Wolfs Head | Page 8

rear of the party.
There was no answer, and Seymour felt his prophetic blood run cold.
His conscience began to stir. Had he, indeed, no foundation for his
suspicion?
"Smith! Smith" cried the irascible officer. "Hey, there! Is the man
deaf!"

"Not deef, edzac'ly," Meddlesome's voice sounded reproachfully; "jes a
leetle hard o' hear in'." She had administered a warning nudge.
"Hey? What ye want?" said the "Wolf's Head," suddenly checking his
horse.
"Have you 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