He suited his action to the words and jumped his horse off down the bottoms. He waved her over to one side.
"Keep well away from me!" he ordered. "They don't want you."
They hung their spurs into their mounts and the horses plunged down the steeply-pitching bottoms, vaulting sage clumps and bounding along the cow trails that threaded the brush. Two hundred yards below the cow the draw made an elbow bend. The girl rounded it and as Harris followed a jump behind he felt a jarring tug at the cantle of his saddle and the thin, sharp crack of a rifle reached him. The gulch made a reverse bend and as they swept around it Harris swung sidewise in the saddle and looked back. They were entirely sheltered from any point on the divide six hundred yards behind them. He pulled his horse to a swinging trot and they rode down the sloping meadow that led straight to the main valley.
"It was certainly stupid of me not to know right off that it was a decoy," he said. "A man just out to act spiteful would have piled up a dozen cows at one stand and left. He's downed one every day—in plain sight of the divide we'd follow on the circle, knowing that I'd soon ride down to look one over myself. All he had to do was to cache himself on the far side, watch for me to ride down, wait until the rest had gone on and climb to the divide and pot me. And it would have been so dead easy to turn the tables and bushwhack him," he added regretfully. "If only I'd have used my head in time."
A sick chill swept the girl as she thought of an enemy with the patience to kill a cow every day, use it for a decoy and wait for a chance at his human prey.
The cows that grazed on the meadow raced off ahead of them. A bunch of wild range horses swept up the broken slopes and wheeled to watch them pass.
"We didn't get started any too soon," Harris said. "His horse wasn't more than a hundred feet beyond the notch when he blew off and warned us—not time for me to get cached and drop him as he topped the ridge."
The girl's eyes suddenly riveted on a small round hole in the cantle of his saddle where the ball had entered. On the inside and far to the left extremity of the cantle a ragged gash showed where if had passed out. The shot had been fired as he wheeled round the sharp bend, quartering away from the man above, but even then the ball had not missed his left hip to exceed an inch.
She started her horse so suddenly that before he realized her purpose she was well in the lead and going at a dead run toward the mouth of the gulch where it opened out into the main bottoms two hundred yards beyond.
From the opposite slope riders were hazing cows out of their respective draws; some had reached the wagon; others were coming down from above. The running horse caught every man's eye as the girl careened out into the center of the valley, rose in her stirrups and waved an arm in a circle above her head. In five seconds riders were whirling in behind her from all directions as she headed for the wagon.