Chapter VI

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Monk and Ham were taken completely by surprise. They just now realized something was wrong.

Doc, having missed the fellow, stumbled. He was on his knees. There wasn't a chance of him reaching the other before the guns got going. He again did what he could, which was grab a handful of dust—it was a dusty spot, fortunately—and slam it into the man's eyes.

The dust blinded the man.

Doc said, “He's a fake!” That was for Monk and Ham.

The fellow's guns began going off. He was, Doc realized with the first shot, something of a wizard with handguns. He was nothing to fool with. He was blinded now, but he was still nothing to fool with.

Almost under Doc's right elbow was a small ditch. It was from the edge of this that he had snatched the dust.

The ditch was typical of the cow country, a cowtrail which had washed to a depth of eighteen inches or so.

Doc rolled into the ditch. It made a fair foxhole. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Monk and Ham making for shelter.

HIS first thought, when he was in the ditch, was that he had made a mistake. Possibly he had. Perhaps he should have tackled the man, and tried to get the guns away from the fellow.

But from the way the man was throwing lead around, his guns would soon be empty anyway.

Monk and Ham stopped running. Their foot−pounding ended in a scuffling, sliding, proof they had dived behind something or into something. Probably another ditch.

The man's guns kept going bang and bang. The last few shots, he grew cunning. He would listen, then shoot at sounds, or what he imagined were sounds. Doc, by tossing some small clods from the ditch sides, made him some sounds.

Doc realized with horror that he'd lost track of how many times the man had fired.

“Monk?”

“Yes?”

“How many times has he shot?”

“I didn't count,” Monk said.

“Ham?”

“I didn't count either,” Ham said.

The man had stopped shooting.

The skin crawled on Doc's back. He knew he had to do something. Were the man's guns empty? Was that why he had stopped firing. Or had he gotten the dust out of his eyes? Maybe he could see that there wasn't a target, Chapter VI

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and was waiting for one.

He might be reloading the guns, on the other hand. It was a devilish predicament, and Doc knew he would have to put his head out of the ditch and see what was going on. Soon. In the next five or ten seconds. A little time, but it seemed like a lot.

Then the situation solved itself. Or was solved—by a rifle shot. A shot from some distance. But first there was the scream— sock! of a high−powered rifle bullet going past and getting into a body.

Doc lifted his head quickly. Surprise made him pop up for a look.

He saw the man leaning backward. The man was drawn up very stiff and tight, his shoulders pulled up almost to his ears, his mouth a wide awful hole of effort, his fingers splayed out and rigid with muscular spasm, the cause of such a muscular convulsion being the bullet which had hit him in the head. He was leaning backward and now he was falling. The muscular tightness was an instant's thing, and was out of his body quickly, so that he really fell loosely, like sacked flesh as he landed on the earth.

Chapter VII

DOC SAVAGE sank back into the ditch. He said, “Keep down, fellows.”

“What happened?” Monk demanded.

“Someone shot him.”

“Who?”

Doc didn't answer.

There was stillness. The shooting had silenced the birds which had been in the surrounding red oaks. A bob−white had been whistling somewhere, but now the bird was still. Two crows had beaten up out of the woods and were flying low and fast, leaving.

Doc lay very still, listening. There was a breeze and it brought him burned powder smell, evidently from the dead man's gun, because there was also the smell of blood. Doc shivered. Blood, he thought, doesn't exactly have an odor. It is more of a presence, of sickness.

Finally Monk said, “Whoever shot him must be a friend of ours.”

“Keep out of sight,” Doc repeated.

He considered the situation for a while. He was frightened. It was natural, he supposed, to be scared. But it wasn't a comfortable thing to stop and think about. One shouldn't think, shouldn't analyze personal feelings at any rate, in such a situation.

He squirmed out of his coat. He got the coat off without lifting from the ditch. He rolled the coat into a cylinder. It was a brown tweed coat and made a brown cylinder somewhat the color of his own bronzed face.

On it he put his hat.