stery of what
or who was in or near the wretched town besides myself, all kept with
me and made me wish ten thousand times that I had never heard of the
place, or of any place except home.

Though of course I did not keep so miserable all the while. There was
plenty of work to be done, and I kept at it most of the time. My eye
soon got well. The day after I beat off the outlaws and had a little
recovered from the work and strain of that and of the strange start
the disappearance of the saddle gave me, I found so many things
waiting to be done that I scarce knew what to turn my hand to first.
But I had thought the poor pony in the tunnel deserved to be got out
before anything else was done; and this I attended to an hour after
the robbers had gone. I went out half expecting to find it gone, too,
with its saddle; but it was not.

It was quite tired out and stood hanging its head. To get it out the
way it had tumbled in would take a great amount of shoveling in the
hard snow, I soon saw, so I decided I would try to lead it through the
tunnel and on out by way of the hotel, though it seemed an odd thing
to do. So I put a halter on it and tried that plan, and though its
back scraped a little in places, what with me ahead and with Kaiser
behind barking a good deal, we got it along and into the office and
then on through the storeroom and kitchen and out to the barn. Dick
and Ned were much excited by the new arrival, and so for that matter
was Blossom; and Crazy Jane was like to have cackled her head off. The
poor things were the same as I, half dead from lonesomeness.

Then I straightened up things about town which had been put out of
order by the fight, fixed the fires again and cleaned up the guns. I
didn't forget to go up the windmill tower several times to have a look
for the outlaws, but I saw no more of them. Another thing I did was
to lay some big slabs of frozen snow over the hole in the tunnel where
the pony fell through, and it was a good thing I did this or I believe
the blizzard would have gone near to filling the whole tunnel system.
As it was it piled on more snow and covered all trace of the robbers'
charge on the street.

I think it would not be possible for me to make you understand what a
blizzard that was, which began the next day and kept up for the best
part of a whole week. All day and night it roared and pushed at the
windows and drove the snow in every crack and hole; here piled it up
and there sw