After a mile of stiff going, the gulch opened to a little valley on the right-hand side.  On the edge of a pine grove, hardly a stone’s throw from where Roy stood, a Mexican jacal looked down into the canon.  The hut was a large one.  It was built of upright poles daubed with clay.  Sloping poles formed the roof, the chinks of which were waterproofed with grass.  A wolf pelt, nailed to the wall, was hanging up to dry.

He knew that this was the home of Meldrum, the ex-convict.

Beaudry followed a bed of boulders that straggled toward the pine grove.  It was light enough now, and he had to move with caution so as to take advantage of all the cover he could find.  Once in the grove, he crawled from tree to tree.  The distance from the nearest pine to the jacal was about thirty feet.  A clump of cholla grew thick just outside the window.  Roy crouched behind the trunk for several minutes before he could bring himself to take the chance of covering that last ten yards.  But every minute it was getting lighter.  Every minute increased the likelihood of detection.  He crept fearfully to the hut, huddled behind the cactus, and looked into the window.

A heavy-set man, with the muscle-bound shoulders of an ape, was lighting a fire in the stove.  At the table, his thumbs hitched in a sagging revolver belt, sat Ned Rutherford.  The third person in the room lay stretched at supple ease on a bed to one of the posts of which his right leg was bound.  He was reading a newspaper.

“Get a move on you, Meldrum,” young Rutherford said jauntily, with an eye on his prisoner to see how he took it.  “I’ve got inside information that I need some hot cakes, a few slices of bacon, and a cup of coffee.  How about it, Dave?  Won’t you order breakfast, too?”

The man on the bed shook his head indifferently.  “Me, I’m taking the fast cure.  I been reading that we all eat too much, anyhow.  What’s the use of stuffing—­gets yore system all clogged up.  Now, take Edison—­he don’t eat but a handful of rice a day.”

“That’s one handful more than you been eating for the past three days.  Better come through with what we want to know.  This thing ain’t going to get any better for you.  A man has got to eat to live.”

“I’m trying out another theory.  Tell you-all about how it works in a week or so.  I reckon after a time I’ll get real hungry, but it don’t seem like I could relish any chuck yet.”  The cattleman fell to perusing his paper once more.

Royal Beaudry had never met his father’s friend, Dave Dingwell, but he needed no introduction to this brown-faced man who mocked his guard with such smiling hardihood.  They were trying to starve the secret out of him.  Already his cheek showed thin and gaunt, dark circles shadowed the eyes.  The man, no doubt, was suffering greatly, yet his manner gave no sign of it.  He might not be master of his fate; at least, he was very much the captain of his soul.  Pat Ryan had described him in a sentence.  “One hundred and ninety pounds of divil, and ivery ounce of ivery pound true gold.”  There could not be another man in the Big Creek country that this description fitted as well as it did this starving, jocund dare-devil on the bed.