The long arm of the Mounted

by James French Dorrance

He glanced at the abandoned cayuse, a scrawny, flea-bitten gray, who stood a few yards down the trail, cropping contentedly at some brush that evidently was not thorned. Its saddle was a cheap one and its cantle carried no pack. The skinner must have found some way of disposing of the hide farther back on the trail after the pursuit was under way.

Several dangers presented themselves in connection with the situation. A shot from ambush was the likeliest one, but that was dismissed with a shrug. The possibility of his passing the other in some brushy hiding place and of the man's backtracking to his mount was another. But Childress decided to take the chance. Dismounting, he fastened the reins to the pommel of the saddle. The well trained Silver would wait, he knew, a reasonable time for his master's return and if, for any cause, the master did not come back would return to the Open A. It was no country for the beast to be hampered with the dropped rein of an ordinary alighting. Slipping his "blazer"—a short-handled, sharp-bitted instrument—from its loop on his riding leather, he plunged into the jungle-like patch.

The fact that an energetic wood-chopper had just passed made the sergeant's progress somewhat easier, but did not render him immune from the inflictions of the small thorns, barbed and poisonous. The spreading leaves of the woody stem had a way of concealing all sorts of viciousness, then forcing it upon him in many a wound. He was ready to agree with the popular verdict that the jaggers were "the very devil" when they got into one's skin. But he did not compliment them by the thought that they could stop him, and at last hacked his way through, but only into another difficulty.

The thorny cover behind, a precipitous, thickly brushed ascent of the ridge began. Higher than his head was the undergrowth, despite the rock-strewn surface. No longer had a trail been left by the quarry, but that Childress was not going amiss in attempting the ridge was proved to him by certain sounds which drifted back—the smashing of rotten logs as they broke under the fleeing man's weight, the rattle of rocks dislodged by his feet, and once the sound of a fall, as of a heavy body tripped and thrown.

So evident were the causes of these noises that the sergeant knew he had gained ground in the first lap of the chase. Probably his quarry had halted after cutting into the devil's-clubs in the hope that, not having seen his actual dismounting, the other would ride past. Childress' noisy entrance must have started him on further flight.

Soon there came encouragement in another glimpse of the pursued—just a hunched up back in a checker-board shirt under one of the black felt hats so generally worn in the region. No sight of features was possible, no estimate as to height or the color of hair beneath the slouched headgear. Although Childress had been fired upon and was thus absolved from that never-fire-first rule of the Mounted, he did not care to chance a shot on suspicion.

The encouragement of this glimpse was soon spoiled by the discovery that he, as pursuer, was in a crisscrossed windfall, while the pursued had gained a deer run which quartered to the crest of the ridge. As the unknown, now called an enemy, disappeared over the comparatively easy course he had won, rage possessed Childress—the lust to overtake and overcome at any cost to himself.

For several minutes he disregarded the saner advices of his woodcraft, and "fought brush," slipping, sliding, butting into it, crawling on all fours. A fall that shook him to the marrow reduced him to calmer methods. With comparative deliberation, he began picking his way out of the seemingly impregnable, wind-made fortification. In time he, too, gained the deer run.

No one was in sight when he reached the crest and paused for a moment to recover breath lost on the laborious ascent. But the hobnailed boots of the fugitive had left their trace in the loose shale. Evidently the man ahead had decided that the ridge, after all, was an unsatisfactory refuge and at once had undertaken the down path on the south side, where a series of ledges gave upon a thickly timbered area of normal level.

This particular region was strange to Childress, and he did not like the looks of this descent, but decided that where another had gone he could follow. A jump landed him on the first ledge below, almost in his quarry's boot tracks, and he raced across to a second brink. Upon a ledge still further down, he could see that this jump also had been negotiated with safety, and he went over with like success.