In the rush of his retreat down the canyon slope, he had plunged into a bunch of shorthorn steers, who, far more startled than he, had rolled him on the forest floor, trampled over him in their panic, and smashed his rifle under their hoofs.  Weaponless, desperate, stinging and aching from his superficial wounds and bruises, he had circled the forest slopes along deer-paths, crossed two canyons, and begun to descend the horse-trail he found in the third canyon.

It was on this trail, going down, that he met the reporter coming up.  The reporter was—­well, just a reporter, from the city, knowing only city ways, who had never before engaged in a man-hunt.  The livery horse he had rented down in the valley was a broken-kneed, jaded, and spiritless creature, that stood calmly while its rider was dragged from its back by the wild-looking and violently impetuous man who sprang out around a sharp turn of the trail.  The reporter struck at his assailant once with his riding-whip.  Then he received a beating, such as he had often written up about sailor-rows and saloon-frequenters in his cub-reporter days, but which for the first time it was his lot to experience.

To the man’s disgust he found the reporter unarmed save for a pencil and a wad of copy paper.  Out of his disappointment in not securing a weapon, he beat the reporter up some more, left him wailing among the ferns, and, astride the reporter’s horse, urging it on with the reporter’s whip, continued down the trail.

Jerry, ever keenest on the hunting, had ranged farther afield than Michael as the pair of them accompanied Harley Kennan on his early morning ride.  Even so, Michael, at the heels of his master’s horse, did not see nor understand the beginning of the catastrophe.  For that matter, neither did Harley.  Where a steep, eight-foot bank came down to the edge of the road along which he was riding, Harley and the hot-blood colt were startled by an eruption through the screen of manzanita bushes above.  Looking up, he saw a reluctant horse and a forceful rider plunging in mid-air down upon him.  In that flashing glimpse, even as he reined and spurred to make his own horse leap sidewise out from under, Harley Kennan observed the scratched skin and torn clothing, the wild-burning eyes, and the haggardness under the scraggly growth of beard, of the man-hunted man.

The livery horse was justifiably reluctant to make that leap out and down the bank.  Too painfully aware of the penalty its broken knees and rheumatic joints must pay, it dug its hoofs into the steep slope of moss and only sprang out and clear in the air in order to avoid a fall.  Even so, its shoulder impacted against the shoulder of the whirling colt below it, overthrowing the latter.  Harley Kennan’s leg, caught under against the earth, snapped, and the colt, twisted and twisting as it struck the ground, snapped its backbone.

To his utter disgust, the man, pursued by an armed countryside, found Harley Kennan, his latest victim, like the reporter, to be weaponless.  Dismounted, he snarled in his rage and disappointment and deliberately kicked the helpless man in the side.  He had drawn back his foot for the second kick, when Michael took a hand—­or a leg, rather, sinking his teeth into the calf of the back-drawn leg about to administer the kick.