Adventure Magazine Cover — page 154: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

144 and Boyer’s guidance. If it hadn’t been for the horse Boyer would have been able to make better time. As it was he had to go extremely slow in the more doubtful places and increased his speed only when they reached comparatively level ground; and the level stretches of trail were few and far between. Five miles to the summit. Boyer figured it would take him at least four hours to reach the top. But after he had crossed the summit he could mount his saddle-animal and catch up with the Giant perhaps by dawn. The wind increased as the hours passed and Boyer neared the summit. The moon, sinking slowly in the west behind the thick veil of clouds, gave hardly any light at all. It is never pitch dark with snow on the hills, except in a storm, and Boyer hoped he would be able to make the summit before the moon went down. A crust formed on the snow and the dan- ger of slipping was thus lessened to some degree and the man-hunter increased his pace as his shoes sank into the snow and were braced by the crust. More than once be thanked his stars that the horse which George had¢provided led easily; and toward the summit, where the trail crossed level ground for quite a distance along a far- flung shelf of rock, Boyer mounted and rested in the saddle while the horse held to the trail and made good progress. Rounding a small clump of jack-pines, the horse stepped along a narrow bit of trail and then to a place where the side of the mountain rose almost sheer on one side and dropped off in a precipice on the other. It was too late for Boyer to dismount and lead the animal across this dangerous piece of trail. His left stirrup overhung the preci- pice; there was no room to dismount on the right. He couldn’t back up; he could only go ahead. He let the reins lie loosely on the horse’s neck as the animal, sensing the danger that threatened, picked its way carefully on the narrow ribbon worn into solid rock, cov- ered with crusted snow wherein the tracks of the Giant led truly on. “Tt’s the pin-point near the summit,” muttered Boyer to himself, and held his breath. He could see the place in the trail ahead where the sheer wall of the mountain fell away. The man-hunter came near to pray- Adventure ing as they approached the narrowest part— the pin-point from which the trail took its name—and when thé horse stepped across it his right thigh scraped the rock wall. For an instant which seemed al] the time forever the horse swayed outward over the chasm below. Boyer’s throat throbbed with a sharp pain of acute anxiety and he drew in his breath with a gasp as the horse crowded past the point. But just as the animal stepped to the level stretch, where the walls of the mountaintop broke away and the preci- pice ended, there came a blinding flash and a loud report that reverberated in rolling echoes among the peaks. The horse fell forward on its knees, throw- ing Boyer over its head on to the level stretch of trail. Instinctively Boyer went for his gun and as he drew it with lightning speed from beneath his mackinaw a forefoot of the struggling horse struck his wrist and knocked the weapon out of his hand to the steep slope below. He struggled to his feet and leaped clear of the horse just as its struggles carried it over the edge of the trail down the bit of slope to the end of the preci- pice and over. A thud from far below sounded dully and then the stillness again fell over the moun- tain. Boyer, crouching on the trail, dis- armed, his weapon swept down the slope and over the precipice before the sliding body of the doomed horse, stared at a point just above the trail where the pin-point ended. The moonlight filtered dimly through a rift in the clouds and Boyer saw a crude tripod upon which was fastened a rifle—a rifle which now tipped barrel-end down from its support, pulled into that position by a string which the horse had pushed against for the reason that it had been stretched tight across the trail. Boyer understood now why the Giant had gone up that trail of an evening and gone up again in the morning and brought back deer. He had planned to kill Boyer or who- ever might take his trail in the same cow- ardly way he had killed his game. The shot which had probably killed the horse had been fired from a seé gun. Boyer inspected the gun and detached a piece of cord which had been fastened to the trigger, run through the rear of the guard and then stretched across the road. The trigger had been filed to a hair. COMmiclbook CO