Before he had him well in
hand again, the man on the opposite brink had vanished. The sheriff's
suspicions were barely astir when a hallooing voice in the rear made
itself heard, and a horseman, breathless with haste, his steed flecked
with foam, rode up, indignant, flushed, and eager.

"Whyn't ye wait for me, Sher'ff? Ye air all on the wrong track," he
cried. "Royston McGurny be hid in the skellington's tree. I glimpsed him
thar myself, an' gin information."

The sheriff gazed down with averse and suspicious eyes. "What's all
this?" he said sternly. "Give an account of yourself."

"Me?" exclaimed the man in amazement. "Why, I'm Barton Smith, yer guide,
that's who. An' I'm good for five hundred dollars' reward."

But the sheriff called off the pursuit for the time, as he had no means
of replacing the bridge or of crossing the chasm.

Meddlesome's share in the escape was not detected, and for a while she
had no incentive to the foolhardiness of boasting. But her prudence
diminished when the reward for the apprehension of Royston McGurny was
suddenly withdrawn. The confession of one of the distillers, dying of
tuberculosis contracted in prison, who had himself fired the fatal shot,
had established the alibi that McGurny claimed, and served to relieve
him of all suspicion.

He eventually became a "herder" of cattle on the bald of the mountain
and a farmer in a small way, and in these placid pursuits he found a
contented existence. But, occasionally, a crony of his olden time would
contrast the profits of this tame industry at a disadvantage with the
quick and large returns of the "wild cat," when he would "confess and
avoid."

"That's true, that's all true; but a man can't holp it no ways in the
world whenst he hev got a wife that is so out-an'-out meddlesome that
she won't let him run ag'in' the law, nohow he kin fix it."

HIS UNQUIET GHOST

The moon was high in the sky. The wind was laid. So silent was the vast
stretch of mountain wilderness, aglint with the dew, that the tinkle of
a rill far below in the black abyss seemed less a sound than an evidence
of the pervasive quietude, since so slight a thing, so distant, could
compass so keen a vibration. For an hour or more the three men who
lurked in the shadow of a crag in the narrow mountain-pass, heard
nothing else. When at last they caught the dull reverberation of a slow
wheel and the occasional metallic clank of a tire against a stone, the
vehicle w