That dream haunted even his walking moments as he lay here on the hilltop, wondering if he had not been mistaken in selecting this place of all the range.  Yet he had chosen it with care as one of the points of passage for Alcatraz during the stallion’s wanderings to the four quarters of his domains and though since he took up his station here an imp of the perverse kept the stallion far away, the watcher remained on guard, baked and scorched by the midday sun, constantly surveying the lower hills nearby or sweeping more distant reaches with his glass.  This day he felt the long vigil to be definitely a failure, for the sun was behind the western summits and the time of deepening shadows most unfavorable to marksmanship had come.  He swung the glass for the last time to the south; it caught the glint of some moving creature.

He focused his attention, but the object disappeared.  A full five minutes passed before it came out of the intervening valley but then, bursting over the hilltop, it swept enormous into the power of the glass—­Alcatraz, and at full gallop!

There was no shadow of a doubt, for though it was the first time he had been able to watch the stallion at close hand he recognized the long and effortless swing of that gallop.  Next he remembered those stories of the charmed life and the tales he had mocked at before now became possible truths.  He caught up his gun to make sure, but when his left hand slipped under the barrel to the balance and the butt of the gun pulled into the hollow of his shoulder, he became of rocklike steadiness.  Swinging the gun to the left he caught Alcatraz full in the readly circle of the sights and over his set teeth the lips curled in a smile; the trail had ended!  The slightest movement of his finger would beckon the life out of that marauder, but as one who tastes the wine slowly, inhales its bouquet, places the vintage, even so Red Perris delayed to taste the fruition of his work.  Pivoted on his left elbow, he swung the rifle with frictionless ease and kept the galloping stallion steadily in the center of the sight.

He smiled grimly now at those fables of the charmed life and drew a bead just over the heart.  The chestnut was very near.  Along the glorious slope of his shoulder Perris saw the long muscles playing with every stride, and what strides they were!  He floated rather than galloped; his hoofs barely flicked the ground, and it seemed to Jim Perris a shameful thing to smash that mechanism.  He did not love horses; he was raised in a land where they were too strictly articles of use.  But even as a machine he saw in Alcatraz perfection.

Not the body, then.  He would drive the bullet home into the brain, the cunning brain which had conceived and executed all the mischief the chestnut had worked.  Along the shining neck, so imperiously arched, Perris swung the sights and rested his head, at last, just below the ears with the forelock blown back between them by the wind of running.  Slowly his finger closed on the trigger.  It seemed that in the silence Alcatraz had found a signal of danger for now he swung that imperious head about and looked full at Red Perris.  By his own act he had changed the aim of the hunter to a yet more fatal target—­the forehead.