"But I ain't aimin' t' git caught down in there, now I'm tellin' yuh! I
aim t' keep along clost t' that there butte, 'n' out on the other side
where we kin pick up luck's trail. I shore would do some rarin' around
if that boy rode off into a mess uh trouble, 'n' I'm tellin' yuh
straight!"

"He's got some good boy at his back," Weary reminded him, loyal to his
Flying U comrade.

"You're dang right he has! I ain't sayin' he ain't, am I? Throw some
more lead back at them skunks behind us, will ye, Lite? 'N' the rest
of yuh save yore shells fer close-ups!" He grinned a little at the
incongruity of a motion-picture phrase in such a situation as this. "'N'
don't be so dang skeered uh hurtin' somebody!" he adjured Lite, drawing
rein a little so as not to forge ahead of the other. "You'll have to
kill off a few anyway 'fore you're through with 'em."

Lite aimed at the man riding in the center of the half-circle, and the
bullet he sent that way created excitement of some sort; but whether the
Indian was badly hit, or only missed by a narrow margin, the four did
not wait to discover. They had held their horses down to a pace that
merely kept them well ahead of the Indians; and though the horses were
sweating, they were holding their own easily enough--with a reserve fund
of speed if their riders needed to call upon it.

Applehead, glancing often behind him, scowled over the puzzle of that
fanlike formation of riders. They would hardly begin so soon to herd him
and his men into that evil little rock basin with the sinister name, and
there was no other reason he could think of which would justify those
tactics, unless another party waited ahead of them. He squinted ahead
uneasily, but the mesa lay parched and empty under the sky--

And then, peering straight into the glare of the sun, he saw, down the
slope which they had climbed without realizing that it would have a
crest, it was so low--Applehead saw the answer to the puzzle; saw and
gave his funny little grunt of astonishment and dismay. Straight as
a chalk line from the sandstone ledge on their right to the
straight-walled butte on their left stretched that boundary line between
the untamed wilderness and the tamed--a barbed wire fence; a four-wire
fence at that, with stout cedar posts whereon the wire was stretched
taut and true. From the look of the posts, it was not new--four or five
years old, perhaps; not six years, certainly, for Applehead had ridden
this way six ye