Here he found it strangely awkward and even perilous to dismount without his hands to balance his weight, as he shifted out of the stirrups.  In spite of his care, he stumbled over a loose rock as he struck the ground and rolled flat on his back.  He got up, grinding his teeth.  His hands were tied behind him.  He turned his back on the broken rock and sawed the ropes against it.  To his dismay he felt the rock edge crumble away.  It was some chalky, friable stuff, and it gave at the first friction.

Beads of moisture started out on the sheriff’s forehead.  Hastily he started on down the arroyo and found another rock, with an edge not nearly so favorable in appearance, but this time it was granite.  He leaned his back against it and rubbed with a short shoulder motion until his arms ached, but it was a happy labor.  He felt the rock edge taking hold of the ropes, fraying the strands to weakness, and then eating into them.  It was very slow work!

The sun drifted up to noon, and still he was leaning against that rock, working patiently, with his head near to bursting, and perspiration, which he could not wipe away, running down to blind him.  Finally, when his brain was beginning to reel with the heat, and his shoulders ached to numbness, the last strand parted.  The sheriff dropped down to the ground to rest.

Presently he drew out his jackknife and methodically cut the remaining bonds.  It came to him suddenly, as he stood up, that someone might have seen this singular performance and carried the tale away for future laughter.  The thought drove the sheriff mad.  He swung savagely into the saddle and drove his horse at a dead run among the perilous going of that gorge.  When he reached the plain he paused, hesitant between a bulldog desire to follow the trail single-handed into the mountains and run down the pair, and a knowledge that he who retreats has an added power that would make such a pursuit rash beyond words.

A phrase which he had coined for the gossips of Woodville, came back into his mind.  He was no longer as young as he once was, and even at his prime he shrewdly doubted his ability to cope with Riley Sinclair.  With the weight of Gaspar thrown in, the thing became an impossibility.  Gaspar might be a weakling, but a man who was capable of murder was always dangerous.

To have been thwarted once was shame enough, but he dared not risk two failures with one man.  He must have help in plenty from Woodville, and, fate willing, he would one day have the pleasure of looking down into the dead face of Sinclair; one day have the unspeakable joy of seeing the slender form of Gaspar dangling from the end of a rope.

His mind was filled with the wicked pleasure of these pictures until he came suddenly upon Woodville.  He drew his horse back to a dogtrot to enter the town.

It was a short street that led through Woodville, but, short though it was, the news that something was wrong with the sheriff reached the heart of the town before he did.  Men were already pouring out on the veranda of the hotel.