For a hard-working cowpuncher with no visible assets save his riding gear and his skill with horses, the half-waking dreams of Tex were florid and as impossible, in the cold light of reason, as had been the dreams of Johnny Jewel in that bunk house. That night others were awake in the moonlight. Down at Sinkhole camp five or six riders were driving a bunch of Rolling R horses into the corral where Johnny kept his riding horse overnight. They were not dreaming vaguely of the future, these riders. Instead they were very much awake to the present and the risks thereof. On the nearest ridge that gave an outlook to the north, a sentinel was stationed in the shade of a rocky out-cropping, ready to wheel and gallop back with a warning if any rode that way. When the horses were corralled and the gate closed, one man climbed upon the fence and gave orders. This horse was to be turned outside--and the gate-tender swung open the barrier to let it through. That horse could go, and that and that. "A dozen or so is about as many as we better take," he said to one who worked near him. "No--turn that one back. I know--he's a good one, but his mane and tail, and them white stockings behind, they're too easy reco'nized. That long-legged bay, over there--he's got wind; look at the chest on 'im! Forequarters like a lion. Haze him out, boys." He turned himself on the fence and squinted over the bewildered little group of freed horses. He swung back and squinted over the bunch in the corral, weighing a delicate problem in his mind, to judge by the look of him. "All right, boys. We kain't afford to be hawgs, this trip. Straddle your hosses and take 'em over to that far corner where we laid the fence down. Remember what I said about keepin' to the rocky draws. I'll wait here and turn these loose, and foller along and set up the fence after yuh. And keep agoin'--only don't swing over toward Baptista's place, mind. Keep to the left all you can. And keep a lookout ahead. Yuh don't want that kid to get a squint at yuh." One answered him in Mexican while they slipped out and mounted. They rode away, driving the horses they had chosen. Unobtrusive horses as to color; bays and browns, mostly, of the commonplace type that would not easily be missed from the herd. The man on the fence smoked a cigarette and studied the horses milling restlessly below him in the corral. From the adobe cabin squatting in the moonlight came the shrill, insistent jingling of a bell. The man looked that way thoughtfully, climbed down and went to the cabin, keeping carefully in the beaten trail.