"Hold on!" he said. "I've something to say to you."
A stray gleam of moonlight that shone down just there flung a patch of brightness athwart the snow, and Tomlinson could see the white face pressed down upon the carbine-stock, but he did not pull up. Instead, he leapt into the shadow, and in another second there was a pale flash, and a sharp detonation rang among the trunks. Then he whipped behind a tree, and, seeing two men close behind him now, flung up his rifle. In his country a man who is shot at usually considers himself warranted in retaliating, and Tomlinson was accustomed to the rifle. In fact, he handled it much as an English sportsman does a gun, by the balance of it, and with an instinctive sense of direction which did not necessitate the aligning of the sights. The result of this was that as the butt came home to his shoulder the trooper dropped his carbine with a cry, and Tomlinson sprang away once more through the smoke. He might have got away altogether, but the corporal could shoot as well as he could, and a few seconds later the fugitive felt a stinging pain in one shoulder.
He staggered but recovered himself again, and running a few yards farther dropped into a thicket, and wriggled under it on his hands and knees. Then, while an unpleasant faintness crept over him, he felt for the long knife which the prospector uses for cutting up an occasional deer. It did not appear advisable to snap another cartridge into the rifle-breech just then, and the knife would prove equally serviceable if his pursuers crawled into the thicket after him. Prospector Tomlinson was, like most of the men who sojourn in that wilderness, a little primitive in his notions, and the troopers had fired on him.
One of them made a good deal of noise floundering through a belt of undergrowth just then, and only stopped when the corporal called to him.
"Where's that blame branch-trail?" he asked.
"It's right here," said the trooper. "I guess our man's lit out along it."
Time was of some consequence, and the corporal did not deem it advisable to stop and consider. A man floundering through the undergrowth would, he reasoned, be heard a long way off, while a bushman could proceed with very little noise along a beaten track. Thus, as he could hear nothing, it appeared very probable that Tomlinson had taken the latter. He and the trooper pushed on along it for awhile, but there was no sign of the prospector, and they came back moodily to where they had last seen him, and proceeded to search every thicket in the vicinity. They spent at least an hour over it, but there was still no appearance of Tomlinson, and at last the corporal sat down disgustedly upon the fallen fir.
"I feel 'most certain I plugged him once," he said. "What d'you let go your carbine for?"
The trooper held the weapon up in the moonlight and glanced at the grey smear down the barrel. Then he held up his left hand, which was stained with red.
"I'm not quite sure if the top of one of my fingers is on or not," he said. "Anyway, my mitten's full of blood."