Walker of the Secret Service

by Melville Davisson Post

The man led them about in circles, across the track and beyond it, in every direction, but the dogs would not take up our trail. The turpentine was a complete safeguard against them; they would not follow it. The big man handled the dogs with skill; he moved out in an ever widening circle; he covered the ground for a hundred yards in every direction, from the point where our trail stopped, but it was no use.

The dogs would not take up a trail fouled with turpentine.

The posse then gathered in a sort of council, and I sat watching them through the thicket. They evidently came to the one obvious solution of the matter—that the train robbers whom they had followed to the track had, here, boarded some passing train; and they set out southward along the track to what I imagine was the closest railway station.

This was precisely the thing Mooney intended them to do.

He was so certain that they would do it that he slept peacefully while this posse was within a quarter of a mile of us, and the dogs baying along the edge of the mountain in which we were at that moment concealed. I felt a vast relief when the posse departed, and I lay back on the dry leaves with my hands linked under my head.

I must have fallen asleep, for when I awoke it was midday. Mooney had found a little stream and had removed all the evidences of his disguise. The wig he had buried under a stone and the make-up he had removed from his face.

He took me through the bushes to the little rivulet, a mere thread of water from some spring, and very carefully restored me to my normal appearance. He removed the make-up with some sort of grease and I washed my hair in the water which he had dammed up into a tiny pool.

We now bore no relation, in our outward appearance, to the men who had held up the train.

It was afternoon and we set out west through the edge of the mountain. The going was rough and dangerous. We found deep gullies and ravines that ran almost from the top of the mountain into the very valleys. Some of these walls were almost perpendicular. They looked to stand sheer for a hundred feet.

We had to follow these gullies for a great distance up the mountain before we could cross them. Then, we came to ledges of rock which it was impossible for us to scale; these we had to follow down the mountain.