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“You’ll have to get on without me,” said Jimmy to them in farewell. “Be good boys. We’ve got the biggest clean-up yet aboard you.”

They started on the twenty-fifth trip since the hold-up. After a time, far up the mountain was heard a single shot. Inside of two hours the express drew sorrowfully into camp. The driver appeared to be alone. In the bottom of the wagon were the three guards weak and sick. The gold sacks were very much absent.

“Done it again,” said the driver. “Ain’t more than got started afore the whole outfit’s down with the belly-ache. Too much of that cursed salmon. Told ’em so. I didn’t eat none. That road agent hit her lucky this trip sure. He was all organized for business. Never showed himself at all. Just opened fire. Sent a bullet through the top of my hat. He’s either a damn good shot or a damn poor one. I hung up both hands and yelled we was down and out. What could I do? This outfit couldn’t a fit a bumble bee. And I couldn’t git away, or git hold of no gun, or see anything to shoot, if I did. He was behind that big rock.”

The men nodded. They were many of them hard hit, but they had lived too long in the West not to recognize the justice of the driver’s implied contention that he had done his best.

“He told me to throw out them sacks, and to be damn quick about it,” went on the driver. “Then I drove home.”

“What sort of a lookin’ fellow was he?” asked someone. “Same one as last year?”

“I never seen him,” said the driver. “He hung behind his rock. He was organized for shoot, and if the messengers hadn’t happened to’ a’ been out of it, I believe he could have killed us all.”

“What did his hoss look like?” inquired California John.

“He didn’t have no horse,” stated the driver. “Leastways, not near him. There was no cover. He might have been around a p’int. And I can sw’ar to this: there weren’t no tracks of no kind from there to camp.”

They caught up horses and started out. When they came to the Lost Dog, they stopped and looked at each other.

“Poor old Babes,” said Simmins. “Biggest clean-up yet; and first time one of ’em didn’t go ‘long.”

“I’m glad they didn’t,” said Tibbetts. “That agent would have killed ’em shore!”

They called out the Gaynes brothers and broke the news. For once the jovial youngsters had no joke to make.

“This is getting serious,” said Jimmy, seriously. “We can’t afford to lose that much.”

George whistled dolefully, and went into the corral for the mules.

The party toiled up the mountain. Plainly in the dust could be made out the trail of the express ascending and descending. Plain also were the signs where the driver had dumped out the gold bags and turned around. From that point the tracks of a man and a horse led to the sheet of rock. Beyond that, nothing.

The men stared at each other a little frightened. Somebody swore softly.

“Boys,” said Bright in a strained voice, “do you know how much was in that express? A half million! There’s nary earthly hoss can carry over half a ton! And this one treads as light as a saddler.”

They looked at each other blankly. Several even glanced in apprehension at the sky.

In a perfunctory manner, for the sake of doing something, those skilled in trail-reading went back over the ground. Nothing was added to the first experience. At the point of robbery magically had appeared a man and–if the stage driver’s solemn assertion that at the time of the hold-up no animal was in sight could be believed–subsequently, when needed, a large horse. Whence had they come? Not along the road in either direction: the unbroken, deep dust assured that. Not down the mountain from above, for the cliff rose sheer for at least three hundred feet. Jimmy Gaynes, following unconsciously the general train of conjecture, craned his neck over the edge of the road. The broken jagged rock and shale dropped off an hundred feet to a tangle of manzanita and snowbrush.