Beck had dismounted and was squatted beside the scar in the rocks. His roan stood a dozen feet behind him. McKee peered out, measuring the distance quickly. The other's back was to him but there was no chance that he could regain his gun without being detected. Beck's revolver swung from his hip, and McKee had nothing with which to fight but the rope in his hands....
The rope! He stared down at it and drew back behind the boulder of rock. The rope!
An absurd, impotent device, but it had served purposes as desperate as this! Besides ... there was a hope in it and, for McKee, there was no other hope beneath that blue dome of sky....
He looked out again as he built his loop. Beck was on hands and knees, peering down into the crack through which stored waters had trickled away. Sam made the loop quickly, steeled to caution. He moved out from his hiding place a step ... then another. The roan looked up, with a little whiff of breath and Beck, attracted by the movement, the slight noise, turned his head sharply toward the horse.
It was then that the loop swirled and that McKee sped forward a dozen paces as quickly, as quietly as a cat, balanced, sure of himself in that crisis. From the tail of his eye Beck saw the first loop cut the corner of his range of vision and his body made the first lunge toward an erect position as the lithe writhing thing sped through the air....
McKee had never thrown as true. The loop settled about Tom's arms and beneath his knees. It came taut with an angry rip through the hondou even as the snared man made the first move to throw it off. He was pitched violently forward on his face, arms pinned to his sides, legs doubled against his stomach.
The breath went from him in an angry oath of surprise as McKee's breath shot from his lips in another oath ... of triumph. Hand over hand he went down the rope, keeping it taut, yet hastening to reach the doubled body before Beck could wriggle free. He fell upon the other just as one arm worked slack enough to permit the hand to strain for the revolver at his hip.
Snarling, gibbering with a mingling of terror and rage, McKee's one hand fastened on the gun. He clung to the rope with the other, battering Beck, who struggled to rise, back to earth with his knees. His fingers clamped on the grip of the Colt; he pulled free: it flashed in the air as his thumb sought the hammer and then, as he drove the muzzle downward against its living target the man beneath him bowed and writhed and he went over with a cry. A fist struck his wrist, the revolver exploded in the air and fell clattering, a dozen feet away.
Then it was man to man, a fight of bone and muscle ... bone, muscle and rope. Blindly McKee clung to the strand with one hand. It passed about his body as they rolled over. Beck's own weight, struggling to tear from it, tightened its hold. Tom struck savagely at the face beside him with his one free fist but McKee's knees, jamming into his stomach, crushed breath from him.
For one vibrant instant their strength was matched, the one's physical advantage offset by the handicap of the lariat about him. And then the rope told. Slowly Tom's resistance became less, gradually McKee wound the hemp about his own hand and wrist, shutting down its sinuous grasp, drawing Beck's body into a more compact knot. With a desperate shift he was on top, winding the hard-twist about Tom's hands, trussing them tightly behind his back, licking his lips as he made his victim secure.