Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/133

 he had seen from afar and expected to meet was a son of Belial.

As surely as if human lips had uttered the words Uncle Alf plucked from the night the message: "It is the Killer you shall meet."

Every hair on his old head pricked up with rage and that danger thrill still surviving from the days of the tree folk. Even as his voice growled and muttered curses in his beard his gangling frame stiffened to the animal reflex of the battle call. His eyes sharpened themselves for peering through the clotted shadows.

"Behold, Boaz winnoweth barley to-night," he muttered, "and in the night season shall the chaff be burned entirely."

Three short, sharp barks from a coyote somewhere ahead in the dark caused Uncle Alf suddenly to rein in his horse. His ears strained themselves for another noise and at last they detected the shuff-shuff of horse's hoofs at an easy trot. They were still a distance off.

Uncle Alf whirled his horse about and made at a walk for the brink of a coulee into which the trail dipped a hundred yards back. Over the edge of this slash across the countryside the trail dropped precipitously twenty feet or more to the dry creek bed, then rose to take