He lay back and went limp, eyes drifting shut.

The first gold bearers showed up on the wagon road in the middle of the morning and Boag was ready for them.

There were three of them and a pack horse. They must have been riding all night; they looked half asleep in the saddle. The same detailing of men Mr. Pickett had employed back, in Arizona, Boag noticed—two reliable old rawhiders and a young Mexican gunman festooned with pistols.

Boag had strung wire across the wagon road down in the weeds where nobody was going to cotton to it in advance. The two riders hit the wire abreast and when their horses stumbled and went down on their chins the Mexican plowed into the tangle because he and his horse both were too sleepy to react fast enough.

Boag pulled the overhead rope and the blankets dropped on them.

The blankets fell curling like fishing nets. The looming shadows terrified the horses. Boag dodged a panicking horse and stepped out of the trees on the edge of the road with cocked .45’s in both hands. The three rawhiders were batting at the blankets and Boag found the outline of a hatted head under a blanket and swatted it with his gun barrel. There was a moan from under the blanket.

The Mexican pawed clear and spotted Boag but Boag was close enough to make it suicidal and the Mexican just put his hands up in the air. Boag whipped around behind him and shucked the guns out of the Mexican’s holsters and when the third rawhider crawled out from under the tangle Boag had a bead on him.

“Don’t get notions now.”

The rawhider blinked in baffled incomprehension. His sleepy brain hadn’t caught up with the things that were happening to him. “What the fuck?”

“Gun belt off,” Boag said.

The rawhider had to absorb it and stare at Boag for a minute before he squeezed his eyelids tight and popped them open as if to clear his head. But Boag was still there and the rawhider nodded bleakly and disarmed himself.

Boag kicked the blanket off the third one, the one he’d hit on the head. The man was on his knees bent far over with his head almost touching the ground; he was holding his head in both hands and rocking back and forth in pain.

Boag said to the Mexican, “Get him on his feet and bring him.”

He prodded the three of them back into the woods to the little clearing where he’d left the lengths of cut wire. “You. Wire the Mexican’s hands behind his back. Do it tight, I’m going to check it.”

When the three of them were wired to trees too far apart for them to reach each other, Boag went after the scattered horses.

He kept listening for the approach of more riders. He didn’t know how close they’d arrive together; he was expecting to have to let some men get by him but he meant to intercept as many as he could.

He’d seen the pack horse bolt to the north; that was the only animal he was really interested in. He rode that way looking for sign and found plenty of it; the horse had crashed through the forest in blind fear but naturally it hadn’t kept that up very long. A quarter of a mile back in the woods he found the horse grazing.

He led it back to his little clearing and tied it up. Had a quick look at the gold and checked the lashings on his prisoners. He didn’t answer any of their questions or threats. He went back to the road and hiked up the blankets and tightened the tripwires and waited for the next bunch.

He had nearly a two-hour wait. He heard them coming; one of them was whistling Dixie and it made Boag’s lip curl.

Only two of them this time, a team like Jackson and Smith: a fat one and a thin one. Otherwise they had the same stamp of the other rawhiders: the short-brim Border hats, the double-cinch Texas saddles, the flannel shirts and beat-up Levi’s and scuffed Missouri boots and the same hard half-shaven faces. As they came up the road he recognized Sweeney, the one who was whistling.

When they hit the wire he dropped the blankets on them and stepped out into the road with a .45 in his fist. With his free hand he grabbed the lead-rope of the pack horse.

He couldn’t find a head to beat on; he just waited for the rawhiders to get untangled.

Sweeney’s partner rolled out from under the blanket; he’d been hurt—maybe hit by a horse’s hoof. Boag watched him for a second and then holstered his gun and bent down to pluck the man’s gun from his holster. The man didn’t even notice; he’d been clipped on the elbow and was holding it cupped in his other hand, rolling around in a silent agony, too hurt to scream.

Holding the man’s gun Boag turned to look for Sweeney and found him coming up from the blanket trying for his gun.

Boag would have been dead there if Sweeney’s fall hadn’t hitched his gun belt around. The holster was somewhere behind Sweeney’s butt and he was still trying to find it when Boag cocked the revolver and leveled it.

“Quit that, Sweeney.”

“You.”

“Yeah me. Unbuckle that thing and leave it drop.”

So now he had five men neutralized and two pack-horse loads of gold.

When he got Sweeney and his partner wired up to trees in the clearing he rigged up the blankets again and inspected the wires. One of the tripwires had snapped and he replaced it.

Assume these loads were the same size as the one Jackson had cached. If all the gold was split up this way, there’d be maybe six more loads on the way in. But most likely Mr. Pickett had already spent some of it and had kept some more. Mr. Pickett had got a lot of paper scrip from Don Pablo of course and he’d probably used that, rather than the gold, to pay off the corrupt officials of the Pesquiera regime; but he wouldn’t have let all the gold out of his reach. Boag expected that if he managed to shanghai two more loads it would do the job; three more would guarantee it.

He got another installment somewhere around one o’clock. Two riders again, the pack on a mule this time. One of the horses got through the first line of tripwires but fell over the second line. The blankets were getting ripped up by now and one of the men showed an inclination to fight but then like the others he discovered he was looking into the black orifices of two steady forty-five caliber muzzles and he thought better of it. You didn’t fight the drop; that was a first rule of anything.

That made seven prisoners and close to a hundred-thousand dollars U.S.

It was a lot of hard men to be leaving off by themselves in the woods. He kept re-checking their wire lashings at close intervals because it only took one loose wire to bring all seven of them down on him.

He made a cache of all their weapons and kept it close to his position by the side of the road. Most of their saddle horses had drifted off somewhere and perhaps some of them would wander up into Mr. Pickett’s fortress. That was all right, that was fine. He wanted Mr. Pickett to get nervous.

Mr. Pickett had to be nervous by now anyway. No gold had showed up yet. Mr. Pickett was going to get angry and worried.

That was part of the idea.

He hadn’t bothered to try putting gags in his prisoners’ mouths. Right now they could yell all they wanted to; nobody except Boag was going to hear it. They wouldn’t have any way of knowing when their friends were approaching— he had them tied up beyond earshot of the road—so they couldn’t warn the approaching gold riders. There wasn’t much they could do with their mouths right now except complain.

Then at half past two he was in trouble. He could see them coming up the road toward him and they were too many. Five men and two pack horses.

Obviously it was two groups who had met on the way in. They’d joined up and now they were spinning yarns happily and Boag didn’t see what the hell he could do about it because in one minute they were going to hit the tripwires.