“Most likely you’re talking like a wall-eyed ijit!” cut in Garry. “Eleven of my sheep found, an hour ago, with their throats torn out.” “Huh?” grunted Fenno, with much the sound that might have been expected had he been kicked in the stomach. “Eleven of ’em!” reiterated Garry. “Down in my Number Two range. I had a bunch of five hundred wethers and old ewes down there. My poor collie, Tiptop, was in charge of ’em. We found him with both forelegs broke and his jugular slit. He’d done his best. I c’d see that, by the way the soft ground was mussed up, all around him. But he’s a little feller; and pretty old, besides. So the Killer got him. And then he got eleven of my sheep. Simmons found what’d happened, when he made his rounds, at sunrise. He came, lickety-split, to me. I phoned up and down the line; but the Golden Fleece seems to be the only ranch he came to.” “He didn’t come here,” said Royce. “We’d have got word, before now, if he’d done any killing at one of the outlying ranges. He--” “That’s the Killer of it!” commented Fenno, savagely. “I know. I’ve been in sections where one of ’em worked. Never visit the same place twice in the same month. Never go back to their kill. Clean up at one ranch to-night; then at another, twelve miles away, to-morrow night; then maybe a week later at one that’s fifty miles away; then back next door to where they killed fust. No way to dope out where they’ll land next. They’re wise to pizen an’ traps an’ guns an’ sich. Send out parties to track ’em, an’ they give ’em the slip an’ double back an’ kill, right behind ’em. Put night guards on the ranges, an’ next mornin’ you’ll find dead sheep not fifty feet from where the guards was posted. Killers are smarter than folks are. We’re sure in for a passel of trouble--the lot of us. That’s the way with luck!” sighed the old pessimist with the sorrily triumphant air of one whose worst fears are realized. “Yep, that’s what I always say about luck. It’s pretty bad, for a while. Then all at once it begins to get a heap worse. Now--” “Well, I’m out to round up a posse of hunters,” interrupted Garry. “That’s the only hope. Post good shots everywhere, on every range; and then let a posse comb the country for the Killer’s lair. Most likely he has a hide-out, somewheres along the foothills of the Dos Hermanos peaks, or maybe down in the coulée. And maybe, with the right men, we can root him out. Anyhow, with men hunting him all day and with the ranges close-guarded all night, he’s li’ble to figger that this ain’t a healthy region for his work; and he’ll shift to somewheres else.”