, not a
key, not a knife, not a button which could be identified as his. Like
the smoke which swallowed him up, he had disappeared completely and
forever.

* * * * *

Is he alive? I cannot tell.

But this I know.

Years afterwards Sidney Blair, head of our engineering department, was
running a line, looking then, as we are looking yet, for a coast outlet.

He took only a flying camp with him, travelling in the lightest kind of
order, camping often with the cattlemen he ran across.

One night, away down in the Panhandle, they fell in with an outfit
driving a bunch of steers up the Yellow Grass trail. Blair noted that
the foreman was a character. A man of few words, but of great muscular
strength; and, moreover, frightfully scarred.

He was silent and inclined to be morose at first, but after he learned
Blair was from McCloud he unbent a bit, and after a time began asking
questions which indicated a surprising familiarity with the northern
country and with our road. In particular, this man asked what had become
of Bucks, and, when told what a big railroad man he had grown, asserted,
with a sudden bitterness and without in any way leading up to it, that
with Bucks on the West End there never would have been a strike.

Sitting at their camp-fire while their crews mingled, Blair noticed in
the flicker of the blaze how seamed the throat and breast of the
cattleman were; even his sinewy forearms were drawn out of shape. He
asked, too, whether Blair recollected the night the barracks burned; but
Blair at that time was east of the river, and so explained, though he
related to the cowboy incidents of the fire which he had heard, among
others the story of Fitzpatrick and Siclone Clark.

"And Fitzpatrick is alive and Siclone is dead," said Blair, in
conclusion. But the cowboy disputed him.

"You mean Clark is alive and Fitzpatrick is dead," said he.

"No," contended Sidney, "Fitzpatrick is running an engine up there now.
I saw him within three months." But the cowboy was loath to conviction.

Next morning their trails forked. The foreman seemed disinclined to part
from the surveyors, and while the bunch was starting he rode a long way
with Blair, talking in a random way. Then, suddenly wheeling, he waved a
good-bye with his heavy Stetson and, galloping hard, was soon lost to
the north in the ruts of the Yellow Grass.

When Blair came in he told Neighbor and me about it. Blair had never