They were dead.

He secured the knife, and behind the tepee he passed the third body, its face as still and white as the others.

He shuddered as he recognized it.

It was Slim Barker.
His rifle was gone.
More swiftly now he made his way into the break out of which his assailants had come a short time before.

The thought came to him again that he had been right, and that Donald MacDonald, in spite of all his years in the mountains, had been fatally wrong.