The cowboys rode straight across the bench.  Song and conversation had ceased and the only sounds were the low clink of bit chains and the soft rustle of horses’ feet in the buffalo grass.  At the end of an hour the leaders swung into an old grass-grown trail that led by devious windings into a deep, steep-sided coulee along the bottom of which ran the bed of a dried-up creek.  Water from recent rains stood in brackish pools.  Remnants of fence with rotted posts sagging from rusty wire paralleled their course.  A dilapidated cross-fence barred their way, and without dismounting, a cowboy loosened the wire gate and threw it aside.

A deserted log-house, windowless, with one corner rotted away, and the sod roof long since tumbled in, stood upon a treeless bend of the dry creek.  Abandoned implements littered the dooryard; a rusted hay rake with one wheel gone, a broken mower with cutter-bar drunkenly erect, and the front trucks of a dilapidated wagon.

The Texan’s eyes rested sombrely upon the remnant of a rocking-horse, still hitched by bits of weather-hardened leather to a child’s wheelbarrow whose broken wheel had once been the bottom of a wooden pail—­and he swore, softly.

Up the creek he could see the cottonwood grove just bursting into leaf and as they rounded the corner of a long sheep-shed, whose soggy straw roof sagged to the ground, a coyote, disturbed in his prowling among the whitening bones of dead sheep, slunk out of sight in a weed-patch.

Entering the grove, the men halted at a point where the branches of three large trees interlaced.  It was darker, here.  The moonlight filtered through in tiny patches which brought out the faces of the men with grotesque distinctness and plunged them again into blackness.

Gravely the Texan edged his horse to the side of the pilgrim.

“Get off!” he ordered tersely, and Endicott dismounted.

“Tie his hands!” A cowboy caught the man’s hands behind him and secured them with a lariat-rope.

The Texan unknotted the silk muffler from about his neck and folded it.

“If it is just the same to you,” the pilgrim asked, in a voice that held firm, “will you leave that off?”

Without a word the muffler was returned to its place.

“Throw the rope over that limb—­the big one that sticks out this way,” ordered the Texan, and a cowpuncher complied.

“The knot had ort to come in under his left ear,” suggested one, and proceeded to twist the noose into place.

“All ready!”

A dozen hands grasped the end of the rope.

The Texan surveyed the details critically: 

“This here is a disagreeable job,” he said.  “Have you got anything to say?”