CHAPTER I--THE HOODED RUSTLERS

Sergeant John Dick, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was leading his horse up a steep and rugged gorge in the great southwest region of Canada. It was close by the United States border, and practically in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

A fine, military-looking figure, Sergeant Dick cut, in his scarlet tunic, riding-breeches, and “Stetson” or broad-brimmed, bell-crowned hat. He carried his rifle at the trail in his left hand, and had the bridle of his horse looped over his right arm.

The animal was limping painfully. It had got a thorn in its hoof lower down the trail, where this was on the open prairie, and had gone dead lame before its master discovered its injury and could extract the thorn.

The accident was particularly annoying to Sergeant Dick, for it was almost imperative he should be at the Paquita Island Reservation, just over the United States border, by sundown, and the lord of day was already well down the western sky.

A howling hurricane of wind made progress still more difficult, blowing dead in his teeth as it was. No ordinary gusty gale was this, but a ceaseless avalanche of wind tearing with a terrific howl along the gorge, raging against man and beast in insensate fury.

At times Sergeant Dick would turn his back to the storm, and the horse, with head also turned, would sidle along almost broadside to it, the better to keep its feet and hold its own.

Man and horse were thus maneuvering one of the turns in the gorge when, high above the howl of the hurricane, rang the sharp, air-splitting crack of a rifle close by--just in front--and simultaneously Sergeant Dick staggered and nearly fell, feeling a sudden numbing, burning pain upon the right side of the head, above his ear.

His Stetson hat, which had so long resisted the tugging of the wind, was whirled from his head, and went rolling like a wheel, on its brim, away down the pass before the gale.

With a thrill of anger, rather than of any bodily fear, the sergeant promptly dived behind his horse, drawing it by the reins at the same time fully broadside across the rocky pass.

As he did so, he beheld for the first time a startling tableau or drama being enacted ahead, round the bend in the gorge.

The track still ascended, but the precipitous, seventy to two hundred feet high cliffs, which shut him in and almost excluded the westering sun, became at the scene gentle acclivities, thickly covered with dense undergrowth and forest trees from the edge of the road to their summits.

It was an ideal spot for an ambuscade, and such was what had taken place. The stage-coach from Settleford, to Paquita Springs over the border, was halted in the dim twilight of the leafy avenue, and the driver and passengers were all lined up at one side of the road, with their hands in the air--women as well as men--under the menace of two _ghost-like_ bandits or “rustlers,” pointing an automatic pistol in either hand and with rifles on backs.

Ghost-like indeed the bandits were. There was no other word for their bizarre and spectral appearance.

There were four others, likewise attired, busy around the coach, from which they were taking bags and boxes, and loading up a round dozen of horses. Two of the horses had evidently been taken from the traces of the coach, which was always drawn by four.

All six “rustlers” were clad in loose white linen frocks, which descended to mid-thigh or even lower, and had great white peaked hoods, like monks’ cowls, drawn completely over their heads and faces!

Only two holes for the eyes showed in each hood; so the reader can well imagine how weird and ghostly they looked in the twilight of the leafy archway, in spite of the rifles slung across their backs or the Browning automatic pistols in their hands, and the top boots showing under the white frocks.

Sergeant Dick took in all these particulars--the whole thrilling tableau before him--at a single glance of course. And, even as he did so, he comprehended that it was not one of the six hooded, ghostly figures beside the stage-coach who had shot at him and so narrowly missed ending his career.

The marksman was clearly a seventh member of the gang--on the look-out, and without a doubt perched upon the rocks at either hand.

Sergeant Dick swiftly removed his eyes from the tableau under the storm-tossed trees ahead, and ran them over the two bold cliffs forming the jaws of the pass at that end. He caught sight of a small cloudlet of smoke, still hanging limply in the air above a ledge just below the summit of the right-hand rock.

The rock behind the ledge acted as a wind-screen, and, although a hurricane was shrieking overhead and sweeping the rocky pass below, the air at the point was as still as if there were no wind at all.

Just as the Sergeant sighted the cloudlet of smoke, a jet of flame darted from behind a boulder on the ledge, the gorge rang again to the echoing detonation of a rifle, and he felt the noble animal shielding him give a convulsive shudder, which told him it had been hit.

It yet stood stockstill and upright before him, however, and so he was satisfied that it could not have been struck in a vital spot.

Swift as the thought itself, Dick brought his own rifle to his shoulder, and leveled it across the saddle at a white triangular tip of cloth, showing above the boulder on the ledge, alongside the new cloudlet of smoke. That white triangular tip he knew was the peaked headgear of another of the dreaded White Hood Rustlers.

He got that triangular tip of white cloth dead in front of his sights with the quickness of considerable practice and rare skill; and simultaneously he pressed the trigger.

As the report of his rifle, blown along by the furious wind, went echoing down the rocky pass, a white-clad, hooded form leaped up from behind the boulder and went scuttling into a little cleft beside the ledge, vanishing as swiftly as a rabbit diving into its hole.

Sergeant Dick smiled a little grimly. He was used to seeing well entrenched foes skedaddle--vacate their quarters as a little too warm--under his straight shooting.

He knew for a certainty that his bullet had gone clean through the white hood of the fugitive rustle-sentinel, within an inch or two of its rascally wearer’s skull. The bullet would have bored a hole through _that_ if only a little more than just the tip or peak of the white hood had been showing.

It was a splendid shot, like hitting a card torn in half and stuck on the chimney pot of a three- or four-story house.

Besides, the shot was such a swift reply to the one preceding it. No wonder it scared its recipient from his strong position--“shook him up some,” to use the language of the country.

The six bandits in the leafy avenue in front of Sergeant Dick had all turned in his direction at the first shot. The four who had been removing the loot from the coach were now making warily for him--scattered in a line across the avenue, with rifles at the ready, like hunters stalking game.

He turned his attention to them, wondering not a little why they did not pour a volley into him or his breastwork of horseflesh. It was evident they considered him their “meat”--a “dead goner” already, and were anxious to take his horse, if not himself, alive.

A live horse is always desirable property in the Far West.

But the ghostly, white-robed and hooded ruffians speedily discovered that they were reckoning without their host. Their attention was somewhat distracted by the sudden appearance of the comrade they had posted as “look-out man” upon the bluff, and then--crack--crack--crack!

Sergeant Dick’s rifle pealed out sharply, and as many of the four rustlers advancing upon him staggered or stumbled.

But to the police officer’s amazement, none of the three fell, although he believed he had hit all three badly.

Recovering immediately from the effects of their hurts, the fellows rushed forward, firing wildly and furiously at the plucky young policeman. Then, suddenly, in a lull of the hurricane, came the clatter of rapidly approaching hoofs _behind Sergeant Dick_, and immediately afterwards two shrill, sharp whistles from the bluff or cliff above him.

He caught a fleeting glimpse of the hooded sentinel within the cleft in the rock, evidently returning to that coign of vantage, with a view to helping to shoot him down--saw the fellow put his left hand under his hood.

It was this man, undoubtedly, who had uttered those two warning whistles, for he now immediately vanished again inside the cleft. Simultaneously the four rustlers firing at Dick wheeled about, and ran for the shelter of the woods on either hand.