Nor could he fail to notice that, after the Western girl's fashion, she
was shod more elegantly and lightly than was consistent with the rude
and rustic surroundings. It was the same slim shoe-print which had
guided him that morning. Presently she stopped, and seemed to be gazing
curiously at the cliff side. Brice followed the direction of her eyes.
On a protruding bush at the edge of one of the wooded clefts of the
mountain flank something was hanging, and in the freshening southerly
wind was flapping heavily, like a raven's wing, or as if still saturated
with the last night's rain. "That's mighty queer!" said Flo, gazing
intently at the unsightly and incongruous attachment to the shrub, which
had a vague, weird suggestion. "It wasn't there yesterday."
"It looks like a man's coat," remarked Brice uneasily.
"Whew!" said the girl. "Then somebody has come down who won't go up
again! There's a lot of fresh rocks and brush here, too. What's that?"
She was pointing to a spot some yards before them where there had been a
recent precipitation of debris and uprooted shrubs. But mingled with it
lay a mass of rags strangely akin to the tattered remnant that flagged
from the bush a hundred feet above them. The girl suddenly uttered a
sharp feminine cry of mingled horror and disgust,--the first weakness
of sex she had shown,--and, recoiling, grasped Brice's arm. "Don't go
there! Come away!"
But Brice had already seen that which, while it shocked him, was urging
him forward with an invincible fascination. Gently releasing himself,
and bidding the girl stand back, he moved toward the unsightly heap.
Gradually it disclosed a grotesque caricature of a human figure, but so
maimed and doubled up that it seemed a stuffed and fallen scarecrow. As
is common in men stricken suddenly down by accident in the fullness of
life, the clothes asserted themselves before all else with a hideous
ludicrousness, obliterating even the majesty of death in their helpless
yet ironical incongruity. The garments seemed to have never fitted the
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