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"Sorry I can't bury you old man," was Billy's parting comment, as he climbed over the breastwork and melted into the night. Billy Byrne moved cautiously through the darkness, and he moved not in the direction of escape and safety but directly up the canyon in the way that the village of the Pimans lay.

Above them all was silence, yet Billy knew that alert, red foemen were creeping to the edge of the bluff in search of their prey. If he could but reach the shelter of the bowlders before the Pimans discovered them!

"Well," said Billy, as the others drew around him for consultation, "they'd be goin' to the hills there. They was Pimans Esteban's tribe. They got her up there in the hills somewheres. Let's split up an' search the hills for her. Whoever comes on 'em first'll have to do some shootin' and the rest of us can close in an' help.

Billy turned to look at him when the last of the Pimans was disposed of, and seeing his condition kneeled beside him and took his head in the hollow of an arm. "You orter lie still," he cautioned the Kansan. "Tain't good for you to move around much." "It was worth it," whispered Eddie. "Say, but that was some scrap.

Far above the watcher a spring of clear, pure water bubbled out of the mountain-side, and running downward formed little pools among the rocks which held it. And with this water the Pimans irrigated their small fields before it sank from sight again into the earth just below their village. Beside the brown body lay a long rifle.

Barbara Harding had not cried out nor attempted to, for she had seen very shortly after her capture that she was in the hands of Indians and she judged from what she had heard of the little band of Pimans who held forth in the mountains to the east that they would as gladly knife her as not.

One by one the Pimans dropped until but a single Indian rushed frantically upon the white man, and then the last of the assailants lunged forward across the breastwork with a bullet from Billy's carbine through his forehead. Eddie Shorter had raised himself painfully upon an elbow that he might witness the battle, and when it was over he sank back, the blood welling from between his set teeth.

"How should he know anything about it? It's all a mystery to me you here, of all men in the world, and Grayson talking about you as the prisoner. I can't make it out. Quick, though, Byrne, tell me all you know about Barbara." Billy kept Grayson covered as he replied to the request of Harding. "This guy hires a bunch of Pimans to steal Miss Barbara," he said.

I ain't never been up here so I ain't familiar with the country. You see we don't run no cattle this side the river the Pimans won't let us. They don't care to have no white men pokin' round in their country; but I'll bet a hat we find a camp there." Onward they rode toward the little spot of green.