Still the boy did not fire.  He waited till the last of the party appeared, a man in fringed buckskin breeches and hickory shirt riding pillion behind a young woman.  Both of these were white.

The sawed-off gun of Thursday covered the second rider carefully.  Before the sound of the shot boomed down the gorge the Apache was lifted from the bare back of the pony.  The heavy charge of buckshot had riddled him through and through.

Instantly the slim, young brave in the lead dug his heels into the flank of his pony, swung low to the far side so that only a leg was visible, and flew arrow-straight up the canon for safety.  Thursday let him go.

Twice his rifle rang out.  At that distance it was impossible for a good shot to miss.  One bullet passed through the head of the third Mescalero.  The other brought down the pony upon which the whites were riding.

The fall of the horse flung the girl free, but the foot of her captor was caught between the saddle and the ground.  Thursday drew a bead on him while he lay there helpless, but some impulse of mercy held his hand.  The man was that creature accursed in the border land, a renegade who has turned his face against his own race and must to prove his sincerity to the tribe out-Apache an Apache at cruelty.  Still, he was white after all—­and Jim Thursday was only eighteen.

Rifle in hand the boy clambered down the jagged rock wall to the dry river-bed below.  The foot of his high-heeled boot was soggy with blood, but for the present he had to ignore the pain messages that throbbed to his brain.  The business on hand would not wait.

While Thursday was still slipping down from one outcropping ledge of rock to another, a plunge of the wounded horse freed the renegade.  The man scrambled to his feet and ran shakily for the shelter of a boulder.  In his hurry to reach cover he did not stop to get the rifle that had been flung a few yards from him when he fell.

The boy caught one glimpse of that evil, fear-racked face.  The blood flushed his veins with a surge of triumph.  He was filled with the savage, primitive exultation of the head-hunter.  For four years he had slept on the trail of this man and had at last found him.  The scout had fought the Apaches impersonally, without rancor, because a call had come to him that he could not ignore.  But now the lust of blood was on him.  He had become that cold, implacable thing known throughout the West as a “killer.”

The merciless caution that dictates the methods of a killer animated his movements now.  Across the gulch, nearly one hundred and fifty yards from him, the renegade lay crouched.  A hunched shoulder was just visible.

Thursday edged carefully along the ledge.  He felt for holds with his hand and feet, for not once did his gaze lift from that patch of hickory shirt.  The eyes of the boy had narrowed to slits of deadly light.  He was wary as a hungry wolf and as dangerous.  That the girl had disappeared around the bend he did not know.  His brain functioned for just one purpose—­to get the enemy with whom he had come at last to grips.