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Updated: May 21, 2025
The younger man was not so easily shaken. He turned to McKinstra naturally. "How many of the hold-ups were there?" "I saw only one, and didn't see him very good. He was a slim fellow in a black mask." "You don't say. Were you the driver?" Alan felt the color suffuse his face. "No, I was the guard." "Oh, you were the guard."
At first Bellamy, as well as Farnum, McKinstra, young Yarnell and the rest of the posse looked expectantly for the return of the sheriff. It was hard to believe that one so virile, so competent, so much a dominant factor of every situation he confronted, could have fallen a victim to the men he hunted.
McKinstra was on sentry duty, but she got by him unobserved and startled Farnum into drawing his gun. Yet all she said was: "Buenos tardes, señor." The woman was a wrinkled Mexican with a close-shut, bitter mouth and bright, snappy eyes. Farnum stared at her in surprise. "Who in Arizona are you?"
She was soon back in her runabout, driving homeward fast as whip and voice could urge the horse. She thought she could reason out what McKinstra and the stage-driver would do. Mesa was twenty-five miles distant, the "Monte Cristo" mine seventeen. Nearer than these points there was no telephone station except the one at the Lee ranch.
All over Cattleland the news would be wafted on the wings of the wind that Alan McKinstra, while acting as shotgun messenger to a gold shipment, had let a road agent hold him up for the treasure he was guarding. "Very likely they'll catch him and get the gold back," she suggested. "That won't do me any good," he returned gloomily.
Bellamy and Alan McKinstra, Farnum and Charlie Hymer, young Yarnell and the sheriff. So Jack had divided his posse, thus leaving at the head of each detail one old and wise head. Each night the parties met at the rendezvous appointed for the wranglers with the pack horses. From sunrise to sunset often no face was seen other than those of their own outfit.
Leisurely the stage rolled up-grade toward the crossing. The Mexican driver was half asleep and the "shotgun messenger" was indolently rolling a cigarette, his sawed-off gun between his knees. Alan McKinstra was the name of this last young gentleman. Only yesterday he had gone to work for Morse, and this was the first job that had been given him.
"Who did that?" she asked of Alan McKinstra, who was sitting on the steps, reading a newspaper and munching an apple. "Jack Flatray took it down. He said the offer of a reward had been withdrawn." "When did he do that?" "About an hour ago. Just before he rode off." "Rode off! Where did he go?" "Heard him say he was going to Mesa. He told your father that when he settled the bill."
The speakers were in a dip of the trail just ahead of her, and the voice of the first she recognized as belonging to the man Boone. The tone of it was jubilantly cruel. "No, sir. You don't move a step of the way, not a step, Mr. Alan McKinstra. I've got him right where I want him, and I don't care if you talk till the cows come home."
"I'm going to send Alan McKinstra along to guide you. He knows that country like a book. You want to head for the lower pass, swing up Diable Cañon, and work up in the headquarters of the Three Forks." Within a quarter of an hour the posse was in motion. Flatray watched it disappear in the dust of the road without a smile.
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