At the shoulder of the Peak the posse of cowmen found Jim Clark, his shaps frayed and his hat slouched to a shapeless mass from long beating through the brush, and followed in his lead to a pocket valley, tucked away among the cedars, where they threw off their packs and camped while Jim and Creede went forward to investigate. It was a rough place, that crotch between the Peaks, and Shep Thomas had cut his way through chaparral that stood horse-high before he won the southern slope. To the north the brush covered all the ridges in a dense thicket, and it was there that the cow camp was hid; but on the southern slope, where the sun had baked out the soil, the mountain side stretched away bare and rocky, broken by innumerable ravines which came together in a _redondo_ or rounded valley and then plunged abruptly into the narrow defile of a box canyon. This was the middle fork, down which Shep Thomas had made his triumphal march the year before, and down which Juan Alvarez would undoubtedly march again. Never but once had the sheep been in that broad valley, and the heavy rains had brought out long tufts of grama grass from the bunchy roots along the hillsides. As Creede and Jim Clark crept up over the brow of the western ridge and looked down upon it they beheld a herd of forty or fifty wild horses, grazing contentedly along the opposite hillside; and far below, where the valley opened out into the _redondo_, they saw a band of their own tame horses feeding. Working in from either side--the wild horses from the north, where they had retreated to escape the drought; the range animals from the south, where the sheep had fed off the best grass--they had made the broad mountain valley a rendezvous, little suspecting the enemy that was creeping in upon their paradise. Already the distant bleating of the sheep was in the air; a sheepman rode up to the summit, looked over at the promised land and darted back, and as the first struggling mass of leaders poured out from the cut trail and drifted down into the valley the wild stallions shook out their manes in alarm and trotted farther away. A second band of outlaws, unseen before, came galloping along the western mountain side, snorting at the clangor and the rank smell of the sheep, and Creede eyed them with professional interest as the leaders trotted past. Many times in the old days he had followed along those same ridges, rounding up the wild horses and sending them dashing down the canyon, so that Hardy could rush out from his hiding place and make his throw. It was a natural hold-up ground, that _redondo_, and they had often talked of building a horse trap there; but so far they had done no more than rope a chance horse and let the rest go charging down the box canyon and out the other end onto Bronco Mesa.