If the Mad Hunter kept his word, the officer had but a few minutes to live. He looked all about the vicinity, hoping he might see some chance of help. It was a desperate--a really hopeless thought. Who or what could save him now? Suddenly his eyes became fixed upon the spur of a hill that jutted out across a shallow valley. The lingering rays of the sun touched the hill-spur redly. It seemed much nearer to him than it really was, and along its brink came a horse and rider! The officer gasped; then held his breath, and did not change the mask of his face. He had learned long since to hide emotion; but this was a terrible situation, and he had almost lost his nerve. The horseman had evidently been about to descend into the valley, when his glance fell upon the two men standing like statues upon the opposite ridge. _He_ could see the giant huntsman, if the soldiers in the other valley could not. He saw at once the attitude of both men and understood. He drew rein, and the officer at the same moment recognized him. Unconsciously his lips parted, and the name of the rider came from the officer in a quick gasp: “Buffalo Bill!” The keen ear of the mad hercules caught the name, and, turning like a panther at bay, he saw the scout on the distant spur. As he moved, the officer’s hands dropped, and he seized the revolver from his belt. Throwing it forward, he pulled the trigger as the madman wheeled again toward him. But the hammer fell without exploding the cartridge. The madman laughed aloud. “No, no!” he shouted. “The bullet is not cast that will kill the Mad Hunter! The cartridge is not made that will injure me!” The officer found his pistol-hammer jammed. He could not cock the weapon again. With a wild shriek the maniac dropped his rifle, and, drawing his knife, flung himself at his victim, intending evidently to kill him with those slashes across the breast which usually marked his dead. But in that awful moment the doomed man’s eyes turned upon the distant spur, and he beheld the rifle rise to the horseman’s shoulder. Desperate as was the chance, Buffalo Bill intending risking a shot to save him. He flung himself backward, as the madman came on, leaving the field clear for the scout to fire. CHAPTER XXXI. BUFFALO BILL’S GREAT SHOT. In that instant, as he was falling backward upon the ground, knowing that if the huge madman reached him before Buffalo Bill’s bullet reached its mark he would be a dead man, a clear perception of the great mistake he had made flashed through the captain’s mind. He remembered that that morning when cleaning his revolver he had noticed something wrong with the hammer, and had put it aside, unloaded, to attend to later in the day. But as he started from the camp that evening to walk up the hill, and Texas Jack had called his warning to him, he had picked up the weapon and thrust it into his belt without looking at it.