It was noon when they struck the railroad. They halted long enough to stop a freight train, send some telegrams, and ask for news. They got orders from Rooney Lee, had an empty box car set behind the engine for a special, and, loading their horses at the chute, made a helter-skelter run for Sleepy Cat. At three o'clock they struck north for the Mission Mountains.
Banks's _posse_, leaving Medicine Bend before daybreak, headed northwest. Their instructions were explicit: to scatter after crossing the Frenchman, watch the trails from the Goose River country and through the Mission Mountains, and intercept everybody riding north until the _posse_ from Sleepy Cat or Whispering Smith should communicate with them from the southwest. Nine men rode in the party that crossed the Crawling Stone Sunday morning at sunrise with Ed Banks.
After leaving the river the three white-capped Saddles of the Mission range afford a landmark for more than a hundred miles, and toward these the party pressed steadily all day. The southern pass of the Missions opens on the north slope of the range into a pretty valley known as Mission Springs Valley, and the springs are the head-waters of Deep Creek. The _posse_ did not quite obey the instructions, and following a natural instinct of safety five of them, after Banks and his three deputies had scattered, bunched again, and at dark crossed Deep Creek at some distance below the springs. It was afterward known that these five men had been seen entering the valley from the east at sundown just as four of the men they wanted rode down South Mission Pass toward the springs. That they knew they would soon be cut off, or must cut their way through the line which Ed Banks, ahead of them, was posting at every gateway to Williams Cache, was probably clear to them. Four men rode that evening from Tower W through the south pass; the fifth man had already left the party. The four men were headed for Williams Cache and had reason to believe, until they sighted Banks's men, that their path was open.
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.