few miles back from the river and climbed
to the knees of the mountains in ever-mounting surge. A devil's
darning-needle in a cornfield would have been traced and cornered as
quickly as that slippery thin old killer of men, it seemed.

As if to show his contempt for those who hunted him, and to emphasize
his own feeling of security, he slipped down to the edge of the fenced
lands and struck down another homesteader that afternoon, leaving him
dead at the handles of his plow.

Those homesteaders were men of rare courage and unbending persistency
in the ordinary affairs of life, but three days of empty pursuit of
this monster left them out of heart. The name of Mark Thorn in itself
was sufficient to move a thrill of terror and repulsion. He had left
his red mark in many places through the land dominated by the cattle
interests of the Northwest, where settlers had attempted to find
lodgment. He had come at length to stand for an institution of
destruction, rather than an individual, which there was no power
strong enough to circumvent, nor force cunning enough to entrap.

There never was a tale of monsters, wolf-men, bloody-muzzled great
beasts of dark forests, that struck deeper fear into the hearts of
primitive peasantry than this modern ogre moved in the minds and
hearts of those striving settlers in the cattle lands. Mark Thorn was
a shadowy, far-reaching thing to them, distorted in their imaginings
out of the semblance of a man. He had grown, in the stories founded on
facts horrible enough without enlargement, into a fateful destroyer,
from whom no man upon whom he had set his mark could escape.

Little wonder, then, that fear for the safety of their wives and
children made the faces of these men gray as they rode the sage,
combing the hollows and hills for the sight of old Mark Thorn. One by
one they began to drop out of the posse, until of the fourteen besides
Macdonald who had ridden in the hunt on the second day, only five
remained on the evening of the third.

It was no use looking for Mark Thorn, they said, shaking gloomy heads.
When he came into a country on a contract to kill, it was like a curse
predestined which the power of man could not turn aside. He had the
backing of the Drovers' Association, which had an arm as long in that
land as the old Persian king's. He would strike there, like the ghost
of all the devils in men that ever had lived on their fellows' blood,
and slink away as silently as a wolf