Page:GB Lancaster--law-bringer.djvu/14

12 to the sun-blistered lips as the man lit his pipe under the curve of a well-shaped hand scarred with rough work. This was the end of the long, stern chase through three full months of storm and sunshine. This was the end, with defiance to the Law in place of submission—and defiance with a solid log-and-daub shack wall before it.

There was not any doubt that he had been watched from the moment when the canoe nosed the sedgy bank of the clearing. The man smiled again, ground the match out under a moccasined heel, jerked his revolver into easy position for sharp work, and walked straight for the shack door with the springy, alert step that tells of the drill-yard. On his shoulders the pale khaki of his tunic had faded to a dirty blurr [sic]; one of the black buffalo-head collar-badges, which marked him as a unit of the Royal North-West Mounted Police of Canada out hunting, was missing, and his Stetson hat looked as though it had been slept in more often than his bed for these many weeks past.

His loins were cramped with the canoe-ache and his body dried up with heat. But he walked lightly, with the wind plucking at him petulantly and the sunset flooding into the clearing until the grass seemed to splash away in spurts of blood from his steady feet. And, behind that sagging door and those eyeless windows, the man whom he had hunted so long was waiting him at last. In the Blue Books the one man was down as Reg. No. 4769 Corporal Heriot, R. L., and the other as Samuel Moonias, half-breed, wanted on two charges of murder. But no living soul called Moonias by his first name, any more than they called Dick Heriot by his second, although there were many who used the same terms of disapprobation for both.

Dick's inner knowledge, that special gift to the roving men who guard their lives by head and hand, had put the situation crystal-clear before him. Moonias had a duck-gun only, one loaded with extra-heavy slugs and given to kicking. Moonias believed that Dick, thinking he had come ashore for sleep, would go in, swift and straightly, expecting to catch him unready. Because of these things Moonias would wait for a close shot. One in the face as Dick pushed the door open, most likely. He might try a potshot from the window. Chance would have to take care of