There was no breath of wind and the sun glared down into the depression with summerlike warmth. Carver crawled back to the lowest point in his basin and divested himself of his jacket. An old brake block, dropped from some chuck wagon in the old days of the round-up, was grown half over with grass. He pried the block from its resting place and regarded it, then set to work, first draping his jacket the length of the twenty-inch slab of wood and observing the effect from one side. Then he padded one shoulder with matted dead grass. His knife, its point stabbed solidly into one edge of the block, served as a handle. He crawled north through the depression, one arm extended, his hand clasping the knife and holding the contraption two feet before him and elevated to a point some ten inches higher than his own head as he lay flat on the ground. He progressed slowly, squirming forward a few inches at a time, wondering meanwhile if any one peering through the grass from a short distance away would mistake it for the flat of a man’s back and the hump of his shoulders. He covered ten feet; fifteen. When one peered through the grass from a prone position the view was none too distinct at best. He hitched forward another two feet. Surely he was holding the decoy sufficiently high to bring it into Noll’s range of vision. Another hitch of two feet, and suddenly his wrist was jarred by the sharp sidewise wrench of the knife as a rifle shot crashed forth from sixty yards to the eastward and the heavy ball tore through the jacket and the block across which it was draped. Carver emitted a single coughing gasp. A split-second later he flung one arm aloft, the fingers outstretched, closing them tightly as the hand was withdrawn. Then he turned back and crawled to his first point of vantage where the scattering stems of coarse grass would tend to break up the view. An hour passed without a sound save the stamp of a hoof or the creak of leather as the two horses moved about a few yards away. A huge black buzzard wheeled high overhead. His spirals narrowed and a second vulture joined him. The two great birds soared on motionless wings a half-mile above the two quiet figures sprawled in the grass a stone’s throw apart, each invisible to the other but quite visible to the carrion birds that hovered over the spot. Carver longed for a smoke. The craving for a cigarette became almost irresistible and in order to combat this urge he forced himself to speculate as to the sensations of the man in the opposite dip in the ground. He concentrated on this line of thought until the study assumed actual interest.