At Lee's Crossing one dark night he went out swinging his lantern, sniffing the warm air, bound for the stable, when he saw a sudden blaze revealing a dark face behind the horse trough, while a bullet ripped through his sleeve.
Silk ran back to the house, grabbed his gun, and returned, only to hear a horse galloping away in the night. The creature was his own favourite mare, and the man who had stolen her—the man whose face he had seen in the flash from the gun barrel—was Pierre Roche.
On a borrowed mustang, heavier and less swift of foot than his own stolen troop horse, Sergeant Silk went off in pursuit. He knew by the direction taken that Roche was making for the refuge of the Indian Reservation at Minnewanka, thirty odd miles away across the mountains.
There were two possible trails. He realised that the fugitive would take the shorter one over the steep shoulder of Minnewanka Peak, and that he would give the mare a rest before ascending. By taking the longer, though somewhat easier, trail through One Tree Cañon, it might be possible to head him off. This is what Silk did, and he urged his horse forward at almost reckless speed.
It was early dawn when he came out from the gloom of the gulch at the point where the trails crossed and examined the dewy grass for signs. There were no hoof marks to be seen, and, satisfied that he had gained his object, he waited under the shadow of a great boulder, watching and listening.
In less than an hour's time he heard the familiar sound of his mare's hoofs, carried towards him by the morning breeze, and soon afterwards his keenly searching eyes distinguished against the rosy glow of the sky the form of a horseman riding slowly over the ridge of one of the nearer hills.
The sound of pattering hoofs came clearer and clearer from the farther valley, and at length, when Pierre Roche came again into sight, hardly a hundred yards away, Silk moved out and halted in the middle of the trail, drawing his revolver.
"Stop, or I fire!" he cried aloud, confronting the fugitive.
His instructions were to shoot at sight, but he held his weapon in front of him, hesitating to fire, wanting, for the sake of a great tradition, to make the usual arrest, the taking of an outlaw alive and uninjured.