His foes piled on him as ants do on a captured insect. His arms were tied behind him with rawhide thongs, his feet fastened together rather loosely.
He was pulled to a sitting posture. In the east the sky had lightened with the promise of the coming day.
His clothes torn from arms and body, his face bleeding from random blows, Houck looked round on the circle of his captors defiantly. In his glaring eyes and close-clamped, salient jaw no evidence was written of the despair that swept over him in a wave and drowned hope. He had in this bleak hour of reckoning the virtue of indomitable gameness.
“All right. You got me. Go to it, you red devils,” he growled.
The Utes gloated over him in a silence more deadly than any verbal threats. Their enemy had been delivered into their hands.
CHAPTER XLVI
THE END OF A CROOKED TRAIL
In the grim faces of the Utes Houck read his doom. He had not the least doubt of it. His trail ended here.