The first thing that comes to mind is that the root-tail program itself forks, with the parent process exiting and the child process continuing on. This child process is what you're seeing when you run ps.

What happens when you run root-tail directly from the command line? Does it just do its work and then exit, or does it put itself in the background and run for a while? If it's the latter, this is accomplished by forking as I outlined above.