awoke when the moon was in
the sky, and heard a trampling of horses high up amidst the pines that
shut in a lonely valley, and once a solitary prospector, camping close
beneath the snow, rose drowsily beside his fire, and wondered whether
he was dreaming as he saw a line of mounted men with rifles flit by and
vanish beyond a black hill shoulder. They rode in silence, and save
for the muffled ring of iron and faint jingle of steel, he could have
taken them for disembodied spirits in place of living men.

Horton, however, had in him a trace of the general, and did what his
mind could grasp with a grim thoroughness, while, as the result of it,
there was blank astonishment one morning in a mining camp as he and the
men who followed him appeared as by magic from amidst the pines
surrounding it. They were also armed, and the miners, who rose from
their breakfast, stared at them motionless in silence, that is, all
save one, who slipped into a tent and afterwards out through the back
of it. Horton, however, saw him, and his command was to the
point--"Stop him."

There was a rustle of branches, and Tom of Okanagan rose out of the
thicket the fugitive had almost gained, with a rifle in his hand. He
laughed somewhat grimly as he said, "Stop right where you are."

Then there was for a space a somewhat impressive tableau, that had in
it humorous as well as tragic possibilities. Hallam's men had
doubtless been chosen because of qualities which are more tolerated
farther south than they are in that country, but they had nothing handy
to enforce their protests with beyond their camp utensils, and it did
not appear advisable to make a move in search of more effective
weapons. Accordingly they stood silent, with the smoke drifting about
them, all save one of them, who, with impotent fury in his face, backed
step by step into the opening before their shanty, as Tom of Okanagan
beckoned him. Nobody else moved at all, for Horton's company were
commandingly posted beneath the surrounding pines, and there was a grim
twinkle in the eyes of one who carried a rifle, and had risen out of
the undergrowth between the shovels and axes and their legitimate
owners. How long the spectacle would have lasted Seaforth did not
know, but at last the man, who had backed away before Okanagan, tripped
on a tent line and went down headlong. That broke the silence, and the
big man, who had on a previous occasion spoken with Alton, stepped
forward.