The gallop of the advancing horse was now loud, clear, hammering
like an anvil. It passed for a moment out of sight in a hollow of the
road below. In the next instant it would be on us. The giant Jud made
one last mighty effort. The Cardinal went straight into the air. I clung
to the bit, dragged up out of the saddle. I felt my foot against the
pommel, my knee against the steel shoulder of the great horse, my face
under the Cardinal's wide red throat.

I heard the reins snap on both sides of the bit--pulled in two. And then
the loud, harsh laugh of the man Ump.

"Hell! It's Jourdan an' Red Mike."

CHAPTER IV

CONCERNING HAWK RUFE

Old wise men in esoteric idiom, unintelligible to the vulgar, have
endeavoured to write down in books how the human mind works in its
house,--and I believe they have not succeeded very well. They have
broken into this house when it was empty, and laboured to decipher the
mystic hieroglyphics written on its walls, and learn to what uses the
departed craftsman put the strange, delicate implements which they found
fastened so primly in their places.

They have got at but little, as I have heard them say, deploring the
brevity of life, and the tremendous magnitude of the labour. The
learned, as one put it, had barely time to explain to his successor that
he had found the problem unsolvable. I think they might as well have
gone about tracking the rainbow, for all they have learned of this
mysterious business.

In fewer moments than a singing maid takes to double back on her chorus,
I had forgotten all about the ghost. I was sitting idly in the saddle
now with the rein over my wrist. Jourdan's message from my brother had
given enough to think of. I knew that Ward in the preceding autumn had
bought the cattle of two great graziers south of the Valley River, to be
taken up during the October month, but I did not know that on a summer
afternoon he had sold these cattle to Woodford, binding himself to
deliver them within three days after they were demanded.

The trade was fair enough when the two had made it. But now the price of
beef cattle was off almost thirty dollars a bullock, and Woodford was in
a position to lose more money than his bald-faced cattle-horse could
carry in a sack. He had waited all along hoping for the tide to turn.
Suddenly, to-day he had demanded his cattle.

To-day, when Ward was on his back and the cattle far to the south across
the Valley River. It was the c