Rick stared at his pal. Scotty could mean only one thing. "Then he had no intention of hitting us?"
"I doubt it. He was shooting at short range, and even a poor shot couldn't very well have missed as often as he did. Besides, I don't think you'd find many poor shots with rifles in this country."
"Then he must have been trying to scare us off," Rick said thoughtfully. "When you started heaving rocks at him, he knew we weren't scaring very much."
"Not much," Scotty said ruefully. "I don't know about you, but my innards turned to custard."
Rick grinned. He knew exactly what Scotty meant. "If things had happened a little more slowly, I'd have dropped dead from sheer fright. But I didn't have time. Anyway, when you started with your sling, he had a choice of shooting for keeps or getting out of there. So he got. Is that how you figure it?"
"Exactly right. What other explanation is there? Stones against rifle slugs isn't much of a contest. I only tried it because there wasn't anything else to do."
"We could have stayed under cover until Mac and Pancho arrived," Rick pointed out.
"Negative. All he had to do was shift position and he'd have had a clear shot at us."
That was true, Rick realized. "But why did he try to scare us off?"
"It beats me. He wasn't a guard, I'm sure. If he was guarding something, he wouldn't have ridden off and left us there. And there wasn't anything personal in it, because he waved at me like an old pal. It was a kind of humorous wave. You know? Real jaunty."