Page:RidersOfSilences - Max Brand.djvu/251

Rh there were something near me. When I woke up there was a bright fire burning in front of me and the pack had been lashed and placed on one of the horses. At first I thought that it was Dick, who had come back. But Dick didn't appear all day. The next night—"

"Wait!" said Jack. "This is gettin' sort of creepy. If you was the drinking kind I'd say you'd been hitting up the red-eye."

"The next evening," continued Mary steadily, "I came about dark on a camp-fire with a bed of twigs near it. I stayed by the fire, but no one appeared. Once I thought I heard a horse whinny far, away, and once I thought that I saw a streak of white disappear over the top of a hill."

The boy sprang up, shuddering with panic.

"You saw what?"

"Nothing. I thought for a minute that it was a bit of something white, but it was gone all at once." "White—vanished at once—went into the dark as fast as a horse can gallop?"

"Something like that. Do you think it was some one?"

For answer the boy whipped out his revolver, examined it, and spun the cylinder with shaking hands. Then he said through set teeth: "So you come up here trailin' him after you, eh?"

"Who?"

"McGurk!"

The name came like a rifle shot and Mary rose in turn and shrank back toward the wall, for there was murder in the lighted black eyes which stared