The deputy, after completing his work to his satisfaction found three more positions where they respectively commanded the corrals, the wagons and the rear of the bunk house. Then he paced more distances and was careful that bulky objects interposed in the direct lines between the positions, this latter precaution being to make it impossible for the deputies to shoot each other. This done, he went into the house and consulted with his companion in arms, laughing immoderately about the joke they would play on the marauder. While Shields and Charley vainly searched the plain and while the deputy paced and thought and paced, and while Sneed and his exhausted cow-punchers slept as if in death, safely under guard, two men were riding along the Ford's Station Sagetown Trail well to the east of the Backbone, chatting amicably and smoking the same brand of tobacco. One of them sat high up in the air on the seat of a stage coach, from where he overlooked his six-horse team. His face was wreathed in grins and his expression was one of beatific contentment. The other cantered alongside on a dirty brown horse which had a white stocking on the near front foot, keeping close watch of the surrounding plain, his mind active and alert. Bill Howland laughed suddenly and slapped his thigh with enthusiasm: "Say, Orphant," he cried, "you are shore raising h--l with that Cross Bar-8 gang! You has got them so tangled up and miserable that they don't know where they are! If their brains was money they'd have to chalk up their drinks. They're about as dangerous as ossified prairie dogs. They remind me of the feller who kicked a rattlesnake to see if it was alive, and found out that it was. No, sir, they shore won't die of brain fever. Why, they ain't had any sleep for a week, have to work double hard, eat what they can cook in sieve tins, and can't say their soul's their own after dark. They could get rest if they quit working one day and all but one get plenty of sleep. Then the other feller could get his at night. But they don't know enough. Oh, it's rich: the whole blamed town is laughing at 'em fit to bust. It's the funniest thing ever happened in these parts since I've been out here." Then he suddenly paused: "Say, Sneed sent a puncher to town this morning. It was that brass-headed, flat-faced Bucknell, what you tied up by the canyon. He begged the sheriff to swear in a dozen bad men and come out and protect his foreman and the rest of the outfit. And the pin-headed wart went and blabbed the whole thing right in front of the Taggert's saloon crowd, and he shore had to blow, all right. He shore did, and that gang's always thirsty." The horseman flecked the ashes from his cigarette and smiled: "Well?" he asked, looking up.