ere had been any freight teams pass lately," he
explained. "But there hasn't--not for a day or two, anyway. Let's look
in the timber."

That was a long time ago, and since then I have seen much of life and
death in many countries, but I can recall as distinctly as if it were
yesterday the grim sight that met us when we rode in among the
whispering cottonwoods. We found Hank Rowan in a little open place,
where rifts of sunlight filtered through the tangled branches; one
yellow bar, full of quivering motes, rested on the wide-open eyes and
mouth, tinting the set features the ghastly color of a plaster cast. The
horse he had ridden lay dead across his legs, and just beyond, a
crumpled heap against the base of a tree, was the carcass of a mule,
half-hidden under a bulky pack. The thing that sickened me, that stirs
me even yet, was a circular, red patch that crowned his head where
should have been thick, iron-gray hair.

"The damned hounds!" MacRae muttered. "They tried to make it look like
an Indian job."

The pack-ropes had been cut and the pack searched. In the same manner
they had gone through his pockets and scattered a few papers and letters
on the ground. These we gathered carefully together, against the time of
meeting Lyn, and then--for time pressed, and a dead man, though he may
be your friend and his passing a sorrow, is out of the game forever--we
dragged him from beneath the dead horse, wrapped him in the canvas
pack-cover, and buried him in the soft leaf-mold where he lay, as we
had buried his lifetime partner early in the morning. When we had
finished, MacRae ordered his two troopers back to Pend d' Oreille, and we
mounted our horses and turned their heads toward Fort Walsh.

It is seventy miles in an air-line from Stony Crossing to the fort. That
night we laid out, sleeping without hardship in a dry buffalo-wallow,
and noon of the next day brought us to Walsh, a huddle of log buildings
clustering around a tall pole from which fluttered the union jack.

Off to one side of the fort a bunch of work-bulls fed peacefully. Down
in the creek bottom a tent or two flapped in the mid-day breeze, and in
their neighborhood uprose the smoke of half a dozen dinner fires. By the
post storeroom, waiting their turn to unload, was ranged a line of the
tarpaulin-covered wagons, wheeled galleons of the plains, that brought
food and raiment to the Northwest before the coming of steam and steel.

"That looks to me like Baker