owly, drawing himself out to six and a half feet of burly manhood. The
shoulders were, however, a little stooped, and the head was thrust forward
with an eager, watchful look--a habit become a physical characteristic.

Presently he caught sight of a hawk sailing southward along the peaks of
the white icebound mountains above, on which the sun shone with such sharp
insistence, making sky and mountain of a piece in deep purity and serene
stillness.

"That hawk's seen him, mebbe," he said, after a moment. "I bet it went up
higher when it got him in its 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 afterward--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, wit