Wolfs Head | Page 8

any idea of where you are going, or how far?" demanded the officer, sternly.
"Just acrost the gorge," the guide answered easily.
"I heard he had been glimpsed in a hollow tree. That word was telephoned from the cross-roads to town. It was the tree the skeleton was in."
"That tree? It's away back yander," observed one of the posse, reluctant and disaffected.
"Oh, he has quit that tree; he is bound for up the gorge now," said the guide.
"Well, I suppose you know, from what I was told," said the sheriff, discontentedly; "but this is a long ja'nt. Ride up! Ride up!"
Onward they fared through the perfumed woods. The wild asters were blooming, and sweet and subtile distillations of the autumnal growths were diffused on the air. The deer are but ill at road-making,--such tangled coverts, such clifty ledges, such wild leaps; for now the path threaded the jagged verge of precipices. The valley, a black abyss above which massive, purplish mountains loomed against a sky of pearly tints, was visibly narrowing. They all knew that presently it would become a mere gorge, a vast indentation in the mountain-side. The weird vistas across the gorge were visible how, craggy steeps, and deep woods filled with moonlight, with that peculiar untranslated intendment which differentiates its luminosity in the wilderness from the lunar glamour 'of cultivated Scenes--something weird, melancholy, eloquent of a meaning addressed to the soul, but which the senses cannot entertain or words express.
With a sudden halt, the guide dismounted. The girl still sat on the saddle-blanket, and the horse bowed his head and pawed. The posse were gazing dubiously, reluctantly, at a foot-bridge across a deep abyss. It was only a log, the upper side hewn, with a shaking hand-rail held by slight standards.
"Have we got to cross this?" asked the officer, still in the saddle and gazing downward.
"Ef ye foller me," said the guide, indifferently.
But he was ahead of his orders. He visibly braced his nerves for the effort, and holding his rifle as a balancing-pole, he sped along the light span with a tread as deft as a fox or a wolf. In a moment he had gained the farther side.
They scarcely knew how it happened. So unexpected was the event that, though it occurred before their eyes, they did not seem to see it. They remembered, rather than perceived, that he stooped suddenly; with one single great effort of muscular force he dislodged the end of the log, heaved it up in the air, strongly flung it aside, whence it went crashing down into the black depths below, its own weight, as it fell, sufficing to wrench out the other end, carrying with it a mass of earth and rock from the verge of the precipice.
The horses sprang back snorting and frightened; the officer's, being a fine animal in prime condition, tried to bolt. Before he had him well in hand again, the man on the opposite brink had vanished. The sheriff's suspicions were barely astir when a hallooing voice in the rear made itself heard, and a horseman, breathless with haste, his steed flecked with foam, rode up, indignant, flushed, and eager.
"Whyn't ye wait for me, Sher'ff? Ye air all on the wrong track," he cried. "Boyston McGurny be hid in the skellington's tree. I glimpsed him thar myself, an' gin information."
The sheriff gazed down with averse and suspicious eyes. "What's all this!" he said sternly. "Give an account of yourself."
"Me!" exclaimed the man in amazement. "Why, I'm Barton Smith, yer guide, that's who. An' I'm good for five hundred dollars' reward."
But the sheriff called off the pursuit for the time, as he had no means of replacing the bridge or of crossing the chasm.
Meddlesome's share in the escape was not detected, and for a while she had no incentive to the foolhardiness of boasting. But her prudence diminished when the reward for the apprehension of Boyston McGurny was suddenly withdrawn. The confession of one of the distillers, dying of tuberculosis contracted in prison, who had himself fired the fatal shot, had established the alibi that McGurny claimed, and served to relieve him of all suspicion.
He eventually became a "herder" of cattle on the bald of the mountain and a farmer in a small way, and in these placid pursuits he found a contented existence. But, occasionally, a crony of his olden time would contrast the profits of this tame industry at a disadvantage with the quick and large returns of the "wild cat," when he would "confess and avoid."
"That's true, that's all true; but a man can't holp it no ways in the world whenst he hev got a wife that is so out-an'-out meddlesome that she won't let him run ag'in' the law, nohow he kin fix it."

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Wolf's Head,