Part 11 (1/2)

”You couldn't miss him in a thousand, Mac. Well, I must be rackin'

along.”

Banjo scarcely had pa.s.sed out of sight when three hors.e.m.e.n came galloping to Macdonald's gate. They brought news of a fresh tragedy, and that in the immediate neighborhood. A boy had been shot down that morning while doing ch.o.r.es on a homestead a little way across the river. He was the son of one of the men on the death-list, and these men, the father among them, had come to enlist Macdonald's aid in running down the slayer.

The boy's mother had seen the a.s.sa.s.sin hastening away among the scant bushes on the slope above the house. The description that she gave of him left no doubt in Macdonald's mind of his ident.i.ty. It was Mark Thorn, the cattlemen's contract killer, the homesteaders' scourge.

It was a fruitless search that day, seeking old Mark Thorn among the hills which rose brokenly a few miles back from the river and climbed to the knees of the mountains in ever-mounting surge. A devil's darning-needle in a cornfield would have been traced and cornered as quickly as that slippery thin old killer of men, it seemed.

As if to show his contempt for those who hunted him, and to emphasize his own feeling of security, he slipped down to the edge of the fenced lands and struck down another homesteader that afternoon, leaving him dead at the handles of his plow.

Those homesteaders were men of rare courage and unbending persistency in the ordinary affairs of life, but three days of empty pursuit of this monster left them out of heart. The name of Mark Thorn in itself was sufficient to move a thrill of terror and repulsion. He had left his red mark in many places through the land dominated by the cattle interests of the Northwest, where settlers had attempted to find lodgment. He had come at length to stand for an inst.i.tution of destruction, rather than an individual, which there was no power strong enough to circ.u.mvent, nor force cunning enough to entrap.

There never was a tale of monsters, wolf-men, b.l.o.o.d.y-muzzled great beasts of dark forests, that struck deeper fear into the hearts of primitive peasantry than this modern ogre moved in the minds and hearts of those striving settlers in the cattle lands. Mark Thorn was a shadowy, far-reaching thing to them, distorted in their imaginings out of the semblance of a man. He had grown, in the stories founded on facts horrible enough without enlargement, into a fateful destroyer, from whom no man upon whom he had set his mark could escape.

Little wonder, then, that fear for the safety of their wives and children made the faces of these men gray as they rode the sage, combing the hollows and hills for the sight of old Mark Thorn. One by one they began to drop out of the posse, until of the fourteen besides Macdonald who had ridden in the hunt on the second day, only five remained on the evening of the third.

It was no use looking for Mark Thorn, they said, shaking gloomy heads.

When he came into a country on a contract to kill, it was like a curse predestined which the power of man could not turn aside. He had the backing of the Drovers' a.s.sociation, which had an arm as long in that land as the old Persian king's. He would strike there, like the ghost of all the devils in men that ever had lived on their fellows' blood, and slink away as silently as a wolf out of the sheepfold at dawn when his allotted task was done.

Better to go home and guard what was left, they said. All of them were men for a fight, but it was one thing to stand up to something that a man could see, and quite another to fight blindfolded, and in the dark. Catching Mark Thorn was like trying to ladle moonlight with a sieve. The country wasn't worth it, they were beginning to believe.

When Mark Thorn came in, it was like the vultures flying ahead of the last, devastating plague.

The man whose boy had been shot down beside the little gra.s.s-roofed barn was the last to leave.

”I'll stick to it for a year, Alan, if you think it's any use,” he said.

He was a gaunt man, with sunken cheeks and weary eyes; gray, worn, unwashed, and old; one of the earth's disinherited who believed that he had come into his rood of land at last. Now the driving shadow of his restless fate was on him again. Macdonald could see that it was heavy in his mind to hitch up and stagger on into the west, which was already red with the sunset of his day.

Macdonald was moved by a great compa.s.sion for this old man, whose hope had been s.n.a.t.c.hed away from him by the sting of a bullet in the dawn.

He laid his hand on the old homesteader's sagging thin shoulder and poured the comfort of a strong man's sympathy into his empty eyes.

”Go on back, Tom, and look after the others,” he said. ”Do your ch.o.r.es by dark, morning and night, and stick close to cover all days and watch for him. I'll keep on looking. I started to get that old hyena, and I'll get him. Go on home.”

The old man's eyes kindled with admiration. But it died as quickly as it had leaped up, and he shook his long hair with a sigh.

”You can't do nothin' agin him all alone, Alan.”

”I think I'll have a better chance alone than in a crowd, Tom. There's no doubt that there were too many of us, cras.h.i.+ng through the brush and setting ourselves up against the sky line every time we rode up a hill. I'll tackle him alone. Tell the neighbors to live under cover till they hear I've either got him or he's got me. In case it turns out against me, they can do whatever seems best to them.”

CHAPTER VIII

AFOOT AND ALONE

Mark Thorn had not killed anybody since shooting the man at the plow.

There were five deaths to his credit on that contract, although none of the fallen was on the cattlemen's list of desirables to be removed.