man,
for purposes of robbery, had slain an entire family--the postmaster, his
wife, and their three children, in the upstairs over the post office in
the mountain village of Chisholm.

For two weeks the man had eluded and exceeded pursuit. His last crossing
had been from the mountains of the Russian River, across wide-farmed
Santa Rosa Valley, to Sonoma Mountain. For two days he had laired and
rested, sleeping much, in the wildest and most inaccessible precincts of
the Kennan Ranch. With him he had carried coffee stolen from the last
house he had raided. One of Harley Kennan's angora goats had furnished
him with meat. Four times he had slept the clock around from exhaustion,
rousing on occasion, like any animal, to eat voraciously of the
goat-meat, to drink large quantities of the coffee hot or cold, and to
sink down into heavy but nightmare-ridden sleep.

And in the meantime civilization, with its efficient organization and
intricate inventions, including electricity, had closed in on him.
Electricity had surrounded him. The spoken word had located him in the
wild canyons of Sonoma Mountain and fringed the mountain with posses of
peace-officers and detachments of armed farmers. More terrible to them
than any mountain lion was a man-killing man astray in their landscape.
The telephone on the Kennan Ranch, and the telephones on all other
ranches abutting on Sonoma Mountain, had rung often and transmitted
purposeful conversations and arrangements.

So it happened, when the posses had begun to penetrate the mountain, and
when the man was compelled to make a daylight dash down into the Valley
of the Moon to cross over to the mountain fastnesses that lay between it
and Napa Valley, that Harley Kennan rode out on the hot-blooded colt he
was training. He was not in pursuit of the man who had slain the
postmaster of Chisholm and his family. The mountain was alive with man-
hunters, as he well knew, for a score had bedded and eaten at the ranch
house the night before. So the meeting of Harley Kennan with the man was
unplanned and eventful.

It was not the first meeting with men the man had had that day. During
the preceding night he had noted the campfires of several posses. At
dawn, attempting to break forth down the south-western slopes of the
mountain toward Petaluma, he had encountered not less than five separate
detachments of dairy-ranchers all armed with Winchesters and shotguns.
Breaking back to cover, th