“Bill! Oh, Bill!” Abington shouted between cupped hands. For the moment he had quite forgotten Bill’s treachery, in his human reaction to the sight of a familiar figure after the ordeal he had just passed through. “Oh, Bill! Hey!” The man’s face was upturned, staring. Then he raised his rifle and fired point-blank at Abington. The bullet struck a rock close by, ricochetted and nicked Abington across the forearm. “You poisonous reptile!” snarled Abington, and whipped out his automatic. At his first shot the figure went sprawling; tried to get up, fell back and lay still. Abington watched him, a bit heartsick over the excellence of his shot. He had never taken much to the manly sport of planting leaden pellets in living bodies, but since his work took him into the wild places of the world he had learned to shoot straight because it seemed to him a necessary accomplishment. Besides, straight shooting made an enormous saving in ammunition. “You would have it,” he grunted remorsefully. “Any jury would agree that my life is of more use to the world than yours--and since you are the killing kind it--” Down in the basin the wounded man struggled to hands and knees and began crawling; slowly, stopping every moment or two, going on, crawling in an aimless circle most horrible to watch. An oath voiced at random jarred out of Abington’s throat. He half raised the automatic, lowered it, shook his head. He couldn’t do it. But neither could he leave man nor animal crawling blindly, aimlessly around until he died. Abington looked again and turned away sickened at that creeping, groping, stricken thing hemmed in by the crimson rocks that rimmed the basin. * * * * * Without any clear purpose Abington started down the ridge, looking for some break in the cliff that separated him from the basin by a scant two hundred feet. He had no doubt that Bill Jonathan was done for; the automatic was a wicked weapon; the range was short. When in the dusk he came slipping and sliding down an old sheep trail long since abandoned for a more favored path, however, there was no wounded man to be seen in the little basin. Like a shot quail that flutters for a moment among the bushes and is lost, the man somehow had managed to crawl away and disappear. Abington called Bill’s name again and again while he lighted the carbide lamp. And as the white light sprang out and drove back the shadows, a gunshot roared just under the cliff for answer to his hail. As he leaped sidewise, Abington shut off the lamp, then rushed the spot where the gun had flashed. By good luck he spied the vague bulk just as the rifle was being painfully lifted for another shot. He snatched at the barrel and wrenched the gun free--by the feeble resistance of the other gauging shrewdly his waning strength. “Venomous kind of snake, aren’t you?” Abington observed with pitying contempt, as he leaned the rifle against the cliff and started to relight the lamp.