A small heap of driftwood lay nearby. Wolfe took a knife from his pocket, whittled a few handfuls of shavings from a stick of dry heart-pine, and started a fire to keep off the bitter cold. When the wood was burning well, he tied a handkerchief about his throbbing head, removed his right boot and ripped the trousersleg to the knee, and bound his injured limb in a set of crude splints. The pain of the fracture was now as much as he could bear without shrieking.
He stretched himself out on his left side, with his back to the rock wall. Suddenly he realized that he was staring at the smaller end of the wild vine. It had been smoothly cut; his man had been waiting for him in the top of the hemlock that had supported it.
"Of course, that was it!" nodded Wolfe, with a bitter little smile. "I—I might have known."
Perhaps the robber, thinking him done for, had gone away for good. Then he would put out the fire, that the smoke from it might not reveal the fact that he was still alive. Anyway, he must begin dragging himself homeward. If Tot became so uneasy that she followed him, and something happened to her—the thought made Little Buck Wolfe's face as hard as a mask of marble.
But his precaution was for nothing. A pair of opaque, uncanny black eyes watched him toss the burning wood to the snow. He chanced to look toward the hemlock above; he saw Cat-Eye Mayfield standing with one lean shoulder touching the body of the tree. Mayfield wore Wolfe's coat and hat over his own coat and hat; around his slender waist was Wolfe's cartridge-belt, and in his hands was Wolfe's repeater.
The two men glared at each other for a full minute without speaking. Mayfield was proud of his cunning; his villainous triumph was written over his narrow, dark face and in his lustreless eyes. Wolfe was defiant, and so full of rage that every nerve and fibre of him trembled; the veins in his temples stood out and throbbed violently.
"Well?" snapped Wolfe.
"Haw-haw-haw!" laughed Mayfield. "Howdy, and hello! A-judgin' from the way ye've got that 'ar leg o' yore'n fixed up, Little Buck, I'd say ye'd missed yore callin'. Ye'd ort to been a doctor, shorely! Ye could git plenty o' cases o' bots and pip, anyhow—haw-haw-haw!"
Wolfe set his teeth together, and refused to reply. Mayfield became demoniacally sober, and asked abruptly, "How'd ye like to be shot?"
