As Carver crossed over a ridge he saw Noll again, only his head and shoulders visible as he rode straight away a scant two hundred yards ahead. Apparently he had no suspicion that there was a man on his trail, yet it seemed certain that before now he would have halted under cover of some ridge to scan his back track and ascertain if he were followed. If he discovered a rider behind him he would halt again at some other point to determine if others rode with the first.
It suddenly occurred to Carver that the swift lessening of distance between them was occasioned by this very thing. Noll had stopped under cover to view his back track; had halted again to make sure that but one man followed his trail. Even as this thought flashed into his mind Carver flung from the saddle and dropped flat on the ground.
He had ridden the length of a shallow draw and he left it only to discover that the landscape had flattened out into low waves of ground. It was the sight of the upper half of a riderless horse standing in the shallow depression beyond one of these waves which had occasioned his sudden fling from the saddle. Noll had dismounted in the next dip ahead, intending to shoot as Carver rode into sight.
Carver lay flat on his face and crawled thirty feet to the north through the shallow basin that sheltered him, then lifted his head cautiously and inspected his surroundings. His range was limited to a distance of fifty yards north and south. He might crawl back west for some twenty yards. The character of his surroundings rendered it impossible for him to move beyond this restricted area without showing himself to the man who was cached in a similar depression somewhere less than seventy yards east of him. And in all the shallow dip there was not one point of sufficient depth to permit of his straightening up on his knees without danger of bringing his head into view of the man who waited for him over across.
Inch by inch, Carver worked his way toward a spot where a few straggling stems of tall grass were scattered about. Poor cover this, yet even a few spears of grass break up the view to a surprising extent when one is prone on the ground. In thirty minutes he had covered as many feet. He removed his hat and elevated his head.
First he studied the character of Noll’s retreat,—a depression similar to the one which afforded him shelter, a trifle deeper perhaps and of slightly greater area. But Noll could not progress a hundred yards in any direction without coming into his view. Carver knew that somewhere over there Noll was watching for the first glimpse of him. He could see the empty scabbard on Lassiter’s saddle and knew that he was armed with a rifle. His own rifle remained on the saddle of the horse he could not reach without showing himself to Noll and he was armed only with the gun on his belt.
“He’s got me handicapped a trifle on location and weapons,” Carver reflected. “It’ll narrow down now to which one has the other out-guessed for patience. What happened to Brad has put me in the humor to go through with my job.”
There was no breath of wind and the sun glared down into the depression with summerlike warmth. Carver crawled back to the lowest point in his basin and divested himself of his jacket. An old brake block, dropped from some chuck wagon in the old days of the round-up, was grown half over with grass. He pried the block from its resting place and regarded it, then set to work, first draping his jacket the length of the twenty-inch slab of wood and observing the effect from one side. Then he padded one shoulder with matted dead grass. His knife, its point stabbed solidly into one edge of the block, served as a handle. He crawled north through the depression, one arm extended, his hand clasping the knife and holding the contraption two feet before him and elevated to a point some ten inches higher than his own head as he lay flat on the ground. He progressed slowly, squirming forward a few inches at a time, wondering meanwhile if any one peering through the grass from a short distance away would mistake it for the flat of a man’s back and the hump of his shoulders. He covered ten feet; fifteen. When one peered through the grass from a prone position the view was none too distinct at best. He hitched forward another two feet. Surely he was holding the decoy sufficiently high to bring it into Noll’s range of vision. Another hitch of two feet, and suddenly his wrist was jarred by the sharp sidewise wrench of the knife as a rifle shot crashed forth from sixty yards to the eastward and the heavy ball tore through the jacket and the block across which it was draped. Carver emitted a single coughing gasp. A split-second later he flung one arm aloft, the fingers outstretched, closing them tightly as the hand was withdrawn. Then he turned back and crawled to his first point of vantage where the scattering stems of coarse grass would tend to break up the view.
An hour passed without a sound save the stamp of a hoof or the creak of leather as the two horses moved about a few yards away. A huge black buzzard wheeled high overhead. His spirals narrowed and a second vulture joined him. The two great birds soared on motionless wings a half-mile above the two quiet figures sprawled in the grass a stone’s throw apart, each invisible to the other but quite visible to the carrion birds that hovered over the spot. Carver longed for a smoke. The craving for a cigarette became almost irresistible and in order to combat this urge he forced himself to speculate as to the sensations of the man in the opposite dip in the ground. He concentrated on this line of thought until the study assumed actual interest.
Noll, being uncertain on several points, would soon become restless, Carver reflected. He was half-convinced that Carver was dead. His thoughts would constantly revert to that coughing gasp that had followed his shot, that up-flung arm with the fingers clutching spasmodically at nothing. Carver had no such uncertainty to disturb him and congratulated himself upon this fact. Point by point he compared his own plight with that of the enemy.