man. Was this the
end for him, after all he had gone through? Was this deadly silent,
rough-coated terrier the thing destined to destroy him where men had
failed? He did not even know that the dog was real. Might it not be
some terrible avenger, out of the mystery beyond life, placed to beset
him and finish him finally on this road that he was convinced was surely
the death-road? The dog was not real. It could not be real. The dog
did not live that could take a full-arm whip-slash without wince or
flinch.

Twice again, as the dog sprang, he deflected it with accurately delivered
blows. And the dog came on with the same surety and silence. The man
surrendered to his terror, clapping heels to his horse's old ribs,
beating it over the head and under the belly with the whip until it
galloped as it had not galloped in years. Even on that apathetic steed
the terror descended. It was not terror of the dog, which it knew to be
only a dog, but terror of the rider. In the past its knees had been
broken and its joints stiffened for ever, by drunken-mad riders who had
hired him from the stables. And here was another such drunken-mad
rider--for the horse sensed the man's terror--who ached his ribs with the
weight of his heels and beat him cruelly over face and nose and ears.

The best speed of the horse was not very great, not great enough to out-
distance Michael, although it was fast enough to give the latter only
infrequent opportunities to spring for the man's leg. But each spring
was met by the unvarying whip-blow that by its very weight deflected him
in the air. Though his teeth each time clipped together perilously close
to the man's leg, each time he fell back to earth he had to gather
himself together and run at his own top speed in order to overtake the
terror-stricken man on the crazy-galloping horse.

Enrico Piccolomini saw the chase and was himself in at the finish; and
the affair, his one great adventure in the world, gave him wealth as well
as material for conversation to the end of his days. Enrico Piccolomini
was a wood-chopper on the Kennan Ranch. On a rounded knoll, overlooking
the road, he had first heard the galloping hoofs of the horse and the
crack of the whip-blows on its body. Next, he had seen the running
battle of the man, the horse, and the dog. When directly beneath him,
not twenty feet distant, he saw the dog leap, in its queer silent way,
straight up and in to the down-smash of th