Walker of the Secret ServicePost, Melville Davisson
General
Walker of the Secret Service
Post, Melville Davisson
Secret service -- Fiction
The sound of the dogs increased and in a little while I could make
out individuals of the posse. A tall man moved in front holding two
dogs on the leash. They came along our trail right down to the
railroad. There the dogs stopped and I realized the efficacy of
Mooney’s precaution against the bloodhound. When the dogs reached
the place where we had turpentined our shoes, they stopped instantly
and began to howl.
The man led them about in circles, across the track and beyond it,
in every direction, but the dogs would not take up our trail. The
turpentine was a complete safeguard against them; they would not
follow it. The big man handled the dogs with skill; he moved out in
an ever widening circle; he covered the ground for a hundred yards
in every direction, from the point where our trail stopped, but it
was no use.
The dogs would not take up a trail fouled with turpentine.
The posse then gathered in a sort of council, and I sat watching
them through the thicket. They evidently came to the one obvious
solution of the matter—that the train robbers whom they had followed
to the track had, here, boarded some passing train; and they set out
southward along the track to what I imagine was the closest railway
station.
This was precisely the thing Mooney intended them to do.
He was so certain that they would do it that he slept peacefully
while this posse was within a quarter of a mile of us, and the dogs
baying along the edge of the mountain in which we were at that
moment concealed. I felt a vast relief when the posse departed, and
I lay back on the dry leaves with my hands linked under my head.
I must have fallen asleep, for when I awoke it was midday. Mooney
had found a little stream and had removed all the evidences of his
disguise. The wig he had buried under a stone and the make-up he had
removed from his face.
He took me through the bushes to the little rivulet, a mere thread
of water from some spring, and very carefully restored me to my
normal appearance. He removed the make-up with some sort of grease
and I washed my hair in the water which he had dammed up into a tiny
pool.
We now bore no relation, in our outward appearance, to the men who
had held up the train.
It was afternoon and we set out west through the edge of the
mountain. The going was rough and dangerous. We found deep gullies
and ravines that ran almost from the top of the mountain into the
very valleys. Some of these walls were almost perpendicular. They
looked to stand sheer for a hundred feet.
We had to follow these gullies for a great distance up the mountain
before we could cross them. Then, we came to ledges of rock which it
was impossible for us to scale; these we had to follow down the
mountain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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