, and
owed his appointment primarily to his pre-eminent fitness for this
very task. Unacquainted with fear, he was at the same time unrivalled
through the backwoods counties for his subtle woodcraft, his sleepless
endurance, and his cunning.

It was two years now since he had set his hand to the business. One of
the gang had been hanged. Two were in the penitentiary, on life
sentence. Henderson had justified his appointment to every one except
himself. But while Pichot and his gross-witted tool, "Bug" Mitchell,
went unhanged, he felt himself on probation, if not shamed. Mitchell
he despised. But Pichot, the brains of the gang, he honoured with a
personal hatred that held a streak of rivalry. For Pichot, though a
beast for cruelty and treachery, and with the murder of a woman on
his black record--which placed him, according to Henderson's ideas, in
a different category from a mere killer of men--was at the same time a
born leader and of a courage none could question. Some chance dash of
Scotch Highland blood in his mixed veins had set a mop of hot red hair
above his black, implacable eyes and cruel, dark face. It had touched
his villainies, too, with an imagination which made them the more
atrocious. And Henderson's hate for him as a man was mixed with
respect for the adversary worthy of his powers.

Reaching the falls, Henderson had been forced to acknowledge that,
once again, Pichot had outwitted him on the trail. Satisfied that his
quarry was by this time far out of reach among the tangled ravines on
the other side of Two Mountains, he dismissed the two tired river-men
who constituted his posse, bidding them go on down the river to
Greensville and wait for him. It was his plan to hunt alone for a
couple of days in the hope of catching his adversary off guard. He had
an ally, unsuspected and invaluable, in a long-legged, half-wild
youngster of a girl, who lived alone with her father in a clearing
about a mile below the falls, and regarded Henderson with a childlike
hero-worship. This shy little savage, whom all the Settlement knew as
"Baisley's Sis," had an intuitive knowledge of the wilderness and the
trails which rivalled even Henderson's accomplished woodcraft; and the
indomitable deputy "set great store," as he would have put it, by her
friendship. He would go down presently to the clearing and ask some
questions of the child. But first he wanted to do a bit of thinking.
To think the better, the better to collect