Page:Sheep Limit (1928).pdf/269

 Rawlins made a grab and caught the back of his jumper.

"Get behind something, Peck! Here—down with you—quick!"

Rawlins was down on elbows and knees behind a clump of sage, with its little wart of earth heaped and held around its deep-striking, wide-spread roots. Old Peck stood looking down at him curiously, both hands gripping his gun, as if he did not understand the reason for a man whose valor he never had doubted up to that moment being in such a sweat to get something between himself and trouble.

The three sheep-killers were charging up, well spread out, their shots cutting the bushes over Rawlins' head. He pulled Peck's leg, wasting valuable time to get the old rascal, brave in a simpleton's ignorance of his danger, down out of that buzzing hot stream of lead.

While Rawlins' hand was still gripping Peck's bony shin, Peck's legs gave way as if he had been hamstrung. He sank down in a dazed, groping way to his knees, still holding to his gun with one hand; settled slowly, without a word or groan, and lay in a huddled bunch close beside Rawlins behind the little knuckle of earth.

Rawlins did not know whether Peck was killed or seriously wounded. There was no blood. He had heard the bullet strike Peck with a spat almost equal to hitting a stump with an axe. There was no time to investigate, or give Peck the assistance upon which his life, if life there was in him, might depend. The sheep-killers were standing off not above fifty yards, their guns quiet since Peck's disaster, spying cautiously