t up on their feet, knowing that the confederates, if
there were any, would mistake them for their pals if they saw them.

After a few minutes they saw two other fellows advancing toward them,
and one of them came up to Fred and asked in a low tone of voice:

"What's the matter?"

"Only this," said Fred, smashing him in the face with his revolver and
sending him tumbling over in the grass. The other fellow stopped and,
suspecting something wrong, started to run.

"Halt!" said Terry, "or you're a dead man."

The fellow threw himself down in the grass and tried to run on his hands
and knees and thus escape any bullet that might be flied at him, but
Terry was on him in a moment and gave him a terrible crack with his
revolver on his head.

Terry searched him for a weapon and found an ugly-looking knife and a
revolver on him. He took possession of the weapons and, with the ball of
twine he had with him, bound him hard and fast, his hands behind him and
his ankles together, and then ran on ahead of the cattle to look for the
gap he suspected they were headed for, he soon found it.

Before a single beef had passed through he and Fred turned the cattle
back.

Then both of them followed the trail of the thieves, which they were
enabled to do, dark though it was, by following the disarranged tall
grass.

They found all of the men had recovered consciousness except the fourth
man, who, was lying where he had fallen like a dead man.

"Terry," said Fred, "this is your man. What in thunder did you crack him
so hard for?"

"I wanted to make sure of him," and they proceeded to drag the men to
the gap that had been cut through the wire fence, took them through it,
stood them up against a tree, for there were a few scattering trees
growing down there, and tied them to the trunk hard and fast.

They both struck matches and held them up before their faces to see if
they could recognize them, but they had never seen them before.

One of them, fearing that he would be recognized, very promptly blew out
the light and mattered something in Spanish, so from that Fred and Terry
judged that they were Mexicans--one, at least--and Fred took Terry aside
and whispered to him that there must be other men mixed up in it; so
they concluded to build a fire some ten feet off from them and then go
back inside the enclosure and conceal themselves in the grass to watch,
for they knew that nobody could go up to the tree to release the men
tied