"I said 'hands up,' and I meant it," rasped Ballard; and when the pale moonlight pricked out the cattle-lifters in the attitude of submission: "First man on the right—knee your horse into the clump of trees straight ahead of you."
It was Fitzpatrick, working swiftly and alone, who disarmed, wrist-roped, and heel-tied to his horse each of the crestfallen ones as Ballard ordered them singly into the mysterious shadows of the pine grove. Six of the ten, including Carson, had been ground through the neutralising process, and the contractor was deftly at work on the seventh, before the magnitude of the engineer's strategy began to dawn upon them.
"Sufferin' Jehu!" said Carson, with an entire world of disgust and humiliation crowded into the single expletive; but when the man called Cummings broke out in a string of meaningless oaths, the leader of the cattle thieves laughed like a good loser.
"Say; how many of you did it take to run this here little bluff on us?" he queried, tossing the question to Fitzpatrick, the only captor in sight.
"You'll find out, when the time comes," replied the Irishman gruffly. "And betwixt and between, ye'll be keeping a still tongue in your head. D'ye see?"
They did see, when the last man was securely bound and roped to his saddle beast; and it was characteristic of time, place, and the actors in the drama that few words were wasted in the summing up.
"Line them up for the back trail," was Ballard's crisp command, when Fitzpatrick and Blacklock had dragged the Maxim in from its boulder redoubt and had loaded it into the waggon beside the rope-wound Billings.
"Whereabouts does this here back trail end up—for us easy-marks, Cap'n Ballard?" It was Carson who wanted to know.
"That's for a jury to say," was the brief reply.
"You've et my bread and stabled yo' hawss in my corral," the chief rustler went on gloomily. "But that's all right—if you feel called to take up for ol' King Adam, that's fightin' ever' last shovelful o' mud you turn over in th' big valley."