He did not understand the bohunks--he did not want to. In his vivid life he had met most kinds of men, but the wild Continental scum that took to railway construction as its own special line of effort was beyond his experience. Hitherto he had been able to anticipate the villainies of his enemies--and in some of them he himself had revelled--but no one had yet charted the designs of creatures like Koppowski and his comrades.

 

Even as the foliage parted Blue Pete knew why he had looked. The raft was gone. He was not surprised, but his anger was none the less for that. With a muffled oath he let the foliage fall and dropped to the ground with the intuitive sense of the wild at evidence of an enemy.

 

A moment's thought raised him to his feet again, to strike recklessly back along the river's brink into the bush. Koppy and his crew, he knew, were busy about the bridge at that hour; the whole out-of-doors was his.

 

Blue Pete, a name once on the lips of every rancher and cowboy, sheriff and Mounted Policeman, from the Montana Badlands to Medicine Hat--once cowboy and rustler, again cowboy and Mounted Police detective, then thrown back to rustling by the blindness of a political judge--was not now the model of physical fitness of a year ago when his rifle and rope were respected over a prairie Province and State. The bullet that had brought mistaken mourning to the Police, and particularly to Sergeant Mahon, the friend for whom it was intended, had come within a hair's breadth of avenging Bilsy and Dutch Henry, the Montana rustlers who had hated him so. What he had escaped was due to his wonderful physique and to the untiring care of Mira Stanton.

 

With her his sole nurse and doctor, he had lain in one of their many retreats in the Cypress Hills until he was strong enough to entrust himself to the pace of the faithful Whiskers for the slow and painful journey to more expert treatment across the border. There he recovered rapidly. But Bilsy's bullet had extracted its toll. The blue-black face was darker now and more leathery, as if the blood behind were running more sluggishly. His cheeks were fallen in, and great hollows showed beneath the squinting eyes. It made him more the Indian than ever in appearance. He had lost weight and bulk, and the shoulder above the wound was an inch lower than its mate.

 

Time would perhaps return him his old form, as it had his strength. But time was the very thing Blue Pete could not wait for.

 

Recklessly as he commenced his return along the banks of the river, instinct won; in a few steps he was moving with all the old soundlessness. Twigs and crackling leaves seemed to evade his feet; eye and ear were ever alert. Though he knew he was alone in the bush, the way of a lifetime refused to sleep within him. By a circuitous route he approached a tangle of trees that hung out from a steep projection in the rising sides of the ravine. His eyes were flitting now about at his feet, and sometimes he carefully passed a boot over marks only he could detect. Once, whistling in soft surprise, he scattered a handful of spruce needles.

 

Into the heart of the thickest clump of trees he disappeared. The green fell behind him, the woods was lifeless again.

 

In the dim light of the cave Mira knew he was worried, but he would tell her when it was good for her to know.

 

"It's gone," he growled, after a long silence.

 

In their intimate way she understood.

 

"Perhaps it broke loose."

 

He looked his surprise that she should imagine he had not satisfied himself. She came to him and laid tender hand on his arm.

 

"I'm sorry, Pete, for your sake. Really it doesn't matter. We could go now--"

 

He moved away from her, not irritably; he just could not trust himself to refuse her anything.

 

"Thar's them two horses yet 'fore we got 'em all back."

 

"Can't we buy them? They ain't worth the trouble and risk."

 

He shook his head doggedly.

 

"Not now. They're after me--again."

 

There was a rending sadness about it, as if some overwhelming desire had escaped him forever, some dreaded fear returned.

 

"But you can give up the job on the trestle any time you like. They can't touch you for that, can they?"

 

He had told her of the incident at the trestle, and the hatred now boiling in the breasts of the bohunks. But of the scene in Torrance's shack, of Sergeant Mahon, he had not said a word; he felt he dare not. That the Sergeant should be there oppressed and threatened him. Loving Mahon with the full strength of his wild nature, he vaguely foresaw the complications that might arise; and he wished to save Mira the worry of it as long as he could. He had no conscious thought that Mira's early infatuation for the Sergeant continued; he knew that he, halfbreed though he was, had her whole heart. The Sergeant's fancy for the prairie girl had been but the reaching out of his fine nature for the beautiful, where so little of the beautiful existed. His marriage to Mira's Eastern-trained cousin had spelled the end of that.

 

What the halfbreed dare not face was the discovery by the Police that he whom they thought dead was alive. He was still on the Police black-books; in spite of their affection for him, he had months of rustling--if it was rustling--to pay for.

 

"Got to git them two horses--somehow," he pe............