Indeed, with their peculiar long paws, nothing more resembles a man, excepting cousin monkey, than uncle bear, slim with wintering.
On a nearer approach, any doubt about Dick's identity with the form calmly leaning on the rifle was impossible. Nevertheless, the silence and the immobility of the bandit appalled the other, and the hanging figure, drumming with its heels on the upright stone as the spinning and unspinning of its cord of support oscillated it, increased in ghastliness and its likeness to homo rather than ursa.
Pausing again anew, he let himself be attracted to understand the puzzle, and, as Dick made no movement, far less a reply to his now frenzied appeal, he darted madly to the butte where the lava stone rose like a monument. There the explanation was ample.
Some merciless hand had slain the Englishman, beheaded him, and flared him, with the skin of the neck only left intact, and after suspending the body like an artist's écorché along the pillar, stuffed the human hide out with snow so that not a wrinkle showed. The cold had frozen this effigy into the semblance of a marble statue. Whilst the captain gazed horrified, some scratches on the obelisk near the suspended corpse caught his eyes. He read with redoubled apprehension:
"—, known as 'the Sydney Duck,' 'Sydney Dick,' and 'the Convict,' escaped from Australian prisons, murderer of Californian miners, of Don Gregorio Peralta, and of his daughter, Mrs. Filditch, tried, found guilty, and executed by Us,"
"THE MEN OF THE MOUNTAIN."
"Hands off! This is the buzzard's bait, do you hear?"
Then the drawing of a rifle and crossed knives, and the fur trademarks of Jim Ridge, Cherokee Bill, and the name "S. G. Filditch," firmly graven.
At the end of reading this weird death sentence, which was a warning too, Captain Kidd uttered a terrible execration, and clutching his rifle and knife, as if he expected the wild justiceers to spring out upon him from around the monolith, darted frenziedly from the unhallowed eminence.
But he had no pursuers, and reflection came to him after half an hour's mad floundering in the snow, that he would be safer among his men than solitary. Besides, Lottery Paul had probably returned, and might, in the chiefs absence, preach that doctrine of retreat to the gin palaces of the frontier which was, on the face of it, superior to the present outlook. His iron hand could alone contain the bandits if any could.
"Besides," murmured he, "what would 'Dave Steelder' say if he knew me to turn such a skulk? After all, what a riddance that rough brute is! As for me, I have had some very close calls, but fortune has carried me through."