."

They rode to the sheltered box canyon where Waddles had left the pack
train. A little later Bentley's men rode up and five minutes behind
them came Carp with the rest. The bed rolls were spread among the
stunted cedars on the floor of the canyon and all hands turned in. At
daylight the long return journey to the Three Bar was commenced. The
horses were tired and the back trip was slow. They camped for the
night twenty miles out from the ranch and before noon of the next day
the sheriff and the marshals had split off with their men, leaving the
Three Bar crew to ride the short intervening space to the ranch alone.

As she neared the edge of the Crazy Loop valley the girl dreaded the
first glimpse of the pillaged ranch. For the first time it occurred to
her to wonder at the speed with which Harris had planned and executed
the return raid while the Three Bar still burned.

"How did you get word to them all?" she asked. "Did you have it all
planned before?"

"It was Carp," he said. "One of Lang's men rode down to inquire for
Morrow and told Carp the cows were gathered for the run and held near
the Three Bar. They figured Carp was a pal of Morrow's and all right.
It was near morning then. Carp sent Bentley fanning for Coldriver to
see if the sheriff was back and to bring out the posse if he hadn't
turned up. He started out for the Three Bar himself. The run was
under way when he came in sight so he cut over and headed the mule
teams at the forks and turned them back, then kept on after the boys at
Brill's. Sent word to me by Evans to meet them where we did."

She did not hear the latter part of his explanation for they had
reached the edge of the valley and she looked down upon the ruins of
her ranch.

"Now I'm ready to go," she said. "I'll go and see what Judge Colton
wants."

"He wanted you to get away before anything like this occurred," Harris
said. "I knew that maybe we'd have tough going for a while at some
critical time and wanted you to miss all of that--to come back and find
the Three Bar booming along without having been through all the grief.
So I wrote him to urge you to come."

"Well, I'm going now," she said. "I don't need to be urged."

Three of the homesteaders had been detailed to stay at the ranch. They
were putting up a temporary fence across the lower end to hold range
stock back from the trampled crops until a permanent one could be built
and linked up with the side fences