It was true that to make Tucker Creek he would have to double out of the Morgan Hills and brush back perilously close to Rickett, but Billy was convinced that this was the outlaw's plan; for though the Caswell City fords would be his safest route it would take him a day's ride, on an ordinary horse, out of his way.Besides, the sheriff had always said:
"Barry will play the chance!"
Billy would have ventured his life that the fugitive would strike straight for the Creek as soon as he doubled out of Morgan Hills.
Doors began to bang; a hundred pairs of boots thudded and jingled towards Billy; the noise of voices rolled through the outer hall, poured through the door, burst upon his ears.He looked up in mild surprise; the first wave of Rickett's men had swept out of the courthouse to take the trail of the fugitive or to watch the pursuit; in this second wave came the remnants, the old men, the women; great-eyed children.In spite of their noise of foot and voice they appeared to be trying to walk stealthily, talk so softly.They leaned about his desk and questioned him with gesticulations, but he only stared.They were all dim as dream people to Billy the clerk, whose mind was far away struggling with his problem.
"Pore old Billy is kind of dazed," suggested a woman."Don't bother him, Bud.Look here!"The tide of noise and faces broke on either side of the desk and swayed off towards the inner office and vaguely Billy felt that they should not be there--the sheriff's privacy--the thought almost drew him back to complete consciousness, but he was borne off from them, again, on a wave of study, pictures.Off there to the east went the fifteen best men of the mountain-desert on the trail of the slender fellow with the black hair and the soft brown eyes.How he had seemed to shrink with aloofness, timidity, when he stood there at the door, giving his name.It was not modesty.Billy knew now; it was something akin to the beasts of prey, who shrink from the eyes of men until they are mad with hunger, and in the slender man Billy remembered the same shrinking, the same hunger.When he struck, no wonder that even the sheriff went down; no wonder if even the fifteen men were baffled on that trail; and therefore, it was sufficiently insane for him, Billy the clerk, to sit in his office and dream with his ineffectual hands of stopping that resistless flight.Yet he pulled himself back to his problem.
Considering his problem in general, the thing was perfectly simple: Barry was sure to head west, and to the west there were only two gates--fording the creek and the river above the junction in the first place, or in the second place cutting across the Asper far north at Caswell City.
If he could be turned from the direction of Tucker Creek he would head for the second possible crossing, and when he drew near Caswell City if he were turned by force of numbers again he would unquestionably skirt the Asper, hoping against hope that he might find a fordable place as he galloped south.But, going south, he might be fenced again from Tucker Creek, and then his case would be hopeless and his horse worn down.
It was a very clever plan, quite simple after it was once conceived, but in order to execute it properly it was necessary that the outlaw be pressed hard every inch of the way and never once allowed to get out of sight.He must be chased with relays.In ordinary stretches of the mountain-desert that would have been impossible, but the country around Rickett was not ordinary.
Between the Morgan Hills and Wago there were considerable stretches of excellent farm land in the center of which little towns had grown up.
Running north from the country seat, they were St.Vincent, Wago, and Caswell City.Coming south again along the Asper River there were Ganton and Wilsonville, and just above the junction of the river with Tucker Creek lay the village of Bly Falls.There was no other spot in the mountain-desert, perhaps, which could show so many communities.Also it was possible to get in touch with the towns from Rickett, for in a wild spirit of enterprise telephones had been strung to connect each village of the group.
