the excellence of his shot. He had never taken much to the manly sport of planting leaden pellets in living bodies, but since his work took him into the wild places of the world he had learned to shoot straight because it seemed to him a necessary accomplishment. Besides, straight shooting made an enormous saving in ammunition.
“You would have it,” he grunted remorsefully. “Any jury would agree that my life is of more use to the world than yours—and since you are the killing kind it—”
Down in the basin the wounded man struggled to hands and knees and began crawling; slowly, stopping every moment or two, going on, crawling in an aimless circle most horrible to watch.
An oath voiced at random jarred out of Abington’s throat. He half raised the automatic, lowered it, shook his head. He couldn’t do it. But neither could he leave man nor animal crawling blindly, aimlessly around until he died. Abington looked again and turned away sickened at that creeping, groping, stricken thing hemmed in by the crimson rocks that rimmed the basin.
Without any clear purpose Abington started down the ridge, looking for some break in the cliff that separated him from the basin by a scant two hundred feet. He had no doubt that Bill Jonathan was done for; the automatic was a wicked weapon; the range was short.