When the three men who had pulled him from his horse and tied him hand
and foot had withdrawn to the farther side of the tiny camp-fire to
wrangle morosely over what should be done with him, Evan Blount found it
simply impossible to realize that they were actually discussing, as one
of the expedients, the propriety of knocking him on the head and
flinging his body into the near-by canyon.

The difficulty of comprehension lay in the crude grotesqueness of the
thing that had happened. Five minutes earlier he had been riding
peacefully up the trail in the moonlight, wondering how thoroughly he
was lost and how much farther it was to Debbleby's. Then, at a sudden
sharp turn in the canyon bridle-path, he had stumbled upon the
camp-fire, had heard an explosive "Hands up!" and had found himself
confronted by three men, with one of the three covering him with a
sawed-off Winchester. From that to the unhorsing and the binding had
been merely a rough-and-tumble half-minute, inasmuch as he was unarmed
and the surprise had been complete; but the grotesquery remained.

Since his captors had as yet made no attempt to rob him, he could only
surmise that some incredibly foolish mistake had been made. But when he
remembered the three invisible horsemen who had passed him on the broad
mesa he was not so certain about the mistake. Most naturally, his
thoughts went back to the little episode on the hotel porch. The passing
glance he had given to the three men with whom the fourth man, Hathaway,
had been talking did not enable him to identify them with the three who
were sourly discussing his fate at the near-by fire; none the less, the
conclusion was fairly obvious. Thus far he had been either too busy or
too bewildered to break in; but when the more murderous of the
expedients was apparently about to be adopted, he decided that it was
high time to try to find out why he was to be effaced. Whereupon he
called across to the group at the fire.

"Without wishing to interfere with any arrangements you gentlemen are
making, I shall be obliged if you will tell me why you think you have
found it necessary to murder me."

"You know mighty good and well why there's one too many of you on Lost
River, jest at this stage o' the game," growled the hard-faced spokesman
who had held the Winchester while his two accomplices were doing the
unhorsing and the binding.

"But I don't," insisted Blount good-naturedly. "So far as I know, there
is only on