"Right here," said Ballard, indicating a point on the river trail just below the intersecting valley mouth, "is where you will be posted with the Maxim. If you take this boulder for a shield, you can command the gulch and the upper trail for a hundred yards or more, and still be out of range of their Winchesters. They'll probably shoot at you, but you won't mind that, with six or eight feet of granite for a breastwork, will you, Jerry?"
"Well, I should say not! Just you watch me burn 'em up when you give the word, Mr. Ballard. I believe I could hold a hundred of 'em from this rock."
"That is exactly what I want you to do—to hold them. It would be cold-blooded murder to turn the Maxim loose on them from this short range unless they force you to it. Don't forget that, Jerry."
"I sha'n't," promised the collegian; and after some further study of the topographies, they went back to the horses.
Thereupon ensued a tedious wait of an hour or more, with no sight or sound of the expected waggon, and with anxiety growing like a juggler's rose during the slowly passing minutes. Anyone of a dozen things might have happened to delay Fitzpatrick, or even to make his errand a fruitless one. The construction track was rough, and the hurrying engine might have jumped the rails. The rustlers might have got wind of the gun dash and ditched the locomotive. Failing that, some of their round-up men might have stumbled upon the contractor and halted and overpowered him. Ballard and Blacklock listened anxiously for the drumming of wheels. But when the silence was broken it was not by waggon noises; the sound was in the air—a distant lowing of a herd in motion, and the shuffling murmur of many hoofs. The inference was plain.
"By Jove! do you hear that, Jerry?" Ballard demanded. "The beggars are coming down-valley with the cattle, and they're ahead of Fitzpatrick!"
That was not strictly true. While the engineer was adding a hasty command to mount, Fitzpatrick's waggon came bouncing up the dry arroyo, with the snorting team in a lather of sweat.
"Sharp work, Mr. Ballard!" gasped the dust-covered driver. "They're less than a mile at the back of me, drivin' a good half of the colonel's beef herd, I'd take me oath. Say the wor-rds, and say thim shwift!"
With the scantest possible time for preparation, there was no wasting of the precious minutes. Ballard directed a quick transference of men, horses, and gun team to the lower end of the inner valley, a planting of the terrible little fighting machine behind the sheltering boulder on the main trail, and a hasty concealment of the waggon and harness animals in a grove of the scrub pines. Then he outlined his plan briskly to his two subordinates.
"They will send the herd down the canyon trail, probably with a man or two ahead of it to keep the cattle from straying up this draw," he predicted. "The first move is to nip these head riders; after which we must turn the herd and let it find its way back home through the sand gulch where we came in. Later on——"