n the warm and ample buffalo-shed. But this winter he made such
difficulty about going in that at last Payne decreed that he should
have his own way and stay out. "It will do him no harm, and may cool
his peppery blood some!" had been the keeper's decision. So the door
was left open, and Last Bull entered or refrained, according to his
whim. It was noticed, however,--and this struck a chord of answering
sympathy in the plainsman's imaginative temperament,--that, though on
ordinary nights he might come in and stay with the herd under shelter,
on nights of driving storm, if the tempest blew from the west or
northwest, Last Bull was sure to be out on the naked knoll to face it.
When the fine sleet or stinging rain drove past him, filling his
nostrils with their cold, drenching his matted mane, and lashing his
narrowed eyes, what visions swept through his troubled,
half-comprehending brain, no one may know. But Payne, with
understanding born of sympathy and a common native soil, catching
sight of his dark bulk under the dark of the low sky, was wont to
declare that _he_ knew. He would say that Last Bull's eyes discerned,
black under the hurricane, but lit strangely with the flash of keen
horns and rolling eyes and frothed nostrils, the endless and
innumerable droves of the buffalo, with the plains wolf skulking on
their flanks, passing, passing, southward into the final dark. In the
roar of the wind, declared Payne, Last Bull, out there in the night,
listened to the trampling of all those vanished droves. And though the
other keepers insisted to each other, quite privately, that their
chief talked a lot of nonsense about "that there mean-tempered old
buffalo," they nevertheless came gradually to look upon Last Bull with
a kind of awe, and to regard his surly whims as privileged.

It chanced that winter that men were driving a railway tunnel beneath
a corner of the Park. The tunnel ran for a short distance under the
front of Last Bull's range, and passed close by the picturesque
cottage occupied by Payne and two of his assistants. At this point the
level of the Park was low, and the shell of earth was thin above the
tunnel roof.

There came a Sunday afternoon, after days of rain and penetrating
January thaw, when sun and air combined to cheat the earth with an
illusion of spring. The buds and the mould breathed of April, and gay
crowds flocked to the Park, to make the most of winter's temporary
repulse. Just when things we