Then Mr. Masterson began to wish he had something to eat. He might have found a turkey in the brush-clumps along the Medicine Lodge. He might have risked the noise of a shot, being so far ahead. But Mr. Masterson did not care to eat a turkey raw and he dared not chance a smoke; the Tomcat would have read the sign for miles and crept aside. Mr. Masterson drew his belt tighter by a hole and thought on other things than breakfast. It wouldn’t be the first time that he had missed a meal, and with that thought he consoled himself. It is an empty form of consolation, as one who tries may tell. “If there’s anything I despise, it’s hunger,” said Mr. Masterson. He was a desperate fork at table. Mr. Masterson lay out of view and kept his glasses on a strip five miles away, where the trail ribboned over a swell. There, in the end, he found what he sought; he made out the Tomcat, a bobbing speck in the distance. Mr. Masterson put aside his glasses and planted himself where he would do the most good. While concealed he still commanded the approach to the ford. To give his presence weight Mr. Masterson had his sixteen-pound buffalo gun. “As I remember this party,” soliloquised Mr. Masterson, “I don’t reckon now he’s got sense enough to surrender when he’s told. And when I think of that little lady dead in Dodge I don’t feel like taking many chances. I’ll hail him, and if he hesitates, the risk is his.” Thirty minutes had come and gone since Mr. Masterson, through his glasses, followed the Tomcat down the far-off slope. Shylock, staunch as whalebone though he was, had found the clip a killer. He was not covering ground as in the beginning. There they were at last, the weary pony and the hunted man, both showing the wear and tear of pace. Ballard ready on his hip, the Tomcat, giving a nervous over-shoulder look, brought Shylock to a walk. The broken pony came stumbling down to the ford. Mr. Masterson, with his mighty buffalo gun, aroused himself for official business. “Drop that rifle!” said Mr. Masterson. It was like a bolt from the blue to the spent and shaken Tomcat. He caught his breath in a startled way. Then, despair standing in the stead of courage, he tossed the Ballard into his left hand and fired, point-blank, at Mr. Masterson’s face where it showed above the bank. The bullet tossed the dust a yard to the left. Mixed bloods and Indians at their best are but poor hands with a rifle, and the Tomcat was at his worst. With the crack of the Ballard came the bellow of the Sharp’s. The great bullet, which would have torn its way through the vitals of a buffalo-bull at eight hundred yards, brought the Tomcat whirling from the saddle like a stricken wild duck. What with sheer weariness and an inadvertent yank at the Spanish bits as the Tomcat went overboard, poor Shylock crossed his tired forelegs, tripped, blundered, and fell. He came down on the Tomcat; in the scramble to get to his feet Shylock fell upon the Tomcat again.