"Drag it!" he snapped. "Get moving. If I had my own way we'd lead your horse out from under you--and we will if I ever hear of your turning up on the Three Bar range again." VI Billie Warren rode with Harris on the last lap of the circle. There were but two men remaining with them. "Moore!" Harris called, and the man turned his horse down the head of a draw that would lead him out into the bottoms a trifle less than a mile above the wagon. Harris heard a shrill whistle behind him and turned sidewise in the saddle to look back, saw that Moore had regained the ridge and was signaling. They turned and rode back to him. "There's another," Moore said, pointing down the gulch. "It's getting to be a habit." A dead cow lay on a little flat a hundred yards below. For three consecutive days some rider had found a fresh-killed Three Bar cow. Every animal had been shot. "I'll look this one over myself," Harris decided. "There's only two more gulches to work. Each one of you boys take one." The girl followed him as he turned down the first steep pitch. They pulled up their horses and sat looking at the cow. A trickle of blood oozed out of a hole between her eyes. Harris rode in a circle round the spot. "He downed her from some point above," he said. "Not a sign anywhere close at hand." He surveyed the ridges that flanked either side of the draw and the little saddle-like depression at the head of it from which they had just descended. From beyond this gap came the shrill nicker of a horse, the sound chopped short as if a man had clamped his hand on the animal's nostrils to silence it. Harris turned swiftly to the girl. "It's a plant," he said. "Ride--hard!" He suited his action to the words and jumped his horse off down the bottoms. He waved her over to one side. "Keep well away from me!" he ordered. "They don't want you." They hung their spurs into their mounts and the horses plunged down the steeply-pitching bottoms, vaulting sage clumps and bounding along the cow trails that threaded the brush. Two hundred yards below the cow the draw made an elbow bend. The girl rounded it and as Harris followed a jump behind he felt a jarring tug at the cantle of his saddle and the thin, sharp crack of a rifle reached him. The gulch made a reverse bend and as they swept around it Harris swung sidewise in the saddle and looked back. They were entirely sheltered from any point on the divide six hundred yards behind them. He pulled his horse to a swinging trot and they rode down the sloping meadow that led straight to the main valley.