f he
has to do it at the muzzle of a gun, and to come on with the track,
night and day. He'll have to raise the pay, and keep on raising it--but
that's all right. It's an order. Rush it!"

Benson nodded, set his horse at the path leading up to the railroad
grade, and spurred up the hill. Ford gave a final tug at his saddle
cinches, put up a leg and began to pick his way down the thronged
street in the opposite direction.

Thirty seconds afterward a man wearing the laced trousers and broad
bullion-corded sombrero of a Mexican dandy came out of his hiding-place
behind the door of the livery stable office, thoughtfully twirling the
cylinder of a drawn revolver.

"I take-a da mustang," he said to the boy who had held Ford's horse
during the short interview with Benson. And when the bronco was brought
out, the Mexican, like Ford, looked to the cinches, mounted, and rode
down the street leading to the lower mesa and the river.

XXIV

RUIZ GREGORIO

He rode easily, as one born to the saddle, the leathers creaking
musically under him to keep time to the shuffling fox-trot of the wiry
little range pony. Once free of the mining-camp and out upon the mesa,
he found a corn-husk wrapper and his bag of dry tobacco and deftly
rolled a cigarette, doing it with one hand, cow-boy fashion. When the
cigarette was lighted, the horseman ahead was a mere khaki-colored dot,
rising and falling in the mellowing distance.

With the eye of a plainsman he measured the trail's length to the broken
hill range where the Pannikin emerges from its final wrestle with the
gorges. Then he glanced up at the dull crimson spot in the murky sky
that marked the sun's altitude. There was time sufficient--and the trail
was long enough. He did not push his horse out of the shuffling trot. At
the portal hills the horseman now disappearing over the rim of the high
mesa would slacken speed. In the canyon itself a dog could not go faster
than a walk.

On the lower mesa the Mexican picked up the galloping dot again,
holding it in view until it halted on the river bank a hundred yards
below the entrance to the canyon. Since the water was low in the ford,
the river bank hid the crossing, and the Mexican drew rein and waited
for the dot to reappear on the opposite shore.

A slow minute was lost; then a second and a third. The man in the corded
sombrero and laced buckskins touched his horse's flank with a spur and
crept forward at a walk, keeping his ey