stretched; here a ford to be negotiated; there an almost perpendicular coulee bank up which the two outfit wagons had to be dragged with block and tackle. Though the darkness was pitchy, Original led the way unerringly as a man in his own house.
No makeshift force was his. Twenty-seven horsemen rode with him, and the wranglers among them had charge of two remounts to a man,—a remuda of the swiftest and sturdiest beasts the Big Country possessed. Two heavy outfit wagons carried grub, extra saddles, bedding and auxiliary stores of cartridges for rifle and six-shooter. Not since Job Brazil, famous trail driver of the seventies, had to shoot his way through a buffalo herd to cut a path for the longhorns had the Big Country seen a force such as this bent on extermination of the rustlers.
Dawn was just beginning to smear the east when Original headed the party into Bear Hole, five miles away from the northern reaches of the Spout. A great gash in the bastions of the mountains, this Bear Hole, with perpendicular cliffs grudgingly giving space for Muddy Creek to break through to the plains beyond, mouth of the gorge screened by
