Like the mountain lion, the man was a killer.  But, unlike the lion, his vague description and the narrative of his deeds was in all the newspapers, and mankind was a vast deal more interested in him than in the lion.  The lion had slain calves in upland pastures.  But the man, for purposes of robbery, had slain an entire family—­the postmaster, his wife, and their three children, in the upstairs over the post office in the mountain village of Chisholm.

For two weeks the man had eluded and exceeded pursuit.  His last crossing had been from the mountains of the Russian River, across wide-farmed Santa Rosa Valley, to Sonoma Mountain.  For two days he had laired and rested, sleeping much, in the wildest and most inaccessible precincts of the Kennan Ranch.  With him he had carried coffee stolen from the last house he had raided.  One of Harley Kennan’s angora goats had furnished him with meat.  Four times he had slept the clock around from exhaustion, rousing on occasion, like any animal, to eat voraciously of the goat-meat, to drink large quantities of the coffee hot or cold, and to sink down into heavy but nightmare-ridden sleep.

And in the meantime civilization, with its efficient organization and intricate inventions, including electricity, had closed in on him.  Electricity had surrounded him.  The spoken word had located him in the wild canyons of Sonoma Mountain and fringed the mountain with posses of peace-officers and detachments of armed farmers.  More terrible to them than any mountain lion was a man-killing man astray in their landscape.  The telephone on the Kennan Ranch, and the telephones on all other ranches abutting on Sonoma Mountain, had rung often and transmitted purposeful conversations and arrangements.

So it happened, when the posses had begun to penetrate the mountain, and when the man was compelled to make a daylight dash down into the Valley of the Moon to cross over to the mountain fastnesses that lay between it and Napa Valley, that Harley Kennan rode out on the hot-blooded colt he was training.  He was not in pursuit of the man who had slain the postmaster of Chisholm and his family.  The mountain was alive with man-hunters, as he well knew, for a score had bedded and eaten at the ranch house the night before.  So the meeting of Harley Kennan with the man was unplanned and eventful.

It was not the first meeting with men the man had had that day.  During the preceding night he had noted the campfires of several posses.  At dawn, attempting to break forth down the south-western slopes of the mountain toward Petaluma, he had encountered not less than five separate detachments of dairy-ranchers all armed with Winchesters and shotguns.  Breaking back to cover, the chase hot on his heels, he had run full tilt into a party of village youths from Glen Ellen and Caliente.  Their squirrel and deer rifles had missed him, but his back had been peppered with birdshot in a score of places, the leaden pellets penetrating maddeningly in a score of places just under the skin.