The light flared up. Abington stooped, gave a shocked exclamation as he started back, recovered himself and stooped again. The man was not Bill Jonathan, but a gaunt old fellow with high cheek bones and a straight gash of a mouth drawing an evil line through his grizzled beard. He was a total stranger, wounded and collapsed against the cliff; beaten and utterly passive now, like a trapped animal that will not move unless it sees some chance of escape. “By Jove, I’m glad it wasn’t Bill, at any rate!” Abington ejaculated as he knelt to make a superficial examination. “Shot through the side,” he diagnosed to himself. “Well below the heart. Serious enough, but by no means fatal with the proper care--and that is going to be something of a problem in existing conditions. Might better have made a clean job of it--glad I didn’t, though. “Well,” he asked aloud, “where’s your camp? If it doesn’t involve too much climbing I’ll try and get you home.” He waited while the old man’s eyes remained fixed on him with a baleful stare. “Doesn’t understand, maybe.” He tried French, German and a passable Italian, keenly watching the eyes that never once changed their homicidal glare. He sat back on his haunches and studied the glowering face with less personal emotion than he would have displayed before an odd pattern of the Maya death mask, and decided that the man had understood his first question well enough and was merely stubborn. “Of course, if you want to lie here all night, that’s your privilege, I suppose,” Abington said finally, standing up and glancing around at the confining walls of the dusk-filled basin. He turned the light again on the old man’s forbidding countenance, made more sinister by the pain he was suffering. “Are your field glasses equipped with night lenses?” Abington asked abruptly, and silently laughed at the startled wavering of those colorless eyes. “Thought so! Now, since you do understand plain English, let me urge you to tell me where I’ll find your camp. Of course you have one, for you’re too well nourished and too well dressed to be living off the country. You won’t talk? Then you are likely to catch cold in that wound, lying out here all night. And I can assure you that a bullet wound--especially in the body--can give plenty of trouble if neglected.” The thin, vindictive mouth, clamped shut in that thick unkempt beard, might have been dumb for all the sound that issued from it. * * * * * Abington rose and went seeking here and there with a light hoping to discover some sign of a camp, or at least a trail that would lead to one. He did not succeed, but he did find the field glasses which had been dropped or cannily hidden under a bush, where they might have been overlooked if the light had not brought a reflection from the lenses. He was looking them over when, from up on the ridge where the sheep had disappeared, a voice that could belong to no man save Bill shouted anxiously: