"By Jove! do you hear that, Jerry?" Ballard demanded. "The beggars are coming down-valley with the cattle, _and they're ahead of Fitzpatrick_!"

That was not strictly true. While the engineer was adding a hasty command to mount, Fitzpatrick's waggon came bouncing up the dry arroyo, with the snorting team in a lather of sweat.

"Sharp work, Mr. Ballard!" gasped the dust-covered driver. "They're less than a mile at the back of me, drivin' a good half of the colonel's beef herd, I'd take me oath. Say the wor-rds, and say thim shwift!"

With the scantest possible time for preparation, there was no wasting of the precious minutes. Ballard directed a quick transference of men, horses, and gun team to the lower end of the inner valley, a planting of the terrible little fighting machine behind the sheltering boulder on the main trail, and a hasty concealment of the waggon and harness animals in a grove of the scrub pines. Then he outlined his plan briskly to his two subordinates.

"They will send the herd down the canyon trail, probably with a man or two ahead of it to keep the cattle from straying up this draw," he predicted. "The first move is to nip these head riders; after which we must turn the herd and let it find its way back home through the sand gulch where we came in. Later on----"

A rattling clatter of horse-shoes on stone rose above the m.u.f.fled lowing and milling of the oncoming drove, and there was no time for further explanations. As Ballard and his companions drew back among the tree shadows in the small inner valley, a single horseman galloped down the canyon trail, wheeling abruptly in the gulch mouth to head off the cattle if they should try to turn back by way of the hogback valley.

Before the echo of his shrill whistle had died away among the canyon crags, three men rose up out of the darkness, and with business-like celerity the trail guard was jerked from his saddle, bound, gagged, and tossed into the bed of an empty waggon.

"Now for the cut-out!" shouted Ballard; and the advance stragglers of the stolen herd were already in the mouth of the little valley when the three amateur line-riders dashed at them and strove to turn the drive at right angles up the dry gulch.

For a sweating minute or two the battle with brute bewilderment hung in the balance. Wheel and shout and flog as they would, they seemed able only to ma.s.s the bellowing drove in the narrow mouth of the turn-out.

But at the critical instant, when the milling tangle threatened to become a jam that must crowd itself from the trail into the near-by torrent of the Boiling Water, a few of the leaders found the open way to freedom up the hogback valley, and in another throat-parching minute there was only a cloud of dust hanging between the gulch heads to show where the battle had been raging.

This was the situation a little later when the main body of the rustlers, ten men strong, ambled unsuspectingly into the valley-mouth trap: dust in the air, a withdrawing thunder of hoof-beats, and apparent desertion of the point of hazard. Carson was the first to grasp the meaning of the dust cloud and the vanishing murmur of hoof-tramplings.

"h.e.l.l!" he rasped. "Billings has let 'em cut back up the gulch! That's on you, Buck c.u.mmin's: I told you ye'd better hike along 'ith Billings."

"You always _was_ one o' them 'I-told-ye-so' kind of liars," was the pessimistic retort of the man called c.u.mmings; and Carson's right hand was flicking toward the ready pistol b.u.t.t when a voice out of the shadows under the western cliff shaped a command clear-cut and incisive.

"Hands up out there--every man of you!" Then, by way of charitable explanation: "You're covered--with a rapid-fire Maxim."

There were doubters among the ten; desperate men whose lawless days and nights were filled with hair's-breadth chance-takings. From these came a scattering volley of pistol shots spitting viciously at the cliff shadows.

"Show 'em, Jerry," said the voice, curtly; and from the shelter of a great boulder at the side of the main trail leaped a sheet of flame with a roar comparable to nothing on earth save its ear-splitting, nerve-shattering self. Blacklock had swept the machine-gun in a short arc over the heads of the cattle thieves, and from the cliff face and ledges above them a dropping rain of clipped pine branches and splintered rock chippings fell upon the trapped ten.

It is the new and untried that terrifies. In the group of rustlers there were men who would have wheeled horse and run a gauntlet of spitting Winchesters without a moment's hesitation. But this hidden murder-machine belching whole regiment volleys out of the shadows....

"Sojers, by cripes!" muttered Carson, under his breath. Then aloud: "All right, Cap'n; what you say goes as it lays."

"I said 'hands up,' and I meant it," rasped Ballard; and when the pale moonlight p.r.i.c.ked out the cattle-lifters in the att.i.tude of submission: "First man on the right--knee your horse into the clump of trees straight ahead of you."

It was Fitzpatrick, working swiftly and alone, who disarmed, wrist-roped, and heel-tied to his horse each of the crestfallen ones as Ballard ordered them singly into the mysterious shadows of the pine grove. Six of the ten, including Carson, had been ground through the neutralising process, and the contractor was deftly at work on the seventh, before the magnitude of the engineer's strategy began to dawn upon them.

"_Sufferin' Jehu!_" said Carson, with an entire world of disgust and humiliation crowded into the single expletive; but when the man called c.u.mmings broke out in a string of meaningless oaths, the leader of the cattle thieves laughed like a good loser.

"Say; how many of you did it take to run this here little bluff on us?"

he queried, tossing the question to Fitzpatrick, the only captor in sight.

"You'll find out, when the time comes," replied the Irishman gruffly.

"And betwixt and between, ye'll be keeping a still tongue in your head.

D'ye see?"

They did see, when the last man was securely bound and roped to his saddle beast; and it was characteristic of time, place, and the actors in the drama that few words were wasted in the summing up.

"Line them up for the back trail," was Ballard's crisp command, when Fitzpatrick and Blacklock had dragged the Maxim in from its boulder redoubt and had loaded it into the waggon beside the rope-wound Billings.

"Whereabouts does this here back trail end up--for us easy-marks, Cap'n Ballard?" It was Carson who wanted to know.

"That's for a jury to say," was the brief reply.

"You've et my bread and stabled yo' hawss in my corral," the chief rustler went on gloomily. "But that's all right--if you feel called to take up for ol' King Adam, that's fightin' ever' last shovelful o' mud you turn over in th' big valley."

Fitzpatrick was leading the way up the hoof-trampled bed of the dry valley with the waggon team, and Blacklock was marshalling the line of prisoners to follow in single file when Ballard wheeled his bronco to mount.

"I fight my own battles, Carson," he said, quietly. "You set a deadfall for me, and I tumbled in like a tenderfoot. That put it up to me to knock out your raid. Incidentally, you and your gang will get what is coming to you for blowing a few thousand yards of earth into our ca.n.a.l.

That's all. Line up there with the others; you've shot your string and lost."

The return route led the straggling cavalcade through the arroyo mouth, and among the low hills back of Riley's camp to a junction with the ca.n.a.l line grade half way to Fitzpatrick's headquarters. Approaching the big camp, Ballard held a conference with the contractor, as a result of which the waggon mules were headed to the left in a semicircular detour around the sleeping camp, the string of prisoners following as the knotted trail ropes steered it.

Another hour of easting saw the crescent moon poising over the black sky-line of the Elks, and it brought captors and captured to the end of track of the railroad where there was a siding, with a half-dozen empty material cars and Bromley's artillery special, the engine hissing softly and the men asleep on the cab cushions.

Ballard cut his prisoners foot-free, dismounted them, and locked them into an empty box-car. This done, the engine crew was aroused, the Maxim was reloaded upon the tender, and the chief gave the trainmen their instructions.

"Take the gun, and that locked box-car, back to Elbow Canyon," he directed. "Mr. Bromley will give you orders from there."

"Carload o' hosses?" said the engineman, noting the position of the box-car opposite a temporary chute built for debarking a consignment of Fitzpatrick's sc.r.a.per teams.

"No; jacka.s.ses," was Ballard's correction; and when the engine was clattering away to the eastward with its one-car train, the waggon was headed westward, with Blacklock sharing the seat beside Fitzpatrick, Ballard lying full-length on his back in the deep box-bed, and the long string of saddle animals towing from the tailboard.

At the headquarters commissary Blacklock tumbled into the handiest bunk and was asleep when he did it. But Ballard roused himself sufficiently to send a message over the wire to Bromley directing the disposal of the captured cattle thieves, who were to be transported by way of Alta Vista and the D. & U. P. to the county seat.

After that he remembered nothing until he awoke to blink at the sun shining into the little bunk room at the back of the pay office; awoke with a start to find Fitzpatrick handing him a telegram scrawled upon a bit of wrapping-paper.

"I'm just this minut' taking this off the wire," said the contractor, grinning sheepishly; and Ballard read the scrawl:

"D. & U. P. box-car No. 3546 here all O. K. with both side doors carefully locked and end door wide open. Nothing inside but a few bits of rope and a stale smell of tobacco smoke and corn whiskey.

"BROMLEY."

XV

HOSPES ET HOSTIS

It was two days after the double fiasco of the cattle raid before Ballard returned to his own headquarters at Elbow Canyon; but Bromley's laugh on his friend and chief was only biding its time.

"What you didn't do to Carson and his gang was good and plenty, wasn't it, Breckenridge?" was his grinning comment, when they had been over the interval work on the dam together, and were smoking an afternoon peace pipe on the porch of the adobe office. "It's the joke of the camp. I tried to keep it dark, but the enginemen bleated about it like a pair of sheep, of course."

"a.s.sume that I have some glimmerings of a sense of humour, and let it go at that," growled Ballard; adding; "I'm glad the hoodoo has let up on you long enough to give this outfit a chance to be amused--even at a poor joke on me."

"It has," said Bromley. "We haven't had a shock or a shudder since you went down-valley. And I've been wondering why."

"Forget it," suggested the chief, shortly. "Call it safely dead and buried, and don't dig it up again. We have grief enough without it."