There now was plenty of cover between him and Repeater, but there was still too little distance between him and Fleming; and the latter was a disconcertingly good shot. Two quick reports sounded from the house and Johnny smiled; the man at the door was seeing things, and backing his imagination with lead. Johnny was watching a ridge behind him. "Me an' Repeater are goin' to argue," he remarked, and almost fired when a sombrero slowly arose on the skyline. "Cussed near bit," he chuckled; "but you got to have yore head in that bonnet before I lets drive." A matted tuft of grass on the top of the ridge moved so gently that only a very observant eye would have detected it. Johnny's Sharp's roared, and instantly was answered from a point a yard away from the stirring clump of grass, the bullet fanning his face. "Yo're too cussed tricky," grunted Johnny; "but I got a few of my own." Leaving his rifle lying so that its barrel barely projected into sight, he slipped into a gulley and crept toward the west, a Colt in his hand. Repeater again stirred the grass tuft, and then he found a rock about the size of a man's head and pushed it up to the skyline of the ridge. Nothing happened. "If my hair wasn't so red," he murmured, "I'd take a peek. It's an awful cross for a man to bear." He was a cheerful cattle-thief and did not get easily discouraged. Also, he was something of a genius, as he proved by putting his sombrero on the rock and raising the decoy high enough in the grass for the hat brim to show. "Shoot, cuss you!" he grunted, leveling his rifle; and then as the uneventful seconds passed he grew fault-finding and used bad language. Suddenly a suspicion flashed across his mind. "That would fool a man with second sight," he muttered. "Somethin's plumb wrong; an' I think I better move. That bowlder over there looks good." And as he crawled behind it a pair of keen eyes barely caught sight of his disappearing heel. "That man's got th' right to wear expensive hats," grinned Johnny, squatting behind a great mass of lava; and his grin widened as he glimpsed the sombrero-topped rock. "Yes, sir: he's got a head worth 'em; an' if I don't watch him close I'll grab holt of th' wrong end of somethin'." Across the valley Fleming, having cleared his eyes of sand, was rapidly recovering his normal vision and was preparing with cheerful optimism to bombard everything which looked capable of sheltering his enemy, when a movement north of and far behind the suspected area acted upon him galvanically. He threw the rifle to his shoulder without elevating the sight, raised it instinctively to the angle of maximum range and squeezed the trigger. He did not expect a hit, and he did not get one; but he caused his friendship to be strongly doubted.