trouble caught him. The horse range lay behind. This was the Broken Butte country, forty miles or so south of the Yellowstone River and Forsythe, and about fifteen miles from the Fort. The bed of Sundown Creek was dry when the little herd passed. Ahead was a downslant of country where jagged rocks blistered under the September sun.
Here Rosebud Joe had been forced to drive the animals down a boulder-strewn hardpan wash which once had been a stage road. It had not been used for years, save by stray riders. It formed a defile that narrowed, with rocks on both sides. It was only three miles long, though, and below the country looked green with the knee-high buffalo grass.
Peering ahead Joe caught sight of a moving figure. An Indian on horseback! The Indian vanished. But Joe frowned. He halted the thirsty herd and rode a little way forward. Then he saw the trouble prepared—though probably not meant for him.
Where the narrow slant of defile met the floor of the valley, three Indians had rigged up a corral of brush and rawhide. It was a horse trap. Any wild horses or tame stock coming down the defile would enter the corral. The Indians, lying there hidden in a pit, would yank rawhide ropes, closing the way back. Then they would rope and take their prizes at leisure, since even a wild horse will not often question even as flimsy a barrier as a brush hedge.
With considerable trouble, Joe headed the herd back uphill the way he had come. But he did not go very far. Back up there sounded far away whoops; and he saw tiny black dots moving. Indians!
In a few moments Joe understood, and his heart sank. The Indian raiders, balked at the V Up and V Down, had started one of their two or three-day relay hunts of wild horses. They might even have Redbird there. They would drive the band now into the defile, and down into the trap prepared. The wild stallion and his mares, if it could really be Redbird, would be so winded, tired out and thirsty, that they all would be near collapse. The Indians would be tired out, too, though not so greatly, since they knew how wild horses travel in circles, and would have spelled each other in relays. This, though, was the coup. And Rosebud Joe was caught, with the valuable Morgans, between the horse drivers and the three Indians waiting down there at the trap.
Joe dismounted, snatching out his carbine—then slowly thrusting it back and examining his single-action Colt. A sort of desperate plan to save the horses had sprung into his mind. But only the revolver would be of any use. And if he failed—well, not only would the ranch and Big Jim lose these most valuable of the Morgans, but Rosebud Joe would lose his life.
He thought of that all right, but he was running as he thought. Running for a fissure in the rocks, which might let him climb and belly around, so as to take the three Indians below somewhat by surprise. They had to be eliminated or captured, and before the other part of the raiding band got down there with the horses.
Joe hurried. The way was rough, and for a few moments he thought it barred by a vertical cliff face. Then he saw a way around, a slide of rubble, and then the floor of the valley. He made it, hurrying, muttering a sort of half prayer with his lips, that finding the Morgans there in the defile would slow
