Unbelieving, he rubbed his eyes. A man could not vanish in thin air?
The mail driver plied the whip, the dogs raced. He would rather have stayed with the sergeant, fought the thing through, shoulder to shoulder. But the officer had spoken, and he was the law!
Half drowned in the drift into which he had plunged, Hardy lay motionless for a time.
Finally he cautiously raised his snow-covered hooded head. He saw the man standing motionless, then watched him turn, scale the slabs of rock until he reached the top, and disappear.
Lithe as a cat, Hardy scaled the overhanging rocks. Crouching like an Indian, his soft ankle-depth moccasins over his boots as noiseless as the footfall of a cougar, he sped after Keith Morely.
“Thank the powers for a fine day,” Hardy thought. The sun shone dazzlingly. The prisms of a million ice-drops on shrub and tree flashed like jewels, bewilderingly beautiful.
Warily, Hardy followed the moccasin imprints left on the crusted snow.
“He is heading directly away from the trail, and he knows exactly where he’s going. No hesitation in his stride. Ha, he has stopped here to put on his webs.”
The snow was crushed into a circular basin where the man had sat to don his snow shoes.
At a little distance ahead came the shrill scolding voices of a pair of chickadees. Hardy nodded in satisfaction. He knew some passing creature had startled the birds. It was their custom to give warning thus from their lofty perches.