The fellow brushed her aside and went into the cabin.  Then the other three riders arrived.

“Mornin’, miss,” said one, a grizzled veteran, who might have been miner, trapper, or bandit.  The other two reined in behind him.  One wore a wide-brimmed black sombrero from under which a dark, sinister face gleamed.  The last man had sandy hair and light roving eyes.

“Whar’s Fresno?” he asked.

“I’m inside,” replied the man called Fresno, and he appeared at the door.  He stretched out a long arm and grasped Allie before she could avoid him.  When she began to struggle the huge hand closed on her wrist until she could have screamed with pain.

“Hold on, girl!  It won’t do you no good to jerk, an’ if you holler I’ll choke you,” he said.  “Fellers, get inside the cabin an’ rustle around lively.”

With one pull he hauled Allie toward his horse, and, taking a lasso off his saddle, he roped her arms to her sides and tied her to the nearest tree.

“Keep mum now or it ’ll be the wuss fer you,” he ordered; then he went into the cabin.

They were a bad lot, and Slingerland’s reason for worry had at last been justified.  Allie did not fully realize her predicament until she found herself bound to the tree.  Then she was furious, and strained with all her might to slip free of the rope.  But the efforts were useless; she only succeeded in bruising her arms for nothing.  When she desisted she was ready to succumb to despair, until a flashing thought of Neale, of the agony that must be his if he lost her or if harm befell her, drew her up sharply, thrillingly.  A girl’s natural and instinctive fear was vanquished by her love.

She heard the robbers knocking things about in the cabin.  They threw bales of beaver pelts out of the door.  Presently Fresno reappeared carrying a buckskin sack in which Slingerland kept his money and few valuables, and the others followed, quarreling over a cane-covered demijohn in which there had once been liquor.

“Nary a drop!” growled the one who got possession of it.  And with rage he threw the thing back into the cabin, where it crashed into the fire.

“Sandy, you’ve scattered the fire,” protested the grizzled robber, as he glanced into the cabin.  “Them furs is catchin’.”

“Let ’em burn!” called Fresno.  “We got all we want.  Come on.”

“But what’s the sense burnin’ the feller’s cabin down?”

“Nuthin’ ‘ll burn,” said the dark-faced man, “an’ if it does it ’ll look like Indians’ work.  Savvy, Old Miles?”

They shuffled out together.  Evidently Fresno was the leader, or at least the strongest force.  He looked at the sack in his hand and then at Allie.

“You fellers fight over thet,” he said, and, throwing the sack on the ground, he strode toward Allie.

The three men all made a rush for the sack and Sandy got it.  The other two pressed round him, not threateningly, but aggressively, sure of their rights.