n. Anything else I can let
yu have?"

"Nope," shouted Buck as they galloped off.

"Somebody's goin' to get plugged full of holes," murmured the ranch
owner as he watched them kicking up the dust in huge clouds.

After they had forded a tributary of the Rio Penasco near the Sacramento
Mountains and had surmounted the opposite bank, Hopalong spurred his
horse to the top of a hummock and swept the plain with Pete's field
glasses, which he had borrowed for the occasion, and returned to the
rest, who had kept on without slacking the pace. As he took up his
former position he grunted, "War-whoops," and unslung his rifle, an
example followed by the others.

The ponies were now running at top speed, and as they shot over a rise
their riders saw their quarry a mile and a half in advance. One of the
Indians looked back and discharged his rifle in defiance, and it now
became a race worthy of the name--Death fled from Death. The fresher
mounts of the cowboys steadily cut down the distance and, as the rifles
of the pursuers began to speak, the hard-pressed Indians made for the
smaller of two knolls, the plain leading to the larger one being too
heavily strewn with bowlders to permit speed.

As the fugitives settled down behind the rocks which fringed the edge of
their elevation a shot from one of them disabled Billy's arm, but had no
other effect than to increase the score to be settled. The pursuers
rode behind a rise and dismounted, from where, leaving their mounts
protected, they scattered out to surround the knoll.

Hopalong, true to his curiosity, finally turned up on the highest point
of the other knoll, a spur of the range in the west, for he always
wanted to see all he could. Skinny, due to his fighting instinct,
settled one hundred yards to the north and on the same spur. Buck lay
hidden behind an enormous bowlder eight hundred yards to the northeast
of Skinny, and the same distance southeast of Buck was Red Connors, who
was crawling up the bed of an arroyo. Billy, nursing his arm, lay in
front of the horses, and Pete, from his position between Billy and
Hopalong, was crawling from rock to rock in an endeavor to get near
enough to use his Colts, his favorite and most effective weapons.
Intermittent puffs of smoke arising from a point between Skinny and Buck
showed where Lanky Smith was improving each shining hour.

There had been no directions given, each man choosing his own position,
yet each was of strategic wort