more was upon his errand. He dragged the rifle by the barrel, so that
its butt made a crooked, broken furrow in the new snow like the trail of
a crippled snake. He fell and got up, and fell and rose again. He
coughed and up the ridge a ranging dog-fox barked back an answer to his
cough.

From out of the slitted door Shem watched him until the scrub oaks at
the edge of the clearing swallowed him up. Then Shem fastened himself in
and made ready to start his flight to the lowlands that very night.

* * * * *

Just below the forks of Pigeon Roost Creek the trail that followed its
banks widened into a track wide enough for wagon wheels. On one side lay
the diminished creek, now filmed over with a glaze of young ice. On the
other the mountain rose steeply. Fifteen feet up the bluff side a fallen
dead tree projected its rotted, broken roots, like snaggled teeth, from
the clayey bank. Behind this tree's trunk, in the snow and half-frozen,
half-melted yellow mire, Anse Dugmore was stretched on his face. The
barrel of the rifle barely showed itself through the interlacing root
ends. It pointed downward and northward toward the broad, moonlit place
in the road. Its stock was pressed tightly against Anse Dugmore's
fallen-in cheek; the trigger finger of his right hand, fleshless as a
joint of cane, was crooked about the trigger guard. A thin stream of
blood ran from his mouth and dribbled down his chin and coagulated in a
sticky smear upon the gun stock. His lungs, what was left of them, were
draining away.

He lay without motion, saving up the last ounce of his life. The cold
had crawled up his legs to his hips; he was dead already from the waist
down. He no longer coughed, only gasped thickly. He knew that he was
about gone; but he knew, too, that he would last, clear-minded and
clear-eyed, until High Sheriff Wyatt Trantham came. His brain would
last--and his trigger finger.

Then he heard him coming. Up the trail sounded the muffled music of a
pacer's hoofs single-footing through the snow, and after that, almost
instantly Trantham rode out into sight and loomed larger and larger as
he drew steadily near the open place under the bank. He was wavering in
the saddle. He drew nearer and nearer, and as he came out on the wide
patch of moonlit snow, he pulled the single-footer down to a walk and
halted him and began fumbling in the right-hand side of the saddlebags
that draped his horse's shoulder.