“He will have it,” said the trooper hoarsely.  “If he rides one of us down he may get away.”

“We have got to stop him,” said Corporal Payne.

Once more the swaying man straightened himself, flung his head back, and with a little breathless laugh drove his horse furiously at Payne.  He was very close now, and his face showed livid under the smearing dust, but his lips were drawn up in a little bitter smile as he rode straight upon the leveled carbines.  Payne, at least, understood it, and the absence of flung-up hand or cry.  Courthorne’s inborn instincts were strong to the end.

There was a hoarse shout from the trooper, and no answer, and a carbine flashed.  Then Courthorne loosed the bridle, reeled sideways from the saddle, rolled half round with one foot in the stirrup and his head upon the ground, and was left behind, while the riderless horse and pursuer swept past the two men who, avoiding them by a hairsbreadth, sat motionless a moment in the thin drifting smoke.

Then Corporal Payne swung himself down, and, while the trooper followed, stooped over the man who lay, a limp huddled object, in the trail.  He blinked up at them out of eyes that were almost closed.

“I think you have done for me,” he said.

Payne glanced at his comrade.  “Push on to the settlement,” he said.  “They’ve a doctor there.  Bring him and Harland the magistrate out.”

The trooper seemed glad to mount and ride away, and Payne once more bent over the wounded man.

“Very sorry,” he said.  “Still, you see, you left me no other means of stopping you.  Now, is there anything I can do for you?”

A little wry smile crept into Courthorne’s face.  “Don’t worry,” he said.  “I had no wish to wait for the jury, and you can’t get at an injury that’s inside me.”

He said nothing more, and it seemed a very long while to Corporal Payne, and Trooper Hilton, who rejoined him, before a wagon with two men in it beside the trooper came jolting up the trail.  They got out, and one of them who was busy with Courthorne for some minutes nodded to Payne.

“Any time in the next twelve hours.  He may last that long,” he said.  “Nobody’s going to worry him now, but I’ll see if I can revive him a little when we get him to Adamson’s.  It can’t be more than a league away.”

They lifted Courthorne, who appeared insensible, into the wagon, and Payne signed to Trooper Hilton.  “Take my horse, and tell Colonel Barrington.  Let him understand there’s no time to lose.  Then you can bring Stimson.”

The tired lad hoisted himself into his saddle, and groaned a little as he rode away, but he did his errand, and late that night Barrington and Dane drove up to a lonely homestead.  A man led them into a room where a limp figure was lying on a bed.

“Been kind of sleeping most of the day, but the doctor has given him something that has wakened him,” he said.