As they came back to him the drumming of
hoofs swelled into a staccato roar, while presently the trail grew
steep, and dark boughs swayed above him. In another few minutes
something smooth and level flung back a blink of light, and the timbers
of a wooden bridge rattled under his passage. Then he was racing
upwards through the gloom of wind-dwarfed birches on the opposite side
listening for the rattle behind him on the bridge, and after a struggle
with the horse pulled him up smoking when he did not hear it.
There was a beat of hoofs across the river, but it was slower than when
he had last heard it and grew momentarily less audible, and Winston
laughed as he watched the steam of the horse and his own breath rise in
a thin white cloud.
"The trooper has given it up, and now for Montana," he said.
CHAPTER IV
IN THE BLUFF
It was very dark amid the birches where Trooper Shannon sat motionless
in his saddle gazing down into the denser blackness of the river
hollow. The stream ran deep below the level of the prairie, as the
rivers of that country usually do, and the trees which there alone
found shelter from the winds straggled, gnarled and stunted, up either
side of the steep declivity. Close behind the trooper a sinuous trail
seamed by ruts and the print of hoofs stretched away across the empty
prairie. It forked on the outskirts of the bluff, and one arm dipped
steeply to the river where, because the stream ran slow just there and
the bottom was firm, a horseman might cross when the water was low, and
heavy sledges make the passage on the ice in winter time.
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