Again the man stood up and started across the wash. He no longer had his rifle. "It is as I thought," Pablo soliloquized. "He has buried the rifle in the sand." Pablo watched the man start resolutely across the three-mile stretch of flat ground between the river and the hills to the south. Don Nicolas Sandoval had remarked that the stranger had come in over the hills to the south. Very well! Believing himself undetected, he would depart in the same direction. The Rancho Palomar stretched ten miles to the south and it would be a strange coincidence if, in that stretch of rolling, brushy country, a human being should cross his path. The majordomo quickly crawled back into the draw where the black mare patiently awaited him. Leading her, he started cautiously down, taking advantage of every tuft of cover until, arrived at the foot of the draw, he discovered that some oaks effectually screened his quarry from sight. Reasoning quite correctly that the same oaks as effectually screened him from his quarry, Pablo mounted and galloped straight across country for his man. He rode easily, for he was saving the mare's speed for a purpose. The fugitive, casting a guilty look to the rear, saw him coming and paused, irresolute, but observing no evidences of precipitate haste, continued his retreat, which (Pablo observed, grimly) was casual now, as if he desired to avert suspicion. Pablo pulled the mare down to a trot, to a walk. He could afford to take his time and it was not part of his plan to bungle his work by undue baste. The fugitive was crossing through a patch of lilac and Pablo desired to overhaul him in a wide open space beyond, so he urged the mare to a trot again and jogged by on a parallel course, a hundred yards distant. "_Buena dias, senor_," he called, affably, and waved his hand at the stranger, who waved back. On went the old majordomo, across the clear space and into the oaks beyond. The fugitive, his suspicions now completely lulled, followed and when he was quite in the center of this chosen ground, Pablo emerged from the shelter of the oaks and bore down upon him. The mare was at a fast lope and Pablo's rawhide riata was uncoiled now; the loop swung in slow, fateful circles--