tion had
ceased and the only sounds were the low clink of bit chains and the
soft rustle of horses' feet in the buffalo grass. At the end of an
hour the leaders swung into an old grass-grown trail that led by
devious windings into a deep, steep-sided coulee along the bottom of
which ran the bed of a dried-up creek. Water from recent rains stood
in brackish pools. Remnants of fence with rotted posts sagging from
rusty wire paralleled their course. A dilapidated cross-fence barred
their way, and without dismounting, a cowboy loosened the wire gate and
threw it aside.

A deserted log-house, windowless, with one corner rotted away, and the
sod roof long since tumbled in, stood upon a treeless bend of the dry
creek. Abandoned implements littered the dooryard; a rusted hay rake
with one wheel gone, a broken mower with cutter-bar drunkenly erect,
and the front trucks of a dilapidated wagon.

The Texan's eyes rested sombrely upon the remnant of a rocking-horse,
still hitched by bits of weather-hardened leather to a child's
wheelbarrow whose broken wheel had once been the bottom of a wooden
pail--and he swore, softly.

Up the creek he could see the cottonwood grove just bursting into leaf
and as they rounded the corner of a long sheep-shed, whose soggy straw
roof sagged to the ground, a coyote, disturbed in his prowling among
the whitening bones of dead sheep, slunk out of sight in a weed-patch.

Entering the grove, the men halted at a point where the branches of
three large trees interlaced. It was darker, here. The moonlight
filtered through in tiny patches which brought out the faces of the men
with grotesque distinctness and plunged them again into blackness.

Gravely the Texan edged his horse to the side of the pilgrim.

"Get off!" he ordered tersely, and Endicott dismounted.

"Tie his hands!" A cowboy caught the man's hands behind him and
secured them with a lariat-rope.

The Texan unknotted the silk muffler from about his neck and folded it.

"If it is just the same to you," the pilgrim asked, in a voice that
held firm, "will you leave that off?"

Without a word the muffler was returned to its place.

"Throw the rope over that limb--the big one that sticks out this way,"
ordered the Texan, and a cowpuncher complied.

"The knot had ort to come in under his left ear," suggested one, and
proceeded to twist the noose into place.

"All ready!"

A dozen hands grasped the end of the rope.

The Texan su