for. And at intervals he read from his favorite novel to the scout,
who still questioned whether it was a true story.

CHAPTER XIII

With Bob Scott to lead an occasional hunting trip, Bucks found the
time go fast at Goose Creek and no excitement came again until later
in the summer.

Where Goose Creek breaks through the sand-hills the country is flat,
and, when swollen with spring rains, the stream itself has the force
and fury of a mountain river. Then summer comes; the rain clouds hang
no longer over the Black Hills, continuing sunshine parches the face
of the great plains, and the rushing and turbulent Goose Creek
ignominiously evaporates--either ascending to the skies in vapor or
burrowing obscurely under the sprawling sands that lie within its
course. Only stagnant pools and feeble rivulets running in widely
separated channels--hiding under osiers or lurking within shady
stretches of a friendly bank--remain to show where in April the noisy
Goose engulfs everything within reach of its foaming wings. The creek
bed becomes in midsummer a mere sandy ford that may be crossed by a
child--a dry map that prints the running feet of snipe and plover, the
creeping tread of the mink and the muskrat, and the slouching trail of
the coyote and the wolf.

Yet there is treachery in the Goose even in its apparent repose, and
the unwary emigrant sometimes comes to grief upon its treacherous bed.
The sands of the Goose have swallowed up more than one heedless
buffalo, and the Indian knows them too well to trust them at all.

When the railroad bridge was put across the creek, the difficulties of
securing it were very considerable and Brodie, the chief engineer, was
in the end forced to rely upon temporary foundations. Trainmen and
engineers for months carried "slow" orders for Goose Creek bridge, and
Bucks grew weary with warnings from the despatchers to careless
enginemen about crossing it.

Among the worst offenders in running his engine too fast over Goose
Creek bridge was Dan Baggs, who, breathing fire through his bristling
red whiskers and flashing it from his watery blue eyes, feared nobody
but Indians, and obeyed reluctantly everybody connected with the
railroad. Moreover, he never hesitated to announce that when "they
didn't like the way he ran his engine they could get somebody else to
run it."

Baggs's great failing was that, while he often ran his train too fast,
he wasted so much time at stations that he w