d 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 muffled 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 mass 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.