The Sunday Murder

They halted to take counsel on the suspicious-looking posse far below them, and while their cruelly exhausted horses rested, Du Sang, always in Sinclair's absence the brains of the gang, planned the escape over Deep Creek at Baggs's crossing. At dusk they divided: two men lurking in the brush along the creek rode as close as they could, unobserved, toward the crossing, while Du Sang and the cowboy Karg, known as Flat Nose, rode down to Baggs's ranch at the foot of the pass.

At that point Dan Baggs, an old locomotive engineer, had taken a homestead, got together a little bunch of cattle, and was living alone with his son, a boy of ten years. It was a hard country and too close to Williams Cache for comfort, but Dan got on with everybody because the toughest man in the Cache country could get a meal, a feed for his horse, and a place to sleep at Baggs's, without charge, when he needed it.

Ed Banks, by hard riding, got to the crossing at five o'clock, and told Baggs of the hold-up and the shooting of Oliver Sollers. The news stirred the old engineman, and his excitement threw him off his guard. Banks rode straight on for the middle pass, leaving word that two of his men would be along within half an hour to watch the pass and the ranch crossing, and asking Baggs to put up some kind of a fight for the crossing until more of the posse came up--at the least, to make sure that nobody got any fresh horses.