“Do that again and I’ll hang yore hide up to dry.”  He shook Meldrum as if he were a child, then flung the gasping man away.  “I’ll show you who’s boss of this rodeo, by gum!”

Meldrum had several notches on his gun.  He was, too, a rough-and-tumble fighter with his hands.  But Hal Rutherford was one man he knew better than to tackle.  He fell back, growling threats in his throat.

Meanwhile Dave was making discoveries.  One was that the first two men who had attacked him were the gamblers he had driven from the Legal Tender earlier in the evening.  The next was that Buck Rutherford was sending the professional tinhorns about their business.

“Git!” ordered the big rancher.  “And keep gitting till you’ve crossed the border.  Don’t look back any.  Jest burn the wind. Adios.”

“They meant to gun you, Dave,” guessed the owner of the horse ranch.  “I reckon they daren’t shoot with me loafing there across the road.  You kinder disarranged their plans some more by dropping in at their back door.  Looks like you’d ‘a’ rumpled up their hair a few if you hadn’t been in such a hurry to make a get-away.  Which brings us back to the previous question.  The unanimous sense of the meeting is that you come through with some information, Dave.  Where is that gunnysack?”

Dave, still sitting on the ground, leaned his back against a tree and grinned amiably at his questioner.  “Sounds like you-all been to school to a parrot.  You must ‘a’ quituated after you learned one sentence.”

“We’re waiting for an answer, Dave.”

The cool, steady eyes of Dingwell met the imperious ones of the other man in a long even gaze.  “Nothing doing, Hal.”

“Even split, Dave.  Fifty-fifty.”

The sitting man shook his head.  “I’ll split the reward with you when I get it.  The sack goes back to the express company.”

“We’ll see about that.”  Rutherford turned to his son and gave brisk orders.  “Bring up the horses.  We’ll get out of here.  You ride with me, Jeff.  We’ll take care of Dingwell.  The rest of you scatter.  We’re going back to the park.”

The Rutherfords and their captive followed no main road, but cut across country in a direction where they would be less likely to meet travelers.  It was a land of mesquite and prickly pear.  The sting of the cactus bit home in the darkness as its claws clutched at the riders winding their slow way through the chaparral.

Gray day was dawning when they crossed the Creosote Flats and were seen by a sheep-herder at a distance.  The sun was high in the heavens before they reached the defile which served as a gateway between the foothills and the range beyond.  It had passed the meridian by the time they were among the summits where they could look back upon rounded hills numberless as the billows of a sea.  Deeper and always deeper they plunged into the maze of canons which gashed into the saddles between the peaks.  Blue-tinted dusk was enveloping the hills as they dropped down through a wooded ravine into Huerfano Park.