"It's a poor time for good friends to fall out," he said lightly. "I don't care the snap of my fingers who shot him, or why. He ought to have been shot a dozen years ago. And now I'll tell you what, I think, explains this business of some one being close behind us, if you are right in it. The big chance is that some one has been trailing Mexicali Joe all along; and dropped in behind us when we dropped in behind Joe. We've been doing a first-class job of sticking to cover; mind you, we haven't caught a second glimpse of Joe all this time, and therefore it is as likely as not that the gent whom you _feel_ to be trailing us hasn't caught a glimpse of us. If this is right, we've got a bully chance right now to prove it. We lie close where we are for ten minutes, and see if your hombre doesn't slip on by us, nosing along after Joe." In silence she acquiesced. That sense of the nearness of another unseen human being was insistent upon her. For a long time, as still as the deep-rooted trees about them, they crouched, listening, watching. She heard the watch ticking in Babe Deveril's pocket. She heard her own breathing and his. She heard the brownie birds threshing among dead leaves. Then there was the eternal whispering of the pines and the faint murmurings from the stream far down in the cañon. At last it would have been a relief to straining nerves if a man, or two or three men, had stepped into sight in the trail from which she and Deveril had withdrawn. For more certain than ever was Lynette Brooke, though she could give neither rhyme nor reason for that certainty, that her instincts had not tricked her. Therefore, instead of being reassured at seeing or hearing no one, she was depressed and made anxious; the silence became sinister, filled with vague threat; that she saw no one was explicable to her by but the one ominous condition: that person or those persons were watching even now, and knew where she and Babe Deveril hid, and did not mean to stir until first their quarry stirred. Why all this caution? She could not explain that to herself; if some one followed, why should that some one hide? Why not step out with gun levelled, and put an end to this grim game of hide-and-seek. "You see," whispered Deveril, "there is no one behind us." They had not moved for a full twenty minutes, and by now he began to convict her of nervous imaginings, fancies of an overwrought girl. But she answered him, saying with unshaken certainty: "I tell you, I know! Some one has been following us, and now is hiding and waiting for us to go on." "Well, you are right or wrong, and in either case I don't fancy this job of sitting so tight I feel as though I were growing roots. If you should happen to be right, we'll know in time, I suppose. Let's go!"