ally, they
stopped, and the private backed off the road. The three men got out;
Parker with his Winchester, the sergeant checking the drum of a
Thompson, and the private pumping a buckshot shell into the chamber of
a riot gun. For half an hour, they followed the brush-grown trail beside
the little stream; once, they passed a dark gray commercial-model jeep,
backed to one side. Then they came to the head of the gap.

A man, wearing a tweed coat, tan field boots, and khaki breeches, was
sitting on a log, smoking a pipe; he had a bolt-action rifle across his
knees, and a pair of binoculars hung from his neck. He seemed about
thirty years old, and any bobby-soxer's idol of the screen would have
envied him the handsome regularity of his strangely immobile features.
As Parker and the two State policemen approached, he rose, slinging his
rifle, and greeted them.

"Sergeant Haines, isn't it?" he asked pleasantly. "Are you gentlemen
out hunting the critter, too?"

"Good afternoon, Mr. Lee. I thought that was your jeep I saw, down the
road a little." The sergeant turned to the others. "Mr. Richard Lee;
staying at the old Kinchwalter place, the other side of Rutter's Fort.
This is Mr. Parker, the district game protector. And Private Zinkowski."
He glanced at the rifle. "Are you out hunting for it, too?"

"Yes, I thought I might find something, up here. What do you think it is?"

"I don't know," the sergeant admitted. "It could be a bobcat. Canada
lynx. Jink, here, has a theory that it's some escapee from the
paper-doll factory, with a machete. Me, I hope not, but I'm not
ignoring the possibility."

The man with the matinee-idol's face nodded. "It could be a lynx.
I understand they're not unknown, in this section."

"We paid bounties on two in this county, in the last year," Parker said.
"Odd rifle you have, there; mind if I look at it?"

"Not at all." The man who had been introduced as Richard Lee unslung and
handed it over. "The chamber's loaded," he cautioned.

"I never saw one like this," Parker said. "Foreign?"

"I think so. I don't know anything about it; it belongs to a friend of
mine, who loaned it to me. I think the action's German, or Czech; the
rest of it's a custom job, by some West Coast gunmaker. It's chambered
for some ultra-velocity wildcat load."

The rifle passed from hand to hand; the three men examined it in turn,
commenting admiringly.

"You find anything, Mr. Lee?" the sergeant asked, handing it