Presently all was in readiness, and the small, well-armed party left the detachment under the light of a brilliant three-quarter moon.  Slavin led in the police buckboard, with the doctor seated beside him, and Lanky Jones crouched behind them.  Yorke and Redmond rode in the rear, with their carbines slung at the saddle-horn.  It was a hazardous mission they were bound on, as they all fully realized now, knowing the terribly ruthless character of the man they sought to apprehend.

Descending the grade which led to the bend of the river they swung due east at a smart pace, following the winding Lower Trail.  This last road ran past Gully’s ranch, which lay some three miles distant.  As they neared their objective the sergeant slackened his team down to a walking pace.

Suddenly Redmond tongue-clucked to himself in absent fashion.  The sound of it roused Yorke out of the sombre reverie into which he had fallen.

“What’s up, Red?” queried he waggishly, in a low voice, “dreaming you’re taking that dive again, or what?”

“No!” muttered George abstractly in the same key.  “I was thinking what a rum, unfathomable old beggar Slavin is.  Fancy him springing that comical old yarn at such a time as this?”

“Ah!” murmured his comrade reflectively.  “When you come to know Burke as well as I do you’ll find he’s generally got some motive for these little things—­blarney and all.  You laughed, didn’t you?  Guess we all of us gave the giddy ‘ha! ha’.’  Felt quite chipper after it, too, the bunch of us . . . well then?”

“Sh-sh!” came the sergeant’s back-flung, guarded growl, “quit your gab there!  We’re gettin’ nigh, bhoys—­here’s th’ brush forninst his place . . . must go mighty quiet an’ careful now.”

Looming up dark and forbidding ahead of them they beheld the all-familiar sight of the huge, shadowy thicket of pine and Balm o’ Gilead clumps that fringed the west end of Gully’s ranch.  Entering its gloomy depths, they felt their way slowly and cautiously along the stump-dotted trail.  At intervals, from somewhere overhead, came the weird, depressing hoot of a long-eared owl, and, seemingly close at hand, the shrill, mocking “ki-yip-yapping” of coyotes echoed sharply in the stillness of the night.  Stray patches of moonlight began to filter upon the party once more as they gradually neared the end of the rough-hewn avenue; the thick growth of pine giving place to scattered cotton-wood clumps.

Arriving at the verge of the timber the party halted.  There, some two hundred yards distant, upon a patch of open ground partially encircled by dense, willow-scrub, lay a ghostly-shadowed cluster of ranch buildings.  The living habitation itself stood upon a slightly raised knoll, hard upon the river-bank.  To their nostrils the night air brought the strong, not unpleasant scent of cattle, drifting up from the numerous recumbent bovine forms which dotted the ground all around the ranch.