ut them punchers'll think I can and finish me."

"You go to Hell!" remarked Speaker joyfully.

"Don't call yore ranch names," admonished Jimmie with a grin, and fainted.

CHAPTER XIX

AN INDIAN COULEE

By four o'clock in the morning the fifteen hundred head of cattle had
crossed the ford of the Big Horn and were bedded down on the other side.
When this hazardous business had been completed, Bud Larkin ordered the
sheep brought up and kept on the eastern bank among the cool grass of the
bottoms.

The captive rustlers, under guard, were being held until daylight, when,
it had been decided, they would be taken to the almost deserted Bar T
ranch, and kept there until further action could be determined on in
regard to them.

When dawn finally came Bud looked at the stolid faces of the men, and
recognized most of them as having belonged to the party that had so nearly
ended his earthly career. He called them by their names, and some of them
grinned a recognition.

"Hardly expected to meet yuh again," said one amiably. "Thought it might
be t'other side of Jordan, but not this side of the Big Horn."

"That's one advantage of raising sheep," retorted Bud. "Mine are so well
trained they stampede in time to save my life. You fellows ought to have
joined me in the business then."

"Wisht we had," remarked another gloomily. "'Tain't so hard on the neck in
the end."

Bud wondered at the hardihood of a man who, facing sure death, could still
joke grimly about it.

Directly after breakfast the rustlers were mounted on their horses, with
their arms tied behind them, and, under a guard of six men, started on
their journey to the Bar T. In charge of the outfit was a gray-haired
sheep-owner from Montana, and to his care Bud entrusted a long letter to
Juliet that he had added to day by day with a pencil as opportunity
offered.

It was such a letter as a lonely girl in love likes to get, and Bud's only
thought in sending it was to prove that she was ever in his mind, and that
he was still safe and well.

Weary and sleepless, Bud then prepared for the ordeal with Stelton. From
Sims, who seemed to know the country thoroughly, he learned that Indian
Coulee was almost thirty miles south-east, and could be distinguished by
the rough weather-sculpture of an Indian head on the butte that formed one
side of the ravine.

Lest there be a misunderstanding, it should be said here that this was the
second day after the battle