This region was the heart of the watershed where Little Goose Creek heads.  The peaks rose gaunt above them.  Occasionally they glimpsed wide vistas of tangled, wooded canons and hills innumerable as sea billows.  Into this maze they plunged ever deeper and deeper.  Daylight came, and found them still travelling.  The prisoner did not need to be told that this inaccessible country was the lurking place of the rustlers who had preyed so long upon the Malpais district.  Nor did he need evidence to connect the sinister figure behind him with the gang of outlaws who rode in and out of these silent places on their nefarious night errands while honest folks kept their beds.

The sun was well up to its meridian before they came through a thick clump of quaking aspens to the mouth of a gulch opening from the end of a little mountain park.  On one of the slopes of the gulch a cabin squatted, half hidden by the great boulders and the matting of pine boughs in front.  Here Brad swung stiffly from the saddle.

“We’ll ’light hyer,” he announced.

“Time, too,” returned Keller easily.  “If anybody asks you, tell them I usually eat breakfast some before ten o’clock.”

“You’ll do yore eating from now on when I give the word,” his guard answered surlily.

He was a big, dark man with a grouch, one who took his duties sourly.  Not by any stretch of imagination could he be considered a brilliant conversationalist.  What he had to say he growled out audibly enough, but for the rest his opinions had to be cork-screwed out of him in surly monosyllables.

There was a good deal of the cave man about him.  The heavy, slouching shoulders, the glare of savagery, the long, hairy arms, all had their primordial suggestion.  Given a club and a stone ax, he might have been set back thousands of years with no injustice to his mentality.

The man soon had a fire blazing in the stove, and from it came a breakfast of bacon, black coffee, and biscuits.  He freed the hands of the nester and sat opposite him at the table, a revolver by the side of his plate for use in an emergency.

Keller smiled.  “This is one of those fashionable dinners where they have extra hardware beside the plates,” he suggested.

“Get gay, and I’ll blow the top of yore head off!” the cow-puncher swore with gusto.

“Thanks.  Under the circumstances, I reckon I’ll not get gay.  I’m in no hurry to put you in the pen, seh.  Plenty of time.  I’m going to need the top of my head to testify against you.”

Irwin swore violently.

“For two cents I’d pump you full of holes right now,” he glared.

Keller laughed, meeting him eye to eye pleasantly.

“Those aren’t the orders, friend.  I’m to be held here till the boss shows up or gives the signal.”

The big jaw of his captor fell from astonishment.  “Who told you that?”

The prisoner helped himself to more bacon and laughed again.  He had made a guess, but he knew now that he had hit the bull’s-eye with his shot in the dark.