From camp not a shot was fired, for the watchmen had had the only weapons and these had been seized by the invaders.
“Our foremen might telegraph to camp,” thought Tom swiftly, as he felt himself being carried away. “But I'll wager that these smart scoundrels didn't forget to cut the wire before springing the raid.”
For the first two or three minutes Harry's, slower moving mind hardly grasped more than the fact that their enemies appeared to have won a complete triumph.
“There isn't much doubt as to what they'll do with us,” thought Hazelton, with a slight shudder. “These rascals will move too fast for pursuit to overtake them early. What they in intend to do with us can be done in a very few minutes.”
Neither young engineer really expected to live to see daylight. From the first, after having incurred the anger of a certain lawless element in Paloma, the young engineers had understood fully that threats of lynching them had not been idly made.
“There'll be a stir, though,” Tom Reade muttered to himself. “The A. G. & N. M. officials won't let this crime go by without a determined effort to bring the offenders to justice. Detectives will search this community in squads, and everyone of these masked gentlemen is likely to get his deserts.”
Within the next half hour the galloping horses had covered fully five miles. Now the leader of the crowd led the way down into a deep gully in the sand.
“Hold up, men,” ordered the leader, and the cavalcade came to a stop, horses panting.
“Tumble the cattle off into the dirt,” was the next order, and it was obeyed, Tom and Harry rolling in the bitter alkali dust.
“Now, gentlemen, I believe I will take command,” spoke one of the party of horsemen, in his most suave voice, as he removed his mask. The speaker, as Reade knew at once, was Jim Duff, the gambler.