THE MYSTERY OE THE BLUE GOOSE 



205 



liar gutteral noise, used by my guide 

 when desiring caution called my atten- 

 tion to the mountain man. 



"What is it, Pete?" I asked in a 

 whisper, for there was a strange ex- 

 pression in my companion's eyes. 



"Keep yer ears open and yer mouth 

 shut!" growled Pete. 



I did so. The trained ear of the 

 hunter had detected the sound of crack- 

 ling twigs and swishing branches made 

 by some animals in rapid motion. 



"Ah!" I exclaimed, "the dogs. You 

 startled me; I thought it was Indians." 

 "God grant it's nothing worse," mut- 

 tered my guide, as he examined his 

 weapons with a critical eye and 

 loosened the cartridges in his belt to 

 make sure that they would be easy to 

 pluck out. 



"Those ain't our dogs, mister," he re- 

 marked, after he had examined his 

 whole arsenal. 



As I again fixed my attention on the 

 noise, in place of the resonant voice of 

 the hounds, I heard nothing but the 

 crackling of branches, with an occas- 

 ional half-suppressed, wolf-like yelp. 



"Big Pete" turned pale and he mut- 

 tered : "It's them for sartin ; it's them 

 agin ! And I hain't been drinking 

 nuther !" 



We were in "Big Pete" Darlinkle's 

 private game preserve. No barbed- 

 wire fences marked its boundaries, no 

 servile and stupid gamekeepers drove 

 small boys and natives from the God- 

 made park and groves ; no insulting 

 and badly composed notices warned 

 humanity in general that this was "Big 

 Pete" Darlinkle's private piece of 

 earth, granted to him by the same 

 divine right that keeps the king on his 

 throne ; no such notices appeared with 

 dire threats of the law for any God- 

 forsaken man who should trespass on 

 this domain ; yet, though it was 

 guarded with no visible police, the same 

 terrible power which makes poaching 

 a crime in the Eastern States, kept tres- 

 passers out of the park. The guard- 

 ians were ignorance and superstition, 

 and they guarded it well, for even "Big 



Pete" Darlinkle, "mountain man," 

 "bad man" and "killer" had lost his 

 color, if not his nerve, at the approach 

 of these two invisible policemen. 



Many a time around the camp fire I 

 had heard, wild romances of a certain 

 strange and ghostly hunter, with his 

 train of phantom dogs which made 

 their appearance and drove ghostly 

 deer panting through the woods. "Big 

 Pete" never added a word to these nar- 

 rations, nor did he contradict them, but 

 we all knew that if anyone had, he must 

 have seen the spooky hunter, with his 

 hobgoblin train, and he had admitted to 

 me that his park, as he called it, was 

 the place this creature was said to fre- 

 quent. I remembered all these things 

 as I listened to the ghoulish pack which 

 now approached nearer and nearer, and 

 all the suppressed superstition in my 

 own nature was aroused. 



For miles and miles in every direc- 

 tion extended an unbroken wilderness, 

 silent, solemn, awful. Strange, mys- 

 terious mountains guarded this secluded 

 park. Peak after peak receded in the 

 distance until I was unable to tell 

 whether the more remote ones were 

 clouds of vapor or solid rock. The 

 eagle now hovered just over the edge 

 of the lake and within easy gunshot, his 

 great wings flapped and beat the air in 

 his excitement. It was evident not 

 only that this bird heard the yelping 

 pack, but was waiting like us for the 

 game to break cover. 



"Big Pete" Darlinkle crouched in ex- 

 actly the same pose he had first as- 

 sumed, his face looked sallow and 

 worn, a simple effect caused by the 

 crimson blood leaving the sunburnt face 

 and changing the warm browm into a 

 dirty yellow by withdrawing red from 

 the mixture ; but I did not stop to ana- 

 lyze the effect and, if I had, I knew 

 "Big Pete" well enough to understand 

 the seriousness of the situation that 

 would cause the blood to leave his 

 cheeks. 



"Big Pete's" eyes were fixed upon 

 an opening in the woods and I knew 

 that something would soon bound from 



