f the range into a pretty valley
known as Mission Springs Valley, and the springs are the head-waters
of Deep Creek. The _posse_ did not quite obey the instructions, and
following a natural instinct of safety five of them, after Banks and
his three deputies had scattered, bunched again, and at dark crossed
Deep Creek at some distance below the springs. It was afterward known
that these five men had been seen entering the valley from the east at
sundown just as four of the men they wanted rode down South Mission
Pass toward the springs. That they knew they would soon be cut off, or
must cut their way through the line which Ed Banks, ahead of them, was
posting at every gateway to Williams Cache, was probably clear to
them. Four men rode that evening from Tower W through the south pass;
the fifth man had already left the party. The four men were headed for
Williams Cache and had reason to believe, until they sighted Banks's
men, that their path was open.

They halted to take counsel on the suspicious-looking _posse_ far
below them, and while their cruelly exhausted horses rested, Du Sang,
always in Sinclair's absence the brains of the gang, planned the
escape over Deep Creek at Baggs's crossing. At dusk they divided: two
men lurking in the brush along the creek rode as close as they could,
unobserved, toward the crossing, while Du Sang and the cowboy Karg,
known as Flat Nose, rode down to Baggs's ranch at the foot of the
pass.

At that point Dan Baggs, an old locomotive engineer, had taken a
homestead, got together a little bunch of cattle, and was living
alone with his son, a boy of ten years. It was a hard country and too
close to Williams Cache for comfort, but Dan got on with everybody
because the toughest man in the Cache country could get a meal, a feed
for his horse, and a place to sleep at Baggs's, without charge, when
he needed it.

Ed Banks, by hard riding, got to the crossing at five o'clock, and
told Baggs of the hold-up and the shooting of Oliver Sollers. The news
stirred the old engineman, and his excitement threw him off his guard.
Banks rode straight on for the middle pass, leaving word that two of
his men would be along within half an hour to watch the pass and the
ranch crossing, and asking Baggs to put up some kind of a fight for
the crossing until more of the _posse_ came up--at the least, to make
sure that nobody got any fresh horses.

The boy was cooking supper in the kitchen, and Baggs had done