r, 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 were at their gayest, with children's voices
clamoring everywhere like starlings, and Bong, the little elephant,
swinging good-naturedly up the broad white track with all the load he
had room for on his back, there came an ominous jar and rumble, like the
first of an earthquake, which ran along the front of Last Bull's range.

With sure instinct, Bong turned tail and fled with his young charges
away across the grassland. The crowds, hardly knowing what they fled
from, with screams and cries and blanched faces, followed the elephant's
example