e chase hot on his heels, he had run full tilt
into a party of village youths from Glen Ellen and Caliente. Their
squirrel and deer rifles had missed him, but his back had been peppered
with birdshot in a score of places, the leaden pellets penetrating
maddeningly in a score of places just under the skin.

In the rush of his retreat down the canyon slope, he had plunged into a
bunch of shorthorn steers, who, far more startled than he, had rolled him
on the forest floor, trampled over him in their panic, and smashed his
rifle under their hoofs. Weaponless, desperate, stinging and aching from
his superficial wounds and bruises, he had circled the forest slopes
along deer-paths, crossed two canyons, and begun to descend the horse-
trail he found in the third canyon.

It was on this trail, going down, that he met the reporter coming up. The
reporter was--well, just a reporter, from the city, knowing only city
ways, who had never before engaged in a man-hunt. The livery horse he
had rented down in the valley was a broken-kneed, jaded, and spiritless
creature, that stood calmly while its rider was dragged from its back by
the wild-looking and violently impetuous man who sprang out around a
sharp turn of the trail. The reporter struck at his assailant once with
his riding-whip. Then he received a beating, such as he had often
written up about sailor-rows and saloon-frequenters in his cub-reporter
days, but which for the first time it was his lot to experience.

To the man's disgust he found the reporter unarmed save for a pencil and
a wad of copy paper. Out of his disappointment in not securing a weapon,
he beat the reporter up some more, left him wailing among the ferns, and,
astride the reporter's horse, urging it on with the reporter's whip,
continued down the trail.

Jerry, ever keenest on the hunting, had ranged farther afield than
Michael as the pair of them accompanied Harley Kennan on his early
morning ride. Even so, Michael, at the heels of his master's horse, did
not see nor understand the beginning of the catastrophe. For that
matter, neither did Harley. Where a steep, eight-foot bank came down to
the edge of the road along which he was riding, Harley and the hot-blood
colt were startled by an eruption through the screen of manzanita bushes
above. Looking up, he saw a reluctant horse and a forceful rider
plunging in mid-air down upon him. In that flashing glimpse, even as he
reined and spurred to make