A short distance ahead of the point where he now stood, between it and the posse coming slowly down the valley, a fainter road crossed toward the hills he sought. At a bend, in a little hollow shaded by a live-oak, a mossy watering-trough dripped, and toward the trough a boy was riding at a walk, on a young horse, bareback. Bending low, Collins glided through the brush, down the hillside, and gained a patch of woods that, paralleling the main road along which the two posses were converging, extended to the trough. He stepped out of the fringe of willows just as the boy brought his horse to a stop beneath the live-oak. Men’s voices came to him from the junction of the roads, one hundred yards away; the posse from up the valley was passing it.
The boy, startled, threw his eyes toward the crackling twigs and looked into the muzzle of the rifle. “Get off that horse,” Collins said, and took a step toward the trough.
The boy slid to the ground along the horse’s gleaming flank; the man, watching him narrow-
