und 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
Cummings 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 canal.
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
canal 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 th