And then came a cry such as no man had ever heard in Ghost Kloof before.

It was Stampede Smith.  A sheer twenty feet he had leaped to the carpet of sand, and as he jumped his hands whipped out his two guns, and scarcely had his feet touched the floor of the soft pocket in the ledge when death crashed from them swift as lightning flashes, and three of the five were tottering or falling before the other two could draw or swing a rifle.  Only one of them had fired a shot.  The other went down as if his legs had been knocked from under him by a club, and the one who fired bent forward then, as if making a bow to death, and pitched on his face.

And then Stampede Smith whirled upon John Graham.

During these few swift seconds Graham had stood stunned, with the girl crushed against his breast.  He was behind her, sheltered by her body, her head protecting his heart, and as Stampede turned he was drawing a gun, his dark face blazing with the fiendish knowledge that the other could not shoot without killing the girl.  The horror of the situation gripped Stampede.  He saw Graham’s pistol rise slowly and deliberately.  He watched it, fascinated.  And the look in Graham’s face was the cold and unexcited triumph of a devil.  Stampede saw only that face.  It was four inches—­perhaps five—­away from the girl’s.  There was only that—­and the extending arm, the crooking finger, the black mouth of the automatic seeking his heart.  And then, in that last second, straight into the girl’s staring eyes blazed Stampede’s gun, and the four inches of leering face behind her was suddenly blotted out.  It was Stampede, and not the girl, who closed his eyes then; and when he opened them and saw Mary Standish sobbing over Alan’s body, and Graham lying face down in the sand, he reverently raised the gun from which he had fired the last shot, and pressed its hot barrel to his thin lips.

Then he went to Alan.  He raised the limp head, while Mary bowed her face in her hands.  In her anguish she prayed that she, too, might die, for in this hour of triumph over Graham there was no hope or joy for her.  Alan was gone.  Only death could have come with that terrible red blot on his forehead, just under the gray streak in his hair.  And without him there was no longer a reason for her to live.

She reached out her arms.  “Give him to me,” she whispered.  “Give him to me.”

Through the agony that burned in her eyes she did not see the look in Stampede’s face.  But she heard his voice.

“It wasn’t a bullet that hit him,” Stampede was saying.  “The bullet hit a rock, an’ it was a chip from the rock that caught him square between the eyes.  He isn’t dead, and he ain’t going to die!”