They organized a vigilance committee. They put a price on his head. Posses scoured the region of his hiding-place, Hunter’s Cañon, into which he disappeared when hard pressed, and left no more trace than the morning mist which the sun disperses. A hundred men combed the myriad recesses of the cañon in vain. Their efforts merely stimulated the bandit.
While twoscore men rode almost within calling distance, the Ghost appeared in the moonlight before Pat McDonald and Peters and robbed them of eighteen pounds of gold-dust which they carried in their belts. When the vigilance committee got word of this insolent outrage they called a mass-meeting so large that even drunken Geraldine was enrolled.
Never in the history of Murrayville had there been so grave and dry-throated an affair. William Collins, the head of the vigilantes, addressed the assembly. He rehearsed the list of the Ghost’s outrages, pointed out that what the community needed was an experienced man-hunter to direct their efforts, and ended by asking Silver Pete to stand up before them. After some urging Pete rose and stood beside Collins, with his hat pushed back from his gray and tousled forelock and both hands tugging at his cartridge-belt.
“Men,” went on Collins, placing one hand on the shoulder of the man-killer, “we need a leader who is a born and trained fighter, a man who will attack the Ghost with system and never stop after he takes up the trail. And I say the man we need is Silver Pete!”
Pete’s mouth twitched back on one side into the faint semblance of a grin, and he shrugged off the patronizing hand of the speaker. The audience stirred, caught each other with side-glances, and then stared back at Silver Pete. His reputation gave even Murrayville pause, for his reputed killings read like the casualty list of a battle.
“I repeat,” said Collins, after the pause, in which he allowed his first statement to shudder its way home, “that Silver Pete is the man for us. I’ve talked it over with him before this, and he’ll take the job, but he needs an inducement. Here’s the reward I propose for him or for any other man who succeeds in taking the Ghost prisoner or in killing him. We’ll give him any loot which may be on the person of the bandit. If the Ghost is disposed of in the place where he has cached his plunder, the finder gets it all. It’s a high price to pay, but this thing has to be stopped. My own opinion is that the Ghost is a man who does his robbing on the side and lives right here among us. If that’s the case, we’ll leave it to Silver Pete to find him out, and we’ll obey Pete’s orders. He’s the man for us. He’s done work like this before. He has a straight eye, and he’s fast with his six-gun. If you want to know Pete’s reputation as a fighting man—”
“He’ll tell you himself,” said a voice, and a laugh followed.
Silver Pete scowled in the direction of the laugh, and his right hand caressed the butt of his gun, but two miners rose from the crowd holding a slender fellow between them.
“It’s only Geraldine,” said one of them. “There ain’t no call to flash your gun, Pete.”
“Take the drunken fool away,” ordered Collins angrily. “Who let him in here? This is a place for men and not for girl-faced clowns!”
“Misher Collins,” said Geraldine, doffing his broad-brimmed hat and speaking with a thick, telltale accent—”Misher Collins, I ask your pardon, shir.”
He bowed unsteadily, and his hat brushed the floor.
“I plumb forgot I was in church with Silver Pete for a preacher!” he went on.
The audience turned their heads and chuckled deeply.
“Take him out, will you?” thundered Collins. “Take him out, or I’ll come down there and kick him out myself!”
The two men at Geraldine’s side turned him about and led him toward the door. Here he struggled away from his guides. “Misher Collins!” he cried in a voice half-whining and half-anger, “if I capture the Ghost do I get the loot?”
A yell of laughter drowned the reply, and Geraldine staggered from the room.
“What do you say, men?” roared Collins, enraged by these repeated interruptions. “Is Silver Pete the man for us?”
There was no shout of approval but a deep muttering of consent.
“I’d hire the devil himself,” murmured one man, “if he’d get rid of the Ghost.”
“All right,” said Collins, and he turned to Pete. “You’re in charge here, and it’s up to you to tell us what to do. You’re the foreman, and we’re all in your gang.”
The crowd was delighted, for Pete, finding himself deserted before the mass of waiting men, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other and kept changing the angle of the hat upon his mop of gray hair.
“Speech!” yelled a miner. “Give us a speech, Pete!” Silver Pete favored the speaker with a venomous scowl.
“Speech nothin’,” he answered. “I ain’t here to talk. I ain’t no gossipin’ bit of calico. I got a hunch my six-gun’ll do my chatterin’ for me.”
“But what do you want us to do, Pete?” asked Collins. “How are we going to help you?”
“Sit tight and chaw your own tobacco,” he said amiably. “I don’t want no advice. There’s been too many posses around these diggin’s. Maybe I’ll start and hunt the Ghost by myself. Maybe I won’t. If I want help I’ll come askin’ it.”
As a sign that the meeting had terminated he pulled his hat farther down over his eyes, hitched his belt, and stalked through the crowd without looking to either side.
Thereafter Murrayville saw nothing of him for a month, during which the Ghost appeared five times and escaped unscathed. The community pondered and sent out to find Pete, but the search was vain. There were those who held that he must have been shot down in his tracks by the Ghost, and even now decorated some lank hillside. The majority felt that having undertaken his quest alone Pete was ashamed to appear in the town without his victim.
On the subject of the quest Geraldine composed a ballad which he sang to much applause in the eight saloons of the town. It purported to be the narrative of Silver Pete’s wanderings in search of the Ghost. In singing it Geraldine borrowed a revolver and belt from one of the bystanders, pushed back his hat and roughed up his hair, and imitated the scowling face of Pete so exactly that his hearers fairly wept with pleasure. He sang his ballad to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” and the sad narrative concluded with a wailing stanza:
“I don’t expect no bloomin’ tears;
The only thing I ask
Is something for a monument
In the way of a whisky flask.”
Geraldine sang himself into popularity and many drinks with his song, and for the first time the miners began to take him almost seriously. He had appeared shortly after old John Murray struck gold six months before, a slender man of thirty-five, with a sadly drooping mouth and humorous eyes.
He announced himself as Gerald Le Roy Witherstone, and was, of course, immediately christened “Geraldine.”
Thereafter he wandered about the town, with no apparent occupation except to sing for his drinks in the saloons. Hitherto he had been accepted as a harmless and amusing man-child, but his ballad gave him at once an Homeric repute, particularly when men remembered that the song was bound to come sooner or later to the ear of Silver Pete.
For the time being Pete was well out of ear-shot. After the meeting, at which he was installed chief man-hunter of the community, he spent most of the evening equipping himself for the chase. Strangely enough, he did not hang a second revolver to his belt nor strap a rifle behind his saddle; neither did he mount a fleet horse. To pursue the elusive Ghost he bought a dull-eyed mule with a pendulous lower lip. On