"'When we shall have been on earth a while, we shall marry, and stay
until we each have four sons of our own, then we shall go away and
again become "thunders,"' they said.

"It all came to pass, just as they said it would. When they had
married good women and each had four sons, they told the people one day
that it was time for them to go away forever.

"There was much sorrow among the people, for the twins were good men
and taught many good things which we have never forgotten, but
everybody knew it had to be as they said. While they lived with us,
these twins could heal the sick and tell just what was going to happen
on earth.

"One day at noon the twins dressed themselves in their finest clothes
and went out to a park in the forest. All the people followed them and
saw them lie down on the ground in the park. The people stayed in the
timber that grew about the edge of the park, and watched them until
clouds and mists gathered about and hid them from view.

"It thundered loudly and the winds blew; trees fell down; and when the
mists and clouds cleared away, they were gone--gone forever. But the
people have never forgotten them, and my grandfather, who is in the
ground near Rocker, was a descendant from one of the sons of the
'thunders.' Ho!"

RETROSPECTION

It was evening in the bad-lands, and the red sun had slipped behind the
far-off hills. The sundown breeze bent the grasses in the coulees and
curled tiny dust-clouds on the barren knolls. Down in a gulch a clear,
cool creek dallied its way toward the Missouri, where its water, bitter
as gall, would be lost in the great stream. Here, where Nature forbids
man to work his will, and where the she wolf dens and kills to feed her
litter, an aged Indian stood near the scattered bones of two great
buffalo-bulls. Time had bleached the skulls and whitened the old
warrior's hair, but in the solitude he spoke to the bones as to a
boyhood friend:

"Ho! Buffalo, the years are long since you died, and your tribe, like
mine, was even then shrinking fast, but you did not know it; would not
believe it; though the signs did not lie. My father and his father
knew your people, and when one night you went away, we thought you did
but hide and would soon come back. The snows have come and gone many
times since then, and still your people stay away. The young-men say
that the great herds have gone to the Sand Hills, and that my father
still has meat. They have