held you up, and to get out
there and pass the word to us that it was all right. They didn't; that
made us a little extra careful, seeing something was wrong, but never
suspecting THEM. We found out afterwards that they got one of my scouts
to cut down that tree, saying it was my orders and a part of our game,
calculating in the stoppage and confusion to collar the swag and get off
with it. Without knowing it, YOU played into their hands by going into
Tarbox's cabin."

"But how did you know this?" interrupted Brice, in wonder.

"They forgot one thing," continued Snapshot Harry grimly. "They forgot
that half an hour before and half an hour after a stage is stopped we
have that road patrolled, every foot of it. While I was opening the box
in the brush, the two fools, sneaking along the road, came slap upon one
of my patrols, and then tried to run for it. One was dropped, but before
he was plugged full of holes and hung up on a tree, he confessed, and
said the other man who escaped had the greenbacks."

Brice's face fell. "Then they are lost," he said bitterly.

"Not unless he eats them--as he may want to do before I'm done on him,
for he must either starve or come out. That road is still watched by my
men from Tarbox's cabin to the bridge. He's there somewhere, and can't
get forward or backward. Look!" he said, rising and going to the door.
"That road," he pointed to the stage road,--a narrow ledge flanked on
one side by a precipitous mountain wall, and on the other by an equally
precipitate descent,--"is his limit and tether, and he can't escape on
either side."

"But the trail?"

"There is but one entrance to it,--the way you came, and that is guarded
too. From the time you entered it until you reached the bottom, you were
signaled here from point to point! HE would have been dropped! I merely
gave YOU a hint of what might have happened to you, if you were up to
any little game! You took it like a white man. Come, now! What is your
business?"

Thus challenged, Brice plunged with youthful hopefulness into his plan;
if, as he voiced it, it seemed to him a little extravagant, he was
buoyed up by the frankness of the highwayman, who also had treated
the double robbery with a levity that seemed almost as extravagant. He
suggested that they should work together to recover the money; that the
express company should know that the unprecedented stealthy introduction
of robbers in the guise of passengers was not Snapshot