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 one of me—­on Lost River or anywhere else.”

“That’ll do for you; it ain’t your put-in, nohow,” was the gruff decision of the court; but Blount was too good a lawyer to be silenced thus easily.

“Perhaps you might not especially regret killing the wrong man, but in the present case I am very sure I should,” he went on.  And then:  “Are you quite sure you’ve got the right man?”

“The boss knows who you are—­that’s enough for us.”

“The boss?” questioned Blount.

“Yas, I said the boss; now hold your jaw!”

Blount caught at the word.  In a flash the talk with Gantry on the veranda of the Winnebasset Club flicked into his mind.

“There is only one boss in this State,” he countered coolly.  “And I am very sure he hasn’t given you orders to kill me.”

“What’s that?” demanded the spokesman.

Blount repeated his assertion, adding jocularly:  “Perhaps you’d better call up headquarters and ask your boss if he wants you to kill the son of his boss.”

At this the gun-holder came around the fire to stand before his prisoner.

“Say, pal—­this ain’t my night for kiddin’, and it hadn’t ort to be your’n,” he remarked grimly.  “The boss didn’t say you was to be rubbed out—­they never do.  But I reckon it would save a heap o’ trouble if you was rubbed out.”

“On the contrary, I’m inclined to think it would make a heap of trouble—­for you and your friends, and quite probably for the man or men who sent you to waylay me.  But, apart from all that, you’ve got hold of the wrong man, as I told you a moment ago.”