"No foolin' thar, youngsters," came a harsh voice; "we've got you where we want you."
Coincidently from all about them the rocks seemed to spawn figures, till half a dozen men in rough plainsman's garb stood in the moonlight. Resistance was useless; worse, it might have resulted in a calamity more dire than the one that had overtaken them.
But curiously enough the very hopelessness of their situation inspired in Peggy a far different feeling to the terror that had clutched at her heart a moment before. She was conscious of a swift tide of anger. In one of the figures she had recognized the renegade guide.
"Juan—you!" she exclaimed in tones in which scorn struggled with indignation.
The guide turned away. Even his effrontery wilted before the young girl's frank contempt. It was all clear enough to Peggy now. Evidently, Juan had been bribed by these men to stay with the party till he had learned their plans, which he was then to betray to the band. For, in the moonlight Peggy had had no difficulty in recognizing the men whose conversation she had overheard at the National House.
There was the red-headed man, with his coarse, bristling crop of hair, and the mustache like the stumpy bristles of an old tooth brush, the tall, dark young fellow with the red sash and the silver spurs, poor Peggy's "romantic brigand," and the hawk-nosed man with the drooping mustache, who had formed the red-headed one's companion on the train.
"Hearn of Red Bill Summers, I op-ine," shot out the man with the red hair in a voice that rasped like a file on rusty iron.
"I think so," rejoined Roy quietly, and Peggy rejoiced to hear her brother's calm, steady tones.
"Wall, I'm him. You treat me right and don't make no fuss an' we'll git along all right. If not—"
He paused significantly.