eye. Ef it'd only speak and tell me
where he is--ef he's a day, or two days, or ten days north."

Suddenly his eyes blazed and his mouth opened in superstitious
amazement, for the hawk stopped almost directly overhead at a great
height, and swept round in a circle many times, waveringly, uncertainly.
At last it resumed its flight southward, sliding down the mountains like
a winged star.

The mountaineer watched it with a dazed expression for a moment longer,
then both hands clutched the rifle and half swung it to position
involuntarily.

"It's seen him, and it stopped to say so. It's seen him, I tell you, an'
I'll git him. Ef it's an hour, or a day, or a week, it's all the same.
I'm here watchin', waitin' dead on to him, the poison skunk!"

The person to whom he had been speaking now rose from the pile of cedar
boughs where he had been sitting, stretched his arms up, then shook
himself into place, as does a dog after sleep. He stood for a minute
looking at the mountaineer with a reflective, yet a furtively sardonic,
look. He was not above five feet nine inches in height, and he was slim
and neat; and though his buckskin coat and breeches were worn and even
frayed in spots, he had an air of some distinction and of concentrated
force. It was a face that men turned to look at twice and shook their
heads in doubt afterwards--a handsome, worn, secretive face, in as
perfect control as the strings of an instrument under the bow of a great
artist. It was the face of a man without purpose in life beyond the
moment--watchful, careful, remorselessly determined, an adventurer's
asset, the dial-plate of a hidden machinery.

Now he took the handsome meerschaum pipe from his mouth, from which he
had been puffing smoke slowly, and said in a cold, yet quiet voice, "How
long you been waitin', Buck?"

"A month. He's overdue near that. He always comes down to winter at Fort
o' Comfort, with his string of half-breeds, an' Injuns, an' the dogs."

"No chance to get him at the Fort?"

"It ain't so certain. They'd guess what I was doin' there. It's surer
here. He's got to come down the trail, an' when I spot him by the
Juniper clump"--he jerked an arm towards a spot almost a mile farther up
the valley--"I kin scoot up the underbrush a bit and git him--plumb.
I could do it from here, sure, but I don't want no mistake. Once only,
jest one shot, that's all I want, Sinnet."

He bit off a small piece of tobacco from a black plug Sinnet of