"Keep your hand out of your pocket."
Gard paused an instant, then said: "Very well," and turned his horse slowly to the right, shook his left foot from the stirrup, and guided his horse close in. Their right shoulders almost touched. He gripped the man's pistol-hand and throat with the same movement. The pistol spat past his cheek. He heaved, left foot in the saddle, and leaped. The man gurgled, and they fell over his horse's cruppers heavily in the road, the man below on his bandaged head. The bandage fell off; his blood trickled into the dust, and he lay still. The horses had cantered apart.
Gard twisted his head around as he lay athwart, looked an instant, and loosened his hand from the black-bearded throat. The grip was so hard and sinewy, it was like untying a knot. It took effort, as if his muscles had been screwed up and rusted in place. The man was dead or stunned.
Gard got up with the pistol in his hand. He brushed his own clothes, caught his horse, sent the other's with a cut from a switch galloping away into the woods, and came back. He found cartridges and a glass flask full of whiskey in the man's pockets, and put them in his own. If not dead, perhaps he had better be; otherwise one must change disguise, and proper disguises were not easy. He slipped a cartridge and cocked the trigger.
The sun above the trees shone on the livid face in the dust. It was about noon, and the hour that Mavering stalked from the sandy road-bed thirty miles away into the charred forest and murmured: "It's not my funeral. It appears to be the anchorite's."
On the whole, the neighborhood was too lively for loose pistol-shooting. Gard lifted the limp body and carried it into a thicket, brought the bandage and laid it beside, kicked the dust over the blood-pools in the road, mounted his horse and smoothed his face, trying to settle its placidity.
He trotted and cantered all the afternoon northeastward among low hills, passing many untroubled farm-yards, but little soldiery. A couple of horsemen said, "Howdy, elder," and seemed to have met with him and his mission before. He gave them one of his few remaining tracts absent-mindedly, without answering, came when the sun was low to the Shenandoah, and heard it murmur its musical name.
"Probably he'd been more convenient dead."
The bridge was burned. He swam his horse through the current. The blue mountains fronted him darkly against the sky. The turnpike led up through a gap and so over into the elder Virginia. It was dark when he reached the end of the meadow lands where the upward pitch and the woods of the mountain road began. "Probably he'd be handier that way."
At the top of the gap were open pastures, a cabin where a dog barked, but no light shone in the windows. The stars were out innumerably, the valley behind in the cold, blue vapor of the night.