moonlight, with that peculiar untranslated intendment which
differentiates its luminosity in the wilderness from the lunar glamour
'of cultivated Scenes--something weird, melancholy, eloquent of a
meaning addressed to the soul, but which the senses cannot entertain or
words express.

With a sudden halt, the guide dismounted. The girl still sat on the
saddle-blanket, and the horse bowed his head and pawed. The posse were
gazing dubiously, reluctantly, at a foot-bridge across a deep abyss. It
was only a log, the upper side hewn, with a shaking hand-rail held by
slight standards.

"Have we got to cross this?" asked the officer, still in the saddle and
gazing downward.

"Ef ye foller me," said the guide, indifferently.

But he was ahead of his orders. He visibly braced his nerves for the
effort, and holding his rifle as a balancing-pole, he sped along the
light span with a tread as deft as a fox or a wolf. In a moment he had
gained the farther side.

They scarcely knew how it happened. So unexpected was the event that,
though it occurred before their eyes, they did not seem to see it. They
remembered, rather than perceived, that he stooped suddenly; with one
single great effort of muscular force he dislodged the end of the
log, heaved it up in the air, strongly flung it aside, whence it went
crashing down into the black depths below, its own weight, as it fell,
sufficing to wrench out the other end, carrying with it a mass of earth
and rock from the verge of the precipice.

The horses sprang back snorting and frightened; the officer's, being a
fine animal in prime condition, tried to bolt. 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. "Boyston 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