When the posse had ridden several hours, and had come to a spot in the forest where the trail forked diversely, a halt was called. They had traveled steep ways and floundered through many belly-deep fords. Dust lay gray upon them and spattered mud overlaid the dust.
“We’ve done come ter a pass, now,” declared the sheriff, “where hit ain’t goin’ ter profit us no longer ter go trailin’ in one bunch. We hev need ter split up an’ turkey tail out along different routes.”
The sun had long crossed the meridian and dyed the steep horizon with burning orange and violet when Bud Grant and Mose Biggerstaff, with whom he had been paired off, drew rein to let their horses blow in a gorge between beetling walls of cliff.
“Me, I ain’t got no master relish for this task, no-how,” declared Mose morosely as he spat at the black loam of rotting leaves. “No man ain’t jedgmatically proved ter me, yit, thet ther feller Sam kilt didn’t need killin’.”
Bud nodded a solemn concurrence in the sentiment. Then abruptly the two of them started as though at the intrusion of a ghost and, of instinct, their hands swept holsterward, but stopped halfway.
This sudden galvanizing of their apathy into life was effected by the sight of a figure which had materialized without warning and in uncanny silence in a fissure where the rocks dripped from reeking moss on either side.
It stood with a cocked repeating rifle held easily at the ready, and it was a figure that required no heralding of its identity or menace.
“Were ye lookin’ fer me, boys?” drawled Sam 59 Mosebury with a palpable enjoyment of the situation, not unlike that which brightens the eyes of a cat as it plays with a mouse already crippled.
With swift apprehension the eyes of the two deputies met and effected an understanding. Mose Biggerstaff licked his bearded lips until their stiffness relaxed enough for speech.
“Me an’ Sim Colby hyar,” he protested, “got summoned by ther high sheriff. We didn’t hev no rather erbout hit one way ner t’other. All we’ve got ter go on air ther deescription thet war give ter us—an’ we don’t see no resemblance atween ye an’ ther feller we’re atter.”