A Broken Bond; Or, The Man Without Morals

by Nicholas Carter

A few moments passed, during which the down-pointed muzzle shifted like a spy-glass, following the moving object. Then——

Crack! Into the still air a blue puff of smoke rose and hung for a moment above the rock. The drone of the bullet sounded clearly down the edge of the slope as the deadly missile hurled itself toward its mark. A quick cry came up from the roadway, and the weapon was stealthily withdrawn.

Quickly, however, the man behind the rock peered down, but when he did so he saw that blind chance had stepped in and thwarted him. The horse had apparently stumbled on a loose rock just as the shot was fired, and had reared back slightly to recover its footing; therefore, it was into the animal’s soft, rounded neck that the heavy bullet had bored its way, and not into the more precious target at which it had been aimed.

The creature was now lying in the roadway, and the convulsive movements of its limbs could be seen dimly through the little cloud of dust which had been raised by its fall.

The man on the horse’s back had been hurled in a heap by the side of the road, but as his would-be murderer watched, he saw him rise to his feet and stare up in the general direction of the rock from which the shot had been fired. Warned by that movement, the skulker swiftly jerked his head back and crouched still lower in his place.

“Curse him!” the hard voice grated. “He always has the fiend’s own luck!”

Grasping his rifle and hat, but still keeping on hands and knees, he began instinctively to crawl away under cover of the rock. He had gone no more than a yard, though, before he paused irresolutely and his fingers sought his belt.

There were other bullets in that belt, but the man’s failure had unnerved him, and a certain fatalistic instinct told him that he was not likely to succeed in a second attempt, now that the first had come to naught. The figure in the road would be on its guard now, and if another shot missed its mark, the point from which it had been fired would almost certainly be located. From that would only be a step to the discovery of the shooter’s identity, and the latter did not care to contemplate such a possibility. Consequently, with a snakelike movement, the lean figure resumed its progress away from the rocks, and presently, having reached the protection of large bowlders, straightened up a little more and increased its pace.

The fugitive knew that the man he had tried to kill was more than usually fond of the dying horse, and would probably delay at its side for a precious minute or two before attempting to solve the mystery of the shot. That delay promised to enable him to make good his escape, and he was resolved to take every possible advantage of it. For perhaps fifteen minutes he doubled and twisted, now ascending and now descending the foothills. At the end of that time he had reached the road again, and, watching his chance, dodged across it. This latest move brought him into thick woods, through which he hurriedly threaded his way in the direction of the valley.