coaxed into speech, and when Pierre entered the room she rose and left the breakfast table. The sad eyes of Jim Boone followed her and then turned to Pierre. No explanation was forthcoming, and he asked for none. The old fatalist had accepted the worst, and now he waited for doom to descend.
They took their horses after breakfast and rode out to search the hills, for it was quite possible that an accident had crippled at least one of the two lost men, either Patterson or Branch. Not a gully within miles was left unsearched, but toward evening they rode back, one by one, with no tidings.
One by one they rode up, and whistled to announce their coming, and then rode on to the stable to unsaddle their horses. About the supper table all gathered with the exception of Bud Mansie. So they waited the meal and each from time to time stole a glance at the fifth plate where Bud should sit.
It was Jack who finally stirred herself from her dumb gloom to take up that fifth and carry it out of the room. It was as if she had announced the death of Mansie.
After that, they ate what they could and then went back around the fire. The evening waned, but it brought no sign of any of the missing three. The wood burned low in the fire. The first to break the long silence was Jim Boone, with “Who brings in the wood?”
And Black Gandil answered: “We'll match, eh?”
In an outburst of energy the day before he disappeared Garry Patterson had chopped up some wood and left a pile of it at the corner of the house. It was a very little thing to bring in an armful of that wood, but long-riders do not love work, and now they started the matching seriously. The odd man was out, and Pierre went out on the first toss of the coins.
“You see,” said Gandil. “Bad luck to everyone but himself.”
At the next throw Jacqueline was the lucky one, and her father afterward. Gandil rose and stretched himself leisurely, yet as he sauntered toward the door his backward glance at Pierre was black indeed. He glanced curiously toward Jack—who looked away sharply—and then turned his eyes to her father.
The latter was considering him with a gloomy, foreboding stare and considering over and over again, as Pierre le Rouge well knew, the prophecy of Black Morgan Gandil.
He fell in turn into a solemn brooding, and many a picture out of the past came up beside him and stood near till he could almost feel its presence. He was roused by the creaking of the floor beneath the ponderous step of Jim Boone, who flung the door open and shouted: “Oh, Morgan.”
In the silence he turned and stared back at Pierre.
“What's up with Gandil?”
“God knows, not I.”
Pierre rose and ran from the room and around the side of the building. There by the woodpile lay the prostrate body. It was a mere limp weight when he turned and raised it in his arms. So he walked back into the house carrying all that was left of Black Morgan Gandil, and placed his burden on a bunk at the side of the room.
There had been no outcry from either Jim Boone or his daughter, but they came quickly to him, and Jacqueline pressed her ear over the heart of the hurt man.
She said: “He's still alive, but nearly gone. Where's the wound?”
They found it when they drew off his coat—a small cut high on the right breast, and another lower and more to the left. Either of them would have been fatal, and about each the flesh was discolored where the hilt of the knife or the fist of the striker had driven home the blade.
They stood back and made no hopeless effort to save him. It was uncanny that Black Morgan Gandil, after all of his battles, should die without a struggle in this way. And it had been no cowardly attack from the rear. Both wounds were in the front. A hope came to them when his color increased at one time, but it was for only a moment; it went out again as if someone were erasing paint from his cheeks.
But just as they were about to turn away his body stirred with a slight convulsion, the eyes opened wide, and he strove to speak. A red froth came on his lips. He made another desperate effort, and twisting himself onto one elbow pointed a rigid arm at Pierre. He gasped: “McGurk—God!” and dropped. He was dead before his head touched the blanket.
It was Jacqueline who closed the staring eyes, for the two men were frozen where they stood. They had heard the story of Patterson and Branch and Mansie in one word from the lips of the dying man.
McGurk was back. McGurk was prowling about the last of the gang of Boone, and the lone wolf had pulled down four of the band one by one on successive days. Only two remained, and these two looked at one another with a common thought.
“The lights!” cried Jacqueline, turning from the body of Gandil. “He can shoot us down through the windows at his leisure.”
“But he won't,” said her father. “I've lived too long with the name of McGurk in my ears not to know the man. He'll never kill by stealth, but openly and man to man. I know him, damn him. He'll wait till he meets us alone, and then we'll finish as poor Gandil, there, or Patterson and Branch and Bud Mansie, all of them fallen somewhere in the mountains with the buzzards left to bury 'em. That's how we'll finish with McGurk on our trail. And you—Gandil was right—it's you that's brought him on us. A shipwrecked man—by God, Gandil was right!”
His right hand froze on the butt of his gun and his face convulsed with impotent rage, for he knew, as both the others knew, that long before that gun was clear of the holster the bullet from Pierre's gun would be on its way. But Pierre threw his arms wide, and standing so, his shadow made a black cross on the wall behind him. He even smiled to tempt the big man further.
CHAPTER 24
Jacqueline ran between and caught the hand of her father, crying:
“Are you going to finish the work of McGurk before he has a chance to start it? He hunted the rest down one by one. Dad, if you put out Pierre what is left? Can you face that devil alone?”
And the old man groaned: “But it's his luck that's ruined me. It's his damned luck which has broken up the
