two or three men scrambling down the bluff. Then the loud
neigh of a frightened horse pealed out.

Jean discarded his useless rifle, and headed down the ridge slope,
keeping to the thickest line of pines and sheering around the clumps of
spruce. As he ran, his mind whirled with grim thoughts of escape, of
his necessity to find the camp where Gordon and Fredericks were buried,
there to procure another rifle and ammunition. He felt the wet blood
dripping down his arm, yet no pain. The forest was too open for good
cover. He dared not run uphill. His only course was ahead, and that
soon ended in an abrupt declivity too precipitous to descend. As he
halted, panting for breath, he heard the ring of hoofs on stone, then
the thudding beat of running horses on soft ground. The rustlers had
sighted the direction he had taken. Jean did not waste time to look.
Indeed, there was no need, for as he bounded along the cliff to the
right a rifle cracked and a bullet whizzed over his head. It lent
wings to his feet. Like a deer he sped along, leaping cracks and logs
and rocks, his ears filled by the rush of wind, until his quick eye
caught sight of thick-growing spruce foliage close to the precipice. He
sprang down into the green mass. His weight precipitated him through
the upper branches. But lower down his spread arms broke his fall,
then retarded it until he caught. A long, swaying limb let him down
and down, where he grasped another and a stiffer one that held his
weight. Hand over hand he worked toward the trunk of this spruce and,
gaining it, he found other branches close together down which he
hastened, hold by hold and step by step, until all above him was black,
dense foliage, and beneath him the brown, shady slope. Sure of being
unseen from above, he glided noiselessly down under the trees, slowly
regaining freedom from that constriction of his breast.

Passing on to a gray-lichened cliff, overhanging and gloomy, he paused
there to rest and to listen. A faint crack of hoof on stone came to
him from above, apparently farther on to the right. Eventually his
pursuers would discover that he had taken to the canyon. But for the
moment he felt safe. The wound in his forearm drew his attention. The
bullet had gone clear through without breaking either bone. His shirt
sleeve was soaked with blood. Jean rolled it back and tightly wrapped
his scarf around the wound, yet still the dark-red blood oozed out and
drippe