CHAPTER XXVIII
THE SUNDAY MURDER
Banks’s posse, leaving Medicine Bend before daybreak, headed northwest. Their instructions were explicit: to scatter after crossing the Frenchman, watch the trails from the Goose River country and through the Mission Mountains, and intercept everybody riding north until the posse from Sleepy Cat or Whispering Smith should communicate with them from the southwest. Nine men rode in the party that crossed the Crawling Stone Sunday morning at sunrise with Ed Banks.
After leaving the river the three white-capped Saddles of the Mission range afford a landmark for more than a hundred miles, and toward these the party pressed steadily all day. The southern pass of the Missions opens on the north slope of the range into a pretty valley known as Mission Springs Valley, and the springs are the head-waters of Deep Creek. The posse did not quite obey the instructions, and following a natural instinct of safety five of them, after Banks and his three deputies 272 had scattered, bunched again, and at dark crossed Deep Creek at some distance below the springs. It was afterward known that these five men had been seen entering the valley from the east at sundown just as four of the men they wanted rode down South Mission Pass toward the springs. That they knew they would soon be cut off, or must cut their way through the line which Ed Banks, ahead of them, was posting at every gateway to Williams Cache, was probably clear to them. Four men rode that evening from Tower W through the south pass; the fifth man had already left the party. The four men were headed for Williams Cache and had reason to believe, until they sighted Banks’s men, that their path was open.
They halted to take counsel on the suspicious-looking posse far below them, and while their cruelly exhausted horses rested, Du Sang, always in Sinclair’s absence the brains of the gang, planned the escape over Deep Creek at Baggs’s crossing. At dusk they divided: two men lurking in the brush along the creek rode as close as they could, unobserved, toward the crossing, while Du Sang and the cowboy Karg, known as Flat Nose, rode down to Baggs’s ranch at the foot of the pass.
At that point Dan Baggs, an old locomotive engineer, had taken a homestead, got together a 273 little bunch of cattle, and was living alone with his son, a boy of ten years. It was a hard country and too close to Williams Cache for comfort, but Dan got on with everybody because the toughest man in the Cache country could get a meal, a feed for his horse, and a place to sleep at Baggs’s, without charge, when he needed it.
Ed Banks, by hard riding, got to the crossing at five o’clock, and told Baggs of the hold-up and the shooting of Oliver Sollers. The news stirred the old engineman, and his excitement threw him off his guard. Banks rode straight on for the middle pass, leaving word that two of his men would be along within half an hour to watch the pass and the ranch crossing, and asking Baggs to put up some kind of a fight for the crossing until more of the posse came up––at the least, to make sure that nobody got any fresh horses.
The boy was cooking supper in the kitchen, and Baggs had done his milking and gone back to the corral, when two men rode around the corner of the barn and asked if they could get something to eat. Poor Baggs sold his life in six words: “Why, yes; be you Banks’s men?”