"Only this," said Fred, smashing him in the face with his revolver and sending him tumbling over in the grass. The other fellow stopped and, suspecting something wrong, started to run.
"Halt!" said Terry, "or you're a dead man."
The fellow threw himself down in the grass and tried to run on his hands and knees and thus escape any bullet that might be flied at him, but Terry was on him in a moment and gave him a terrible crack with his revolver on his head.
Terry searched him for a weapon and found an ugly-looking knife and a revolver on him. He took possession of the weapons and, with the ball of twine he had with him, bound him hard and fast, his hands behind him and his ankles together, and then ran on ahead of the cattle to look for the gap he suspected they were headed for, he soon found it.
Before a single beef had passed through he and Fred turned the cattle back.
Then both of them followed the trail of the thieves, which they were enabled to do, dark though it was, by following the disarranged tall grass.
They found all of the men had recovered consciousness except the fourth man, who, was lying where he had fallen like a dead man.
"Terry," said Fred, "this is your man. What in thunder did you crack him so hard for?"
"I wanted to make sure of him," and they proceeded to drag the men to the gap that had been cut through the wire fence, took them through it, stood them up against a tree, for there were a few scattering trees growing down there, and tied them to the trunk hard and fast.
They both struck matches and held them up before their faces to see if they could recognize them, but they had never seen them before.