ed again. Dancing was busy installing the new telegraph
outfit. While this was going on, Scott saddled the horses and, when he
and Dave Hawk had mounted, the two rode rapidly down the emigrant
trail toward Bitter Creek. The train was held until Dancing could get
the instruments working again; then, at Hawk's request, it was sent
down the Bitter Creek grade after himself and Scott; the trail
followed the railroad for miles. Dancing remained with Bucks to guard
against further attack.

The two railroad men rode carefully along the heavy ruts of the
emigrant trail, from which all recent tracks had been obliterated by
the flood, knowing that they would strike no sign of the wagon until
it had been started after the storm. They had covered in this manner
less than two miles when, rounding a little bend, they saw a covered
emigrant wagon standing in the road not half a mile from the railroad
track.

Scott led quickly toward concealment and from behind a shoulder of
rock to which the two rode they could see that the wagon had been
halted and the horses, strangely entangled in the harness, were lying
in front of it. Scott and Hawk dismounted and, crawling up the
shoulder where they could see without being seen, waited impatiently
for some sign of life from the suspicious outfit. The description
Bucks had given fitted the wagon very well, and the two lay for a
time waiting for something to happen, and exchanging speculations as
to what the situation might mean. They were hoping that the thieves
might, if they had gone away, return, and with this thought restrained
their impatience.

"It may be a trick to get us up to shooting distance, Bob," suggested
Hawk when Scott proposed they should close in.

"But that wouldn't explain why the horses are lying there in that way,
Dave. Something else has happened. Those horses are dead; they haven't
moved. Suppose I circle the outfit," suggested Scott benevolently.

"Take care they don't get a shot at you."

"If they can get a shot at me before I can at them they are welcome,"
returned Scott as he picked up his bridle rein. "From what Bucks told
me I don't think a great deal of their shooting. He is a level-headed
boy, that long-legged operator." And Scott, with some quiet grimaces,
recounted Bucks's story of his descent of Point of Rocks the night
before, under the fire of the three desperadoes.

That he himself was now taking his own life in his hands as he started
on a perilous