At ten o'clock the police were snugly hidden in the heavy willow bush of a little valley through which rippled Whispering Water; their horses had been taken back on the trail by one constable. A bull's-eye lantern fastened to a stake just topped a rock. In this position, when the slide was pulled, its rays would light up the trail where it dipped from the cut-bank to the stream.
They lay for an hour in the little bluff of willows. A moon that had hung in the western sky wandering lazily toward the distant saw-toothed ridge of the Rockies, had passed behind the gigantic stone wall, and a sombre gloom had obliterated the uneven edge of the cut-bank. In the belly of the valley it was just a well of blackness, cut at times by a penciled line of silver where the waters swirled around a cutting rock. The stillness was oppressive for the air was dead; no winger of the night passed; no animal of the prairie, gopher or coyote, disturbed the solemn hush; nobody spoke; in each one's mind was the unworded thought that they waited for a man that was known to be without fear, a man to whom odds meant little or nothing.
As they lay chest to earth in the heavy grass Corporal McBane pivoted his body on elbows close to Sergeant Jerry and whispered: "I'm glad, man, you suggested the flare. In the dark, wi' promiscuous shootin', there might be killin', and I'd no like to pot Bulldog myself', even if he is a whisky runner."
Jerry laughed a soft, throaty chuckle. "You'd have a fine chance, Mac, with that old .44 Enfield pepper-box against Carney with his .45 Colt; he just plays it like a girl fingerin' the keys of a piano; those gray cat-eyes of his can see in the dark."
"Well, wi' the flare on him he'll quit. It's only damn fools that won't wait for a better chance."
"We had him once before," Jerry said reflectively, "and he gave us the slip; just for the joke of it, too, for it was that train hold-up, and it was proved after he had nothing to do with it. But listen to this, Scottie, we both like Bulldog, but if he bucks us, we belong to the Force."
"Aye, I'm aware of it, Sergeant; and Bulldog himself wouldn't thank us to spit on our salt. But what makes you think he'll be with this outfit?"
"Because it's just one of his damned mad capers to run it into Fort Calbert under our noses, and he wouldn't ask anyone to run the risk and not be there."
But McBane had a Scotch reluctance to believe in foolish bravado. "It's no sense, Sergeant," he objected, "and Carney's vera clever."
Suddenly, on top of the cut bank where the trail dipped through the sandy wall, something blurred the blue-black sky; there was a heavy, slipping, sliding noise as if a giant sheet of sand-paper were being shoved along the earth. There was the creaking of wood on wood, the dull thump of an axle in a hub; a softened, just perceptible thud, thud of muffled hoofs.