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It was the work of a moment; a trained horse and an experienced hand. The cavalcade had covered nearly fifty yards before they could pull up; the freed captive had covered half that distance uphill. The road was so narrow that only two shots could be fired, and these broke dust two yards ahead of the fugitive. They had not dared to fire low; the horse was the more valuable animal. The fugitive knew this in his extremity also, and would have gladly taken a shot in his own leg to spare that of his horse. Five men were detached to recapture or kill him. The latter seemed inevitable. But he had calculated his chances; before they could reload he had reached the woods again; winding in and out between the pillared tree trunks, he offered no mark. They knew his horse was superior to their own; at the end of two hours they returned, for he had disappeared without track or trail. The end was briefly told in the “Sierra Record:”–

“Red Pete, the notorious horse-thief, who had so long eluded justice, was captured and hung by the Sawyer’s Crossing Vigilantes last week; his confederate, unfortunately, escaped on a valuable horse belonging to Judge Boompointer. The judge had refused one thousand dollars for the horse only a week before. As the thief, who is still at large, would find it difficult to dispose of so valuable an animal without detection, the chances are against either of them turning up again.”

*****

Salomy Jane watched the cavalcade until it had disappeared. Then she became aware that her brief popularity had passed. Mrs. Red Pete, in stormy hysterics, had included her in a sweeping denunciation of the whole universe, possibly for simulating an emotion in which she herself was deficient. The other women hated her for her momentary exaltation above them; only the children still admired her as one who had undoubtedly “canoodled” with a man “a-going to be hung”–a daring flight beyond their wildest ambition. Salomy Jane accepted the change with charming unconcern. She put on her yellow nankeen sunbonnet,–a hideous affair that would have ruined any other woman, but which only enhanced the piquancy of her fresh brunette skin,–tied the strings, letting the blue-black braids escape below its frilled curtain behind, jumped on her mustang with a casual display of agile ankles in shapely white stockings, whistled to the hound, and waving her hand with a “So long, sonny!” to the lately bereft but admiring nephew, flapped and fluttered away in her short brown holland gown.

Her father’s house was four miles distant. Contrasted with the cabin she had just quitted, it was a superior dwelling, with a long “lean-to” at the rear, which brought the eaves almost to the ground and made it look like a low triangle. It had a long barn and cattle sheds, for Madison Clay was a “great” stock-raiser and the owner of a “quarter section.” It had a sitting-room and a parlor organ, whose transportation thither had been a marvel of “packing.” These things were supposed to give Salomy Jane an undue importance, but the girl’s reserve and inaccessibility to local advances were rather the result of a cool, lazy temperament and the preoccupation of a large, protecting admiration for her father, for some years a widower. For Mr. Madison Clay’s life had been threatened in one or two feuds,–it was said, not without cause,–and it is possible that the pathetic spectacle of her father doing his visiting with a shotgun may have touched her closely and somewhat prejudiced her against the neighboring masculinity. The thought that cattle, horses, and “quarter section” would one day be hers did not disturb her calm. As for Mr. Clay, he accepted her as housewifely, though somewhat “interfering,” and, being one of “his own womankind,” therefore not without some degree of merit.

“Wot’s this yer I’m hearin’ of your doin’s over at Red Pete’s? Honeyfoglin’ with a horse-thief, eh?” said Mr. Clay two days later at breakfast.