ocks
but hitting nobody. The Happy Family took a shot at every symptom of
movement in the grove, and toward the rim-rock they sent a bullet
now and then, just to assure the watchers up there that they were not
forgotten, and as a hint that caution spelled safety.

For themselves, the boys were amply protected there on the side of the
Frying-pan where the handle stretched out into the open land toward the
mountain. Perhaps here was once a torrent flowing from the basin-like
hollow walled round with rock; at any rate, great bowlders were
scattered all along the rim as though spewed from the basin by some
mighty force of the bygone ages. The soil, as so often happens in the
West, was fertile to the very edge of the Frying-pan and young pinons
and bushes had taken root there and managed to keep themselves alive
with the snow-moisture of winter, in spite of the scanty rainfall the
rest of the year.

The boys were amply protected, yes; but there was not a drop of water
save what they had in their canteens, and there was no feed for their
horses unless they chose to nibble tender twigs off the bushes near them
and call that food. There was, of course, the grain in the packs, but
there was neither time nor opportunity to get it out. If it came to a
siege, luck and his boys were in a bad way, and they knew it. They were
penned as well as protected there in that rocky, brushy neck. The most
that they could do was to discourage any rush from those back in the
grove; as to getting through that grove themselves, and out in the open,
there was not one chance in a hundred that they could do it.

From the outside in to where they were entrenched was just a trifle
easier. The Indiana in the grove were all absorbed in watching the edge
of the Frying-pan and had their backs to the open, never thinking that
white men would be coming that way; for had not the other party been
decoyed around the farther end of the big butte, and did not several
miles and a barbed-wire fence lie between?

So when Applehead and his three, coming in from the north, approached
the grove, they did it under cover of a draw that hid them from sight.
From the shots that were fired, Applehead guessed the truth; that
Luck's bunch had sensed danger before they had actually ridden into the
Frying-pan itself, and that the Navajos were trying to drive them out of
the rocks, and were not making much of a success of it.

"Now," Applehead instructed the three when they