For, after the hired bronco had wandered aimlessly through many gulches
and had climbed a good half-score of the hogback hills, the young man
from the East admitted that the boyhood memories were hopelessly and
altogether at fault in the deceptive moonlight. Blount gave the horse a
breathing halt on one of the hogbacks and tried to reconstruct the
puzzling hills into some featuring that he could remember. The effort
was fruitless. He was very thoroughly and painstakingly lost.
IV
THE HIGHBINDERS
When the three men who had pulled him from his horse and tied him hand
and foot had withdrawn to the farther side of the tiny camp-fire to
wrangle morosely over what should be done with him, Evan Blount found it
simply impossible to realize that they were actually discussing, as one
of the expedients, the propriety of knocking him on the head and
flinging his body into the near-by canyon.
The difficulty of comprehension lay in the crude grotesqueness of the
thing that had happened. Five minutes earlier he had been riding
peacefully up the trail in the moonlight, wondering how thoroughly he
was lost and how much farther it was to Debbleby's. Then, at a sudden
sharp turn in the canyon bridle-path, he had stumbled upon the
camp-fire, had heard an explosive "Hands up!" and had found himself
confronted by three men, with one of the three covering him with a
sawed-off Winchester.
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