“If I don’t kill you, will you keep still?”
The boy nodded mutely.
A grimace suddenly distended the fugitive’s cracked face, a strange grimace, like the decrepit contortion of what might once have been a smile; and his eyes lit up, lit up with something that might have been the shadow of a softness. “Cross your heart and die?” he asked.
The boy crossed his heart, his staring face very serious.
Collins leaped upon the horse and was off.
He did not ride toward the mountain to which the boy had pointed. He turned his back to it, made for the main road down which had passed the second posse, swung into it, and went up the valley, at right angles to the course that would take him to his goal. As he turned into the main road, a yell had sounded. Another rose now; a rifle cracked. He had been seen by some member of the posses. He rounded a sharp double-turn beneath the branches of a sycamore which scraped him as he passed, and a long ribbon of
