Wilbur, and
Patterson, and mighty-handed Phil Branch had forced him to go on and
leave that form lying motionless on the snow.

At that he groaned, and spurred the black, and so the cavalcade rushed
faster and faster through the night.

They came over a sharp ridge and veered to the side just in time, for
all the further slope was a mass of treacherous sand and rubble and raw
rocks and mud, where a landslide had stripped the hill to the stone.

As they veered about the ruin and thundered on down to the foot of the
hill, Jim Boone threw up his hand for a signal and brought his stallion
to a halt on back-braced, sliding legs.

For a metallic glitter had caught his eye, and then he saw, half
covered by the pebbles and dirt, the figure of a man. He must have
been struck by the landslide and not overwhelmed by it, but rather
carried before it like a stick in a rush of water. At the outermost
edge of the wave he lay with the rocks and dirt washed over him. Boone
swung from the saddle and lifted Pierre le Rouge.

The gleam of metal was the cross which his fingers still gripped.
Boone examined it with a somewhat superstitious caution, took it from
the nerveless fingers, and slipped it into a pocket of Pierre's shirt.
A small cut on the boy's forehead showed where the stone struck which
knocked him senseless, but the cut still bled--a small trickle--Pierre
lived. He even stirred and groaned and opened his eyes, large and
deeply blue.

It was only an instant before they closed, but Boone had seen. He
turned with the figure lifted easily in his arms as if Pierre had been
a child fallen asleep by the hearth and now about to be carried off to
bed.

And the outlaw said: "I've lost my boy to-night. This here one was
given me by the will of--God."

Black Morgan Gandil reined his horse close by, leaned to peer down, and
the shadow of his hat fell across the face of Pierre.

"There's no good comes of savin' shipwrecked men. Leave him where you
found him, Jim. That's my advice. Sidestep a red-headed man. That's
what I say."

The quick-stepping horse of Bud Mansie came near, and the rider wiped
his blue, stiff lips, and spoke from the side of his mouth, a prison
habit of the line that moves in the lock-step: "Take it from me, Jim,
there ain't any place in our crew for a man you've picked up without
knowing him beforehand. Let him lay, I say."

But big Dick Wilbur was already leading up the horse of Hal Boone, and