urged him to a greater
speed for home, and a greater sympathy for the man who was prepared to
accept the Judas money offered for the lives of this gang of criminals.

CHAPTER III

TRAILING THE "BLACK TAIL"

The woman started. She threw up her head. Her wide eyes, wonderful
and dark, searched the deep aisles of the shaded pine woods about her.
Her hair hung loosely in a knot at the nape of her neck, and its
intensely dark masses made an exquisite framing for the oval of the
handsome face beneath the loose brim of wide prairie hat.

The stillness of these wooded slopes of the Cathills was profound.
They possessed something of the solemnity belonging to the parent range
of the Rockies beyond. For they were almost primeval. The woman might
have belonged to them, her dark beauty so harmonized with its
surroundings. Yet for all her coloring, for all the buckskin she wore
for upper garment, there was nothing in her nature of the outlands
which now claimed her. She was of the cities. She was bred and
nurtured in the civilized places. The life about her was another life.
It was crude and foreign to her. It claimed her by force of
circumstance against every instinct and emotion.

Her searching ceased, and her eyes fixed their steady regard upon a
gray-brown object moving amongst the myriad of black stanchions which
supported the tousled roof of melancholy green foliage above her. With
an almost imperceptible movement one buckskin clad arm reached slowly
out toward the small sporting rifle which leaned against an adjacent
tree-trunk. Her whole poise was tense and steady. There was in her
attitude that hard decision which one associates only with the
experienced hunter. There was almost too much decision in a woman so
obviously young.

The weapon was drawn toward her. For one brief moment it was laid
across her lap upon the paper-covered book she had been reading. Then
its butt found its way to a resting place against her soft shoulder.
Not for an instant had her gaze been diverted from the moving object.
Now, however, her head inclined forward, and her warm cheek was laid
against the cool butt. The sights of the weapon were brought up into
line. The pressure of her forefinger was increased upon the trigger.
There was a sharp report followed by a swift rush of scampering hoofs
amongst the brittle pine cones and needles which carpeted the twilit
woods. Then, in a flash, all the tense poise gave way to