“You sure got spry in a hurry,” Ditch remarked, regaining his feet. “Thanks for saving my life.”

“Don’t mention it,” Pritchard said, as he stood up. “I reckon I owed you. In fact, I think I’m still down a few lives to you.”

“We’ll call it even,” Ditch said, righting the lantern. He picked up his rifle and the deputies’ pistols.

Crittenden held both hands to his blood-soaked gut. He blinked up at Pritchard through the cloud of gun smoke that filled the tiny shack.

“You’re dead,” he gasped, disbelief accenting the agony in his face. “I watched you die! I buried you myself!”

“Evidently,” Pritchard said, “you didn’t dig a deep enough hole.” He cocked the revolver a fourth time and shot Crittenden in the forehead.

Ditch saw his friend’s eyes in the lantern’s glow just before he fired the coup de grâce into the gut-shot deputy’s brain. Pritchard’s countenance darkened as he pulled the trigger, almost as if a shadow had fallen over him. It was an expression Ditch had never before seen on his friend’s face, and it shook him.

“When I was on my knees in front of my own grave, looking up into the barrel of a pistol,” Pritchard explained, reading the worry on his friend, “I was a dead man.”

Ditch dared not interrupt. It was as if Pritchard was speaking in a trance.

“When you pulled me out of that hole,” he went on, “and I realized I wasn’t dead, do you know what my first thought was?”

“No,” Ditch said, his voice barely a whisper. “What were you thinkin’?”

“I was thinking,’” Pritchard continued, looking down at the revolver in his hand and the dead man at his feet, “never again will I let a man point a gun at me without him paying with his life. Not if I can do something about it. I swear it.”

“We’d best git,” Ditch said, not knowing what else to say. “These boys didn’t come alone, and you can bet the rest of their posse ain’t far behind. They might have heard the shots, even in this rain. Can you ride?”

“I’ll have to,” Pritchard said, stuffing the Colt in his belt.

Ditch and Pritchard hurriedly packed up, saddled their horses, and rode off into the night, but not before taking the guns, food, water, ammunition, and money belonging to the deputies. Ditch released the deputies’ horses, minus their saddles and bridles, after first dragging the deputies’ bodies off into the cornfield.

Ditch and Pritchard spent the next ten, long, arduous days and nights riding south. They traveled by night and hid out and slept by day. They avoided roads and foraged for food as they went. Pritchard’s fever abated, and his strength gradually returned. The holes in his scalp began to scab and heal.