"I've got Mr. Healy to thank for this, I expect," commented the nester quietly.
"We've got no rope on yore expectations, Mr. Keller; but this outfit doesn't run any information bureau," answered the heavy-set, sullen fellow who had been called Brad.
There were four of them, all masked; but the ranger was sure of one of them, if not two. The first speaker had been Tom Dixon; the last one was Brad Irwin, a rider belonging to the Twin Star outfit.
They helped the bound man to his horse and held a low-voiced consultation. Three of his captors turned their horses toward the south, while Irwin took charge of Keller. With his rifle resting across the horn of his saddle, the man followed his charge up the trail, winding among the summits that stood as sentinels around Gregory's Pass. Through the defile they went, descending into the little-known mountain parks beyond.
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 cañons 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.