“George! George!” the woman cried, “get your gun quick; there’s a rough-neck come through the garden.”
Somebody inside the house answered, “What’s that you say, Anna?”
Sard called to the man, “There’s a rough-neck murdered Mr. Davis; I’ve got to break it to the widow.”
“Stop him, George,” the woman said.
The man tried to stop him, and got one on the jaw which he remembered for a long time.
Sard got out into a road which led quite clear of the houses into the wilderness of the foothills. There was a sort of trail leading up the hill, through a sparsely-grown jungle of brushwood. He took his chance of snakes and dodged into the brush and zigzagged through it, keeping uphill all the time. At the top of the cañon, half a mile from the town, he stopped for a moment, but he heard people as well as dogs, so he set off downhill into a gully.
At the foot of the gully there were great rocks among which a little river ran. He ran upstream in the water for about a hundred yards, so as to puzzle the dogs, and then scrambled out of the water up a great rock. At the top of the rock there was a recess filled with dry sand and screened by boulders. In the sand were the fresh footprints of a wild cat, but Sard judged that wild cats are less dangerous than men, and flung himself down to get his breath.
In a couple of minutes he heard the dogs at the water, and the voices of men, encouraging the dogs to hunt. He judged that there were at least eight men up with the hounds, and others joined them. He could hear their conversation as they walked up and down, and poked among the rocks.
“He’s the silver bandit who broke gaol at the barracks this afternoon.”
Another said, “He nearly killed Hanssen at the Palace.”