CHAPTER I


PRESENTIMENT

The man was short and fat, and greasy above the dark beard line. In
addition, he was bowlegged as a greyhound, and just now he moved with a
limp as though very footsore. His coarse blue flannel shirt, open at the
throat, exposed a broad hairy chest that rose and fell mightily with the
effort he was making. And therein lay the mystery. The sun was hot--with
the heat of a cloudless August sun at one o'clock of the afternoon. The
country he was traversing was wild, unbroken--uninhabited apparently of
man or of beast. Far to his left, just visible through the dancing heat
rays, indistinct as a mirage, was a curling fringe of green trees. To
his right, behind him, ahead of him was not a tree nor a shrub nor a
rock the height of a man's head; only ungrazed, yellowish-green
sun-dried prairie grass. The silence was complete. Not even a breath of
wind rustled the grass; yet ever and anon the man paused glanced back
the way he had come, listened, his throat throbbing with the effort of
repressed breathing, in obvious expectation of a sound he did not hear;
then, for the time relieved, forged ahead afresh, one hand gripping the
butt of an old Springfield rifle slung over his shoulder, the other,
big, unclean, sunbrowned, swinging like a pendulum at his side.

Ludicrous, unqualifiedly, the figure would have been in civilisation,
humorous as a clown in a circus; but seeing it here, solitary, exotic,
no observer would have laughed. Fear, mortal dogging fear, impersonate,
supreme, was in every look, every action. Somewhere back of that curved
line where met the earth and sky, lurked death. Nothing else would have
been adequate to arouse this phlegmatic human as he was now aroused. The