His voice broke at the last word. He threw his arms aloft in a wild gesture. The features of the face he turned toward Billy were contorted with emotion. He gibbered and mowed at them in the moon-light. He looked like an inmate of Bedlam. He was certainly in a bad way, was Judge Driver.
Suddenly he lost his head. He clapped heels to his horse's flanks in an effort to escape. But both Billy Wingo and Riley Tyler had been waiting for precisely such a move ever since leaving Golden Bar. Two ropes shot out simultaneously. One fastened on the red-and-white pinto's neck, the other settled round the Judge's shoulders. The paint pony stopped abruptly. The judge flew backward from the saddle and hit the snow on the back of his neck.
The three friends dismounted and gathered around the judge. Riley loosened his rope. The judge lay still and gasped and crowed. The wind had been considerably knocked out of him. When he sat up, he was promptly sick, very sick. The paroxysm shook him from head to heels.
It was half an hour before he was able to stand on his feet without support. The three boosted him into the saddle, mounted their own horses and proceeded along the draw.
Whenever the judge made as if to check his horse, which he did more than once, Billy Wingo would crowd his horse forward and kick the pinto. Their progress may be said to have been fairly regular.
A mile from the ranch house they climbed the shelving side of the draw and rode across the flat to where a straggling growth of pine and spruce made a black, pear-shaped blot along the smooth white slope of a saddle-backed hill. The tail of this evergreen plantation ran out across the flat from the base of the hill almost to the edge of the draw they had just quitted. A tall spruce, towering high above his fellows, formed the tip, as it were, of the stem of the pear.
Beyond and below this spruce, where the draw met lower ground and lost its identity as a draw, was the Walton ranch house. On the flat the evergreens barred the four riders from the eyes of any one watching from the house.
The four men reached the trees, rode in among them. Three of them dismounted and tied their horses. The fourth remained in the saddle. Said Billy Wingo to the fourth:
"Get down."
The judge got down. Swiftly his hands were tied behind his back, and his eyes were thoroughly blindfolded with his own silk handkerchief.