The brutal cries of the man were cut short as he shot far over the pommel, lunging headlong over the pinto’s head, and striking with head and shoulders upon the glare ice. When he stopped sliding he lay very still for a few moments. Then he groaned, sat up, and found that the bluffs and the river and the stars and the universe in general were whirling giddily, with himself for the dizzy centre. With uncertain arms he reached out, endeavouring to check the sickening motion of things with the sheer force of his powerful hands. He was thrown down like a weakling wrestling with a giant. He lay still, cursing in a whisper, trying to steady the universe, until the motion passed, leaving in his nerves the sickening sensation incident to the sudden ending of a rapid flight. With great care Antoine raised himself upon his elbows and gazed about with an imbecile leer. Then he began to remember; remembered that he was hunted; that he was an outcast, a man of no race; remembered dimly, and with a malignant grin, a portion of a long series of crimes; remembered that the last was horse-stealing and that some of the others concerned blood. And as he remembered, he felt with horrible distinctness the lariat tightening about his neck—the lariat that the men of Cabanne’s trading post were bringing on fleet horses, nearer, nearer, nearer through the silent night. Antoine shuddered and got to his feet, looming huge against the star-sprent surface of the ice, as he turned a face of bestial malevolence down trail and listened for the beat of hoofs. There was only the dim, hollow murmur that dwells at the heart of silence. “Got a long start,” he observed, with the chuckle of a man whom desperation has made careless. “Hel-_lo_!” A pale, semicircular glow, like the flare of a burning straw stack a half day’s journey over the hills, had grown up at the horizon of the east; and as the man stared, still in a maze from his recent fall, the moon heaved a tarnished silver arc above the mystic rim of sky, flooding with new light the river and the bluffs. The man stood illumined—a big brute of a man, heavy-limbed, massive-shouldered, with the slouching stoop and the alert air of an habitual skulker. He moved uneasily, as though he had suddenly become visible to some lurking foe. He glanced nervously about him, fumbled at the butt of a six-shooter at his belt, then catching sight of the blotch of huddled dusk that was the fallen pinto, the meaning of the situation flashed upon him. “That cussed cayuse! Gone and done hisself like as not! Damn me! the whole creation’s agin me!” He made for the pony, snarling viciously as though its exhausted, lacerated self were the visible body of the inimical universe. He grasped the reins and jerked them violently. The brute only groaned and let its weary head fall heavily upon the ice. “_Get up!_” Antoine began kicking the pony in the ribs, bringing forth great hollow bellowings of pain.