He was lifted from his feet, his head still in chancery and his mouth closed. He could hear the meeting breaking up, the crunching passage of the silent bohunks returning to the camp. Suddenly he was dropped, and a shadow faded noiselessly into the other shadows of night.
"Mavy!" he called in a low voice. "Mavy!"
Only two dull taps came back to him from the shadows.
CHAPTER XII
SERGEANT MAHON SKIRTS DEATH
Blue Pete, alias Peter Maverick, alias anything that seemed to suit the varied occasions of his checkered career, thrust aside the curtain of foliage covering the hiding place of his new raft. There was no reason why he should visit the raft just then; he could have no possible use for it until he had in his hands those two horses up in Torrance's stable. But ever since he had been forced to knock Koppy's pointing rifle from his hands to save Juno the half breed had been oppressed by a thousand fears.
He did not understand the bohunks—he did not want to. In his vivid life he had met most kinds of men, but the wild Continental scum that took to railway construction as its own special line of effort was beyond his experience. Hitherto he had been able to anticipate the villainies of his enemies—and in some of them he himself had revelled—but no one had yet charted the designs of creatures like Koppowski and his comrades.
Even as the foliage parted Blue Pete knew why he had looked. The raft was gone. He was not surprised, but his anger was none the less for that. With a muffled oath he let the foliage fall and dropped to the ground with the intuitive sense of the wild at evidence of an enemy.
A moment's thought raised him to his feet again, to strike recklessly back along the river's brink into the bush. Koppy and his crew, he knew, were busy about the bridge at that hour; the whole out-of-doors was his.
Blue Pete, a name once on the lips of every rancher and cowboy, sheriff and Mounted Policeman, from the Montana Badlands to Medicine Hat—once cowboy and rustler, again cowboy and Mounted Police detective, then thrown back to rustling by the blindness of a political judge—was not now the model of physical fitness of a year ago when his rifle and rope were respected over a prairie Province and State. The bullet that had brought mistaken mourning to the Police, and particularly to Sergeant Mahon, the friend for whom it was intended, had come within a hair's breadth of avenging Bilsy and Dutch Henry, the Montana rustlers who had hated him so. What he had escaped was due to his wonderful physique and to the untiring care of Mira Stanton.