locked tightly round his thighs. Before he could free himself
another body flung itself at his shoulder and hurled him from his feet.

His foes piled on him as ants do on a captured insect. His arms were tied
behind him with rawhide thongs, his feet fastened together rather
loosely.

He was pulled to a sitting posture. In the east the sky had lightened
with the promise of the coming day.

His clothes torn from arms and body, his face bleeding from random blows,
Houck looked round on the circle of his captors defiantly. In his glaring
eyes and close-clamped, salient jaw no evidence was written of the
despair that swept over him in a wave and drowned hope. He had in this
bleak hour of reckoning the virtue of indomitable gameness.

"All right. You got me. Go to it, you red devils," he growled.

The Utes gloated over him in a silence more deadly than any verbal
threats. Their enemy had been delivered into their hands.

CHAPTER XLVI

THE END OF A CROOKED TRAIL

In the grim faces of the Utes Houck read his doom. He had not the least
doubt of it. His trail ended here.

The terror in his heart rose less out of the fact itself than the
circumstances which surrounded it. The gray dawn, the grim,
copper-colored faces, the unknown torment waiting for him, stimulated his
imagination. He could have faced his own kind, the cattlemen of the Rio
Blanco, without this clutching horror that gripped him. They would have
done what they thought necessary, but without any unnecessary cruelty.
What the Utes would do he did not know. They would make sure of their
vengeance, but they would not be merciful about it.

He repressed a shudder and showed his yellow teeth in a grin of defiance.
"I reckon you're right glad to see me," he jeered.

Still they said nothing, only looked at their captive with an aspect that
daunted him.

"Not dumb, are you? Speak up, some of you," Houck snarled, fighting down
the panic within him.

A wrinkled old Ute spoke quietly. "Man-with-loud-tongue die. He kill
Indian--give him no chance. Indians kill him now."

Houck nodded his head. "Sure I killed him. He'd stolen my horse, hadn't
he?"

The old fellow touched his chest. "Black Arrow my son. You kill him. He
take your horse mebbe. You take Ute horse." He pointed to the pinto. "Ute
kill Man-with-loud-tongue."

"Black Arrow reached for his gun. I had to shoot. It was an even break."
Houck's voice pleaded in spite of his resolution not to weak