"What do you imagine they really plan to do, and who are they?" asked Dick, as he and his brother followed Bud to their own special tent.
"I can only guess who they are, and your guess is as good as mine," the western lad answered.
"Then I'll say Del Pinzo and the Hank Fisher gang," ventured
Nort.
"And I'll agree," replied Bud. "They have two motives, now, for working against us. One because we've beaten 'em in two innings—the time of the Triceratops and in the underground river game. But getting our cattle—or the cattle of any other rancher—is reward enough in itself at the price beef is selling for now. They want to make a lot of money, and ruin us because we've come to Happy Valley. But they'll find that we can bat a little, too," added Bud, carrying out the simile of a baseball game. "And it's going to be our turn at the plate mighty soon!"
"The sooner the better," declared Nort, and his brother nodded in agreement.
When Old Billee's wound had been further attended to, with the more adequate remedies kept in camp, there was a gathering of the "clan," so to speak, in the tent where the boys and their cowboy helpers usually ate.
"Then you aren't going to chase over to where they drove off your cattle right away; is that it, Bud?" asked Snake.
"I don't see any use," said the young western ranch lad. "All we'd see would be the marks of the trail, and they'll stay for some time, if it doesn't rain, which isn't likely. What I want to do is to pack enough grub—and other things," he added significantly with a motion toward his .45, "for a long trip. We've got to get at the bottom of how they drive off our cattle, and manage to get them out of the valley without leaving a trace.
"That's the puzzle we have to solve, as we found out about the hidden water. Up to now the raids of Del Pinzo and his crowd—assuming that they are the ones—have been small. They're the kind that's always going on, and a lot of the cattlemen, and Dad among 'em, seem to shut their eyes to the thefts. I'm not going to do that. But what I started to say was that, up to now, the raids have been small ones. Very likely they thought we wouldn't make much fuss over the steers we lost.
"But this is a big raid, and the others were only leading up to it. They played to get us out of the south end of the valley, and away from our big herd so they could drive it off unmolested."