University of Virginia Library

THROUGH the quiet night, crystalline with the pervading spirit of the frost, under prairie skies of mystic purple pierced with the glasslike glitter of the stars, fled Antoine.

Huge, and hollow-sounding with the clatter of the pinto's hoofs, hung the night above and about, lonesome, empty, bitter as the soul of him who fled.

A weary age of flight since sunset! And now the coming of midnight saw the thin-limbed, long-haired pony slowly losing its nerve, rasping in the throat, tottering.

With pitiless, spike-spurred heels the rider hurled the beast on into the empty night.

"G'wan, you blasted cayuse, you over-grown wolf-dog, you pot-bellied shonga! Keep up that tune; I'm goin' somewheres! What'd I steal you fer? Pleasure? Ho, ho, ho! I reckon! Pleasure for the half-breed! G'wan!"

Suddenly rounding a bank of sand, the pinto sighted the broad, ice-bound river, a stream of glinting silver under the stars. Sniffing and crouching upon its haunches at the sudden glow that dwindled a gleaming thread into the further dusk, the jaded beast received a series of vicious jabs from the spike-spurred heels. It groaned and lunged forward again, taking with uncertain feet the glaring path ahead, and awakening a dull, snarling thunder in the under regions of the ice.

Slipping, struggling, doing its brute best to overcome fatigue, the pinto covered the ice.

"Doin' a war-dance, eh?" growled the man with bitter mirth; and gouging the foaming, bloody flanks of the animal: "G'wan! Set up that tune; I want fast music, 'cause I'm goin' somewheres — don't know where — out there in the shadders. Come here, will you? Take that and that and that! Now, will you kick the scen'ry back'ards? By the —"

The cries of the man were cut short as he shot far over the pommel, lunging headlong past the pinto's head, and striking with head and shoulders upon the ice.

When he stopped sliding, he lay very still for a few moments. Then he groaned, sat up, and found that the bluffs and the river and the stars and the universe in general were whirling giddily — himself the dizzy center.

With uncertain arms he reached out, endeavoring to check the sickening motion of things by sheer force of his powerful hands. He was thrown down like a weakling wrestling with a giant. Then he lay still, cursing in a whisper, trying to balance the disturbed universe, until the motion passed.

With great care, Antoine raised himself upon his elbows and gazed about with a foolish grin.

Then he remembered — remembered that he was hunted; that he was an outcast, a man of no race; remembered dimly, and with a leer, a portion of a long series of crimes; remembered that the last was horse-stealing, and that some of the others concerned blood.

And as he remembered, he felt with horrible distinctness the lariat tightening about his neck — the lariat that the men of Cabanne's trading-post were bringing on fleet horses, nearer, nearer, nearer through the silent night.

Antoine shuddered and got to his feet, looming huge against the star-sprinkled surface of the ice as he turned a malevolent face down trail and listened for the beat of hoofs.

There was only the dim, hollow murmur

that has its habitation at the heart of silence.

"Got a long start," he observed with the chuckle of a man whom desperation has made careless. "Hello!"

A pale, semicircular glow, like the flare of a burning straw-stack a half a night's journey over the hills, had grown up at the horizon of the east. And as the man stared, still in a maze from his recent fall, the moon heaved an arc of tarnished silver above the mystic rim of sky, flooding with new light the river and the bluffs. The man stood illumined — a big brute of a man; heavy-limbed, massive-shouldered, with the slouching stoop and alert air of the habitual skulker.

The refugee moved uneasily, as though he had suddenly become visible to a lurking foe. He glanced nervously about him, fumbled at the butt of a six-shooter at his belt, then catching sight of the blotch of huddled dusk that was the fallen pinto, the meaning of his situation flashed upon him.

"That cussed cayuse! Gone and done hisself, like as not! The whole creation's agin me!"

He made for the pinto, snarling viciously, as though its exhausted, lacerated body were the visible self of the inimical universe. He grasped the reins and jerked them. The brute groaned and let its weary head fall heavily upon the ice.

"Get up!"

Antoine began kicking the pinto in the ribs, bringing forth groans of pain.

"Oh, you won't get up, eh? Agin me, too, eh? Take that and that and that! I wished you was everybody in the world and hell to wunst; I'd make you beller, now I got you down! Take that, and pass in!"

With a roar of anger, he fell upon the pinto, swearing, striking, kicking. But the pony only groaned faintly. Its outworn limbs could no longer support its body.