Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 12, 2025
With bated breath the man-hunter glued his gaze upon the face of the man bending over the casket. "What a sad face, and yet most wonderful in its beauty. Who is she? A daughter of the house?" Harper turned and regarded Dyke Darrel questioningly, a sympathetic look in his black eyes. "Do you not know her?" "I know her? You forget that I am a stranger in this part of the West, Dyke."
He was the terror and aversion of every negro quarter along the coast; and his name appropriate to his character oft served the sable mother as a "bogey" to frighten her squalling piccaninny into silence! Such was Ruffin the man-hunter, as he was known among the black helots of the plantations. The "cobbing-board" and the red cowhide were not half so terrible as he.
He did not know that Breault was the best man-hunter in "N" Division, which reached from Athabasca Landing to the Arctic Ocean, or that up and down the two thousand-mile stretch of the Three River Country he was known as Shingoos, the Ferret. The girl fell asleep first that night, with her cheek on her father's shoulder. Breault, the Ferret, rolled himself in a blanket, and breathed deeply.
He listened, but no sound came down the dimly illumined stairway. A new thing was pressing upon him now. It rode over the shock of tragedy, over the first-roused instincts of the man-hunter, overwhelming him with the realization of a horror such as had never confronted him before. It gripped him more fiercely than the mere killing of Kedsty.
A certain Chalaudon, member of the Commune, is one of this kind, president of the Revolutionary Committee of the section of "L'Homme arme," and probably an excellent man-hunter; for "the government committees assigned to him the duty of watching the right bank of the Seine, and, with extraordinary powers conferred on him, he rules from his back shop one half of Paris.
There was something which he had not seen, something which he could not see, something that was hiding itself from him. He became, in an instant, the old James Kent. The instinctive processes of the man-hunter leaped to their stations like trained soldiers. He saw Marette again, as she had looked at him when he entered the room. It was not murder he had caught in her wide-open eyes.
"But he's got my wife." "Ah." And there was a world of understanding in the man's monosyllable. Five minutes later the man-hunter was on the trail again. It was the afternoon of the second day of his quest. He was saddle-sore and weary, but his purpose knew no weakening.
At once he plunged into the business of the stage line, and soon became a terror to the thieves and outlaws, several of whom he was the means of having shot or hung, although he himself was nothing of a man-hunter at the time; and indeed, in all his life he killed but one man a case of a reputation beyond desert, and an instance of a reputation fostered by admiring but ignorant writers.
For a moment the man-hunter could scarcely believe his senses. He sipped the hot sling, and afterward felt better, so that he sat up and gazed about him. It was the same room he had visited earlier in the evening, but the picture of home comfort was not the same, on account of the absence of the comfortable form and motherly face of Mrs. Bordine, who had retired long since to rest.
For a time he had ceased to be David Carrigan, the man-hunter. A few days ago his blood had run to that almost savage thrill of the great game of one against one, the game in which Law sat on one side of the board and Lawlessness on the other, with the cards between. It was the great gamble. The cards meant life or death; there was never a checkmate one or the other had to lose.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking