into the saddle Jim Boone swung the inert body of Pierre. The argument
was settled, for every man of them knew that nothing could turn Boone
back from a thing once begun. Yet there were muttered comments that
drew Black Morgan Gandil and Bud Mansie together.

And Gandil, from the South Seas, growled with averted eyes:

"This is the most fool stunt the chief has ever pulled."

"Right, pal," answered Mansie. "You take a snake in out of the cold,
and it bites you when it comes to in the warmth; but the chief has
started, and there ain't nothing that'll make him stop, except maybe
God or McGurk."

And Black Gandil answered with his evil, sudden grin: "Maybe McGurk,
but not God."

They started on again with Garry Patterson and Dick Wilbur riding close
on either side of Pierre, supporting his limp body. It delayed the
whole gang, for they could not go on faster than a jog-trot. The wind,
however, was falling off in violence. Its shrill whistling ceased, at
length, and they went on, accompanied only by the harsh crunching of
the snow underfoot.

CHAPTER X

THE GUARD

Consciousness returned to Pierre like the light of the rising moon
which breaks dimly through the window and makes all the objects in a
room grotesquely large and blackly shadowed. Many a time his eyes
opened, and he saw nothing, but when he did see and hear it was by
vague glimpses.

He heard the crying crunch of the snow underfoot; he heard the panting
and snorting of the horses; he felt the swing and jolt of the saddle
beneath him; he saw the grim faces of the long-riders, and he said:
"The law has taken me."

Thereafter he let his will lapse, and surrendered to the sleepy
numbness which assailed his brain in waves. He was riding without
support by this time, but it was an automatic effort. There was no
more real life in him than in a dummy figure. It was not the effect of
the blow. It was rather the long exposure and the over-exertion of
nerves and mind and body during the evening and night. He had simply
collapsed beneath the strain.

But an old army man has said: "Give me a soldier of eighteen or twenty.
In a single day he may not march quite so far as a more mature man or
carry quite so much weight. He will go to sleep each night dead to the
world. But in the morning he awakens a new man. He is like a slate
from which all the writing has been erased. He is ready for a new day
and a new world. Thirty days of campaigning