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 But her prudence diminished when the reward for the apprehension of Boyston McGurny was suddenly withdrawn.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.”