A deserted log-house, windowless, with one corner rotted away, and the sod roof long since tumbled in, stood upon a treeless bend of the dry creek. Abandoned implements littered the dooryard; a rusted hay rake with one wheel gone, a broken mower with cutter-bar drunkenly erect, and the front trucks of a dilapidated wagon.
The Texan's eyes rested sombrely upon the remnant of a rocking-horse, still hitched by bits of weather-hardened leather to a child's wheelbarrow whose broken wheel had once been the bottom of a wooden pail—and he swore, softly.
Up the creek he could see the cottonwood grove just bursting into leaf and as they rounded the corner of a long sheep-shed, whose soggy straw roof sagged to the ground, a coyote, disturbed in his prowling among the whitening bones of dead sheep, slunk out of sight in a weed-patch.
Entering the grove, the men halted at a point where the branches of three large trees interlaced. It was darker, here. The moonlight filtered through in tiny patches which brought out the faces of the men with grotesque distinctness and plunged them again into blackness.
Gravely the Texan edged his horse to the side of the pilgrim.
"Get off!" he ordered tersely, and Endicott dismounted.
"Tie his hands!" A cowboy caught the man's hands behind him and secured them with a lariat-rope.
The Texan unknotted the silk muffler from about his neck and folded it.
"If it is just the same to you," the pilgrim asked, in a voice that held firm, "will you leave that off?"
Without a word the muffler was returned to its place.