Class 
 Book. 
 
 
 u 
 
 GopyiightN°_ 
 
 
 COPyRIGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
Doubleday, Pajje and Co., New York. AD. i9oo 
 

 
 
 Copyright, 1900, by 
 
 Grace Gallatin Seton-Cnompaon 
 
 65644 
 
 ll_ibw y o* Cotipraae 
 }'' Vtu tOWt KtCtswtO 
 
 t OCT 24 1900 
 
 j Copyright entry 
 
 SECOND COPY. 
 
 Delivered to 
 
 GRGtrf DIVISION, 
 
 JAOV— 1 o 1900 - 
 
w 
 
 I 
 
 M 
 
 A 
 
 
In this Book the full-page Drawings 
 were made by Ernest Seton-Thomp- 
 son, G. Wright and E. M. Ashe, and the 
 Marginals by S. N. Abbott. The cover, 
 title-page and general make-up were de- 
 signed by the Author. Thanks are due 
 to Miller Christy for proof revision, and 
 to A. A. Anderson for valuable sugges- 
 tions on camp outfitting. 
 
XJ 
 
THIS BOOK IS A TRIBUTE TO 
 THE WEST. 
 
 I have used many Western phrase 
 
 necessary to the Western setting. 
 
 I can only add that the events related 
 really happened in the Rocky Moun- 
 tains of the United States and Canada : 
 and this is why, being a woman. I wanted 
 to tell about them, in the hope that some 
 going-to-Europe-in-the-summer-woman 
 may be tempted to go West instead. 
 
 G. G. S.-T. 
 New York City, S epte mber ist, 19c:. 
 
 1:-^ 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 F 
 
 8 
 
 I 
 
 The Why of It . 
 
 13 
 
 T 
 
 II 
 
 Outfit and Advice tor the 
 Woman-who-goes-hunting- 
 
 
 
 
 with-her-husband . 
 
 l 7 
 
 
 III 
 
 The First Plunge of the 
 
 
 
 
 Woman Tenderfoot . 
 
 59 
 
 
 IV 
 
 Which Treats of the Imps 
 
 
 
 
 and My Elk . 
 
 73 
 
 
 V 
 
 Lost in the Mountains 
 
 97 
 
 
 VI 
 
 The Cook 
 
 "3 
 
 
 VII 
 
 Among the Clouds 
 
 129 
 
 
 VIII 
 
 At Yeddars 
 
 143 
 
 
 IX 
 
 My Antelope 
 
 161 
 
 
A 
 
 
 
 
 N 
 D 
 E 
 R 
 
 p 
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 
 r 
 O 
 
 o 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 T 
 
 X 
 
 A Mountain Drama 
 
 *75 
 
 
 XI 
 
 What I Know about Wahb 
 
 
 
 
 of the Bighorn Basin 
 
 183 
 
 
 XII 
 
 The Dead Hunt 
 
 215 
 
 
 XIII 
 
 Just Rattlesnakes 
 
 2 45 
 
 
 XIV 
 
 As Cowgirl 
 
 265 
 
 
 XV 
 
 The Sweet Pea Lady . 
 Some one Else's Mountain 
 
 
 
 
 Sheep .... 
 
 291 
 
 
 XVI 
 
 In which the Tenderfoot 
 
 
 
 
 Learns a New Trick 
 
 3*3 
 
 I 
 
 XVII 
 
 Our Mine 
 
 335 
 
 
 XVII 
 
 i The Last Word . 
 
 355 
 
A LIST OF 
 FULL-PAGE DRAWINGS. 
 
 Costume for cross saddle riding . 25 
 
 Tears starting from your smoke-in- 
 flamed eyes .... 41 
 
 Saddle cover for wet weather 
 Policeman's equestrian rain coat 51 
 
 She was postmistress twice a week 77 
 
 The trail was lost in a gully . .104 
 
 Whetted one to a razor edge and 
 threw it into a tree where it stuck 
 quivering . . .121 
 
 Not three hundred yards away . . . 
 were two bull elk in deadly combat 139 
 
 
 6 
 
 R 
 
 F 
 
 PAGE § 
 T 
 
o 
 
 D A LIST OF 
 
 I FULL-PAGE DRAWINGS. 
 
 F 
 
 8 PAGE 
 
 Down the path came two of the 
 prettiest Blacktails . . -151 
 
 A misstep would have sent us fly- 
 ing over the cliff . . . 166 
 
 Thus I fought through the afternoon 197 
 
 We whizzed across the railroad 
 track in front of the Day Express 222 
 
 Five feet full in front of us, they 
 pulled their horses to a dead stop 239 
 
 The coyotes made savage music . 253 
 
 The horrid thing was ready for me 260 
 
A LIST OF 
 FULL-PAGE DRAWINGS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I started on a gallop, swinging one 
 arm ...... 281 
 
 The warm beating heart of a 
 mountain sheep . . . 304 
 
 I could not keep away from his hoofs 309 
 
 We started forward, just as the rear 
 wheels were hovering over the edge 327 
 
 " You better not sit down on that 
 kaig . . . It's nitroglycerine " . 345 
 
 The tunnel caused its roof to cave 
 in close behind me . . 349 
 
 A mountain lion sneaked past my 
 saddle-pillowed head . . . 359 
 
 top 
 
 I 
 
 E 
 R 
 F 
 
 8 
 
 T 
 
Q 
 
 B 
 
 M 
 
 A 
 
 i. 
 
 THE WHY OF IT. 
 23) 
 
I. 
 
 HEORETICALLY, I 
 
 have always agreed with 
 the Quaker wife who re- 
 formed her husband — 
 "Whither thou goest, 
 I go also, Dicky dear." 
 What thou doest, I do also, Dicky 
 dear." So when, the year after our 
 marriage, Nimrod announced that the 
 mountain madness was again working 
 in his blood, and that he must go West 
 and take up the trail for his holiday, I 
 tucked my summer-watering-place-and- 
 Europe-flying-trip mind away (not with- 
 
 c^^ 
 
out regret, I confess) and cautiously 
 tried to acquire a new vocabulary and 
 some new ideas. 
 
 Of course, plenty of women have 
 handled guns and have gone to the 
 Rocky Mountains on hunting trips — 
 but they were not among my friends. 
 However, my imagination was good, 
 and the outfit I got together for my 
 first trip appalled that good man, my 
 husband, while the number of things I 
 had to learn appalled me. 
 
 In fact, the first four months spent 
 'Out West' were taken up in learning 
 how to ride, how to dress for it, how to 
 shoot, and how to philosophise, each of 
 which lessons is a story in itself. But 
 briefly, in order to come to this story, 
 I must have a side talk with the 
 Woman-who-goes-hunting-with-her-hus- 
 band. Those not interested please omit 
 the next chapter. 
 
mi 
 
 ii. 
 
 OUTFIT AND ADVICE 
 
 FOR THE WOMAN-WHO- 
 
 GOES-HUNTING-WITH- 
 
 HER-HUSBAND. 
 
II. 
 
 i 
 
 S it really so that most 
 women say no to camp 
 life because they are 
 afraid of being uncom- 
 fortable and looking 
 unbeautiful? There is 
 no reason why a woman should make 
 a freak of herself even if she is going to 
 rough it ; as a matter of fact I do not 
 rough it, I go for enjoyment and leave 
 out all possible discomforts. There is 
 no reason why a woman should be more 
 uncomfortable out in the mountains, 
 with the wild west wind for companion 
 
 ,/>•• 
 
and the big blue sky for a roof, than sit- 
 ting in a 10 by 12 whitewashed bedroom 
 of the summer hotel variety, with the 
 tin roof to keep out what air might be 
 passing. A possible mosquito or gnat 
 in the mountains is no more irritating 
 than the objectionable personality that 
 is sure to be forced upon you every 
 hour at the summer hotel. The usual 
 walk, the usual drive, the usual hop, 
 the usual novel, the usual scandal, — 
 in a word, the continual consciousness 
 of self as related to dress, to manners, 
 to position, which the gregarious living 
 of a hotel enforces — are all right enough 
 once in a while; but do you not get 
 enough of such life in the winter to last 
 for all the year ? 
 
 Is one never to forget that it is not 
 proper to wear gold beads with crape ? 
 Understand, I am not to be set down 
 
as having any charity for the ignoramus 
 who would wear that combination, but 
 I wish to record the fact that there are 
 times, under the spell of the West, when 
 I simply do not care whether there are 
 such things as gold beads and crape ; 
 when the whole business of city life, the 
 music, arts, drama, the pleasant friends, 
 equally with the platitudes of things and 
 people you care not about — civiliza- 
 tion, in a word — when all these fade 
 away from my thoughts as far as geo- 
 graphically they are, and in their place 
 comes the joy of being at least a healthy, 
 if not an intelligent, animal. It is a plea- 
 sure to eat when the time comes around, 
 a good old-fashioned pleasure, and you 
 need no dainty serving to tempt you. It 
 is another pleasure to use your muscles, 
 to buffet with the elements, to endure 
 long hours of riding, to run where walk- 
 
ing would do, to jump an obstacle in- ^ 
 stead of going around it, to return, m ft 
 physically at least, .to your pinafore days n 
 when you played with your brother J 
 Willie. Red blood means a rose-colored Q 
 world. Did you feel like that last sum- j? 
 mer at Newport or Narragansett ? <j> 
 
 So enough ; come with me and learn 
 how to be vulgarly robust. 
 
 Of course one must have clothes and 
 personal comforts, so, while we are still 
 in the city humor, let us order a habit 
 suitable for riding astride. Whipcord, 
 or a closely woven homespun, in some 
 shade of grayish brown that harmonizes 
 with the landscape, is best. Corduroy 
 is pretty, if you like it, but rather clumsy. 
 Denham will do, but it wrinkles and 
 becomes untidy. Indeed it has been 
 my experience that it is economy to 
 buy the best quality of cloth you can 
 
afford, for then the garment always 
 keeps its shape, even after hard wear, 
 and can be cleaned and made ready 
 for another year, and another, and an- 
 other. You will need it, never fear. 
 Once you have opened your ears, " the 
 Red Gods " will not cease to " call for 
 you." 
 
 In Western life you are on and off 
 your horse at the change of a thought. 
 Your horse is not an animate exercise- 
 maker that John brings around for a 
 couple of hours each morning; he is 
 your companion, and shares the vicissi- 
 tudes of your life. You even consult 
 him on occasion, especially on matters 
 relating to the road. Therefore your 
 costume must look equally well on and 
 off the horse. In meeting this require- 
 ment, my woes were many. I struggled 
 valiantly with everything in the market, 
 
and finally, from five varieties of di- 
 vided skirts and bloomers, the follow- 
 ing practical and becoming habit was 
 evolved. 
 
 I speak thus modestly, as there is now 
 a trail of patterns of this habit from the 
 Atlantic to the Pacific coast. Wher- 
 ever it goes, it makes converts, especial- 
 ly among the wives of army officers at 
 the various Western posts where we 
 have been — for the majority of women 
 in the West, and I nearly said all the 
 sensible ones, now ride astride. 
 
 When off the horse, there is nothing 
 about this habit to distinguish it from 
 any trim golf suit, with the stitching 
 up the left front which is now so popu- 
 lar. When on the horse, it looks, as 
 some one phrased it, as though one were 
 riding side saddle on both sides. This 
 is accomplished by having the fronts of 
 
COSTUME FOR CKOSS SADDLE RIDING. 
 Designed by the Author. 
 
A 
 
 the skirt double, free nearly to the waist, 
 and, when off the horse, fastened by pat- 
 ent hooks. The back seam is also open, 
 faced for several inches, stitched and 
 closed by patent fasteners. Snug 
 bloomers of the same material are worn 
 underneath. The simplicity of this 
 habit is its chief charm ; there is no 
 superfluous material to sit upon — oh, 
 the torture of wrinkled cloth in the 
 divided skirt! — and it does not fly up 
 even in a strong wind, if one knows 
 how to ride. The skirt is four inches 
 from the ground — it should not bell 
 much on the sides — and about three and 
 a half yards at the bottom, which is 
 finished with a five-inch stitched hem. 
 
 Any style of jacket is of course suita- 
 ble. One that looks well on the horse 
 is tight fitting, with postilion back, short 
 on hips, sharp pointed in front, with 
 
single-breasted vest of reddish leather 
 (the habit material of brown whipcord), 
 fastened by brass buttons, leather collar 
 and revers, and a narrow leather band on 
 the close-fitting sleeves. A touch of 
 leather on the skirt in the form of a 
 patch pocket is harmonious, but any 
 extensive leather trimming on the skirt 
 makes it unnecessarily heavy. 
 
 A suit of this kind should be as irre- 
 proachable in fit and finish as a tailor 
 can make it. This is true economy, for 
 when you return in the autumn it is 
 ready for use as a rainy-day costume. 
 
 Once you have your habit, the next 
 purchase should be stout, heavy soled 
 boots, 13 or 14 inches high, which 
 will protect the leg in walking and 
 from the stirrup leather while riding. 
 One needs two felt hats (never straw), 
 one of good quality for sun or rain, 
 
with large firm brim. This is impor- 
 tant, for if the brim be not firm the 
 elements will soon reduce it to raglike 
 limpness and it will flap up and down 
 in your face as you ride. This can be 
 borne with composure for five or ten 
 minutes, but not for days and weeks at 
 a time. The other felt hat may be as 
 small and as cheap as you like. Only 
 see that it combines the graces of com- 
 fort and becomingness. It is for even- 
 ings, and sunless rainless days. A small 
 brown felt, with a narrow leather band, 
 gilt buckle, and a twist of orange veil- 
 ing around the crown, is pretty for the 
 whipcord costume. 
 
 One can do a wonderful amount of 
 smartening up with tulle, hat pins, belts, 
 and fancy neck ribbons, all of which 
 comparatively take up no room and add 
 no weight, always the first consideration. 
 
Be sure you supply yourself with a re- 
 serve of hat pins. Two devices by 
 which they may be made to stay in the 
 hat are here shown. The spiral can be 
 given to any hat pin. The chain and 
 small brooch should be used if the hat 
 pin is of much value. 
 
 At this point, if any man, a reviewer 
 perhaps, has delved thus far into the 
 mysteries of feminine outfit, he will 
 probably remark, " Why take a hat pin 
 of much value?" to which I reply, 
 " Why not ? Can you suggest any 
 more harmless or useful vent for woman's 
 desire to ornament herself? And un- 
 less you want her to be that horror of 
 horrors, a strong-minded woman, do you 
 think you can strip her for three months 
 of all her gewgaws and still have her 
 filled with the proper desire to be pleas- 
 ing in your eyes ? No ; better let her 
 
 M J 
 A/ 
 N 
 
 fi 
 
have the hat pins — and you know they 
 really are useful — and then she will dress 
 up to those hat pins, if it is only with a 
 fresh neck ribbon and a daisy at her belt." 
 I had a man's saddle, with a narrow 
 tree and high pommel and cantle, such 
 as is used out West, and as I had not 
 ridden a horse since the hazy days of my 
 infancy, I got on the huge creature's back 
 with everything to learn. Fear envel- 
 oped me as in a cloud during my first 
 ride, and the possibilities of the little 
 cow pony they put me on seemed more 
 awe-inspiring than those of a locomo- 
 tive. But I had been reading Professor 
 William James and acquired from him 
 the idea (I hope I do not malign him) 
 that the accomplishment of a thing de- 
 pends largely upon one's mental attitude, 
 and this was mine all nicely taken — in 
 New York : — 
 
"This thing has been done before, and 
 done well. Good; then I can do it, and 
 in joy it too." 
 
 I particularly insisted upon the latter 
 clause — in the East. This formula is 
 applicable in any situation. I never 
 should have gotten through my West- 
 ern experiences without it, and I ad- 
 vise you, my dear Woman-who-goes- 
 hunting-with-her-husband, to take a 
 large stock of it made up and ready for 
 use. There is one other rule for your 
 conduct, if you want to be a success: 
 think what you like, but unless it is 
 pleasant, don't say it. 
 
 Is it better to ride astride % I will 
 not carry the battle ground into the 
 East, although even here I have my 
 opinion; but in the West, in the moun- 
 tains, there can be no question that it is 
 the only "way. Here is an example to 
 
33 
 
 ' w illustrate : Two New York women, 
 m mother and daughter, took a trip ol 
 N x some three hundred miles over the 
 |» pathless Wind River Mountains. The 
 ^ mother rode astride, but the daughter 
 f preferred to exhibit her Durland Acad- 
 ; o emy accomplishment, and rode side- 
 saddle, according to the fashion set by 
 an artful queen to hide her deformity. 
 The advantages of health, youth and 
 strength were all with the daughter; 
 yet in every case on that long march it 
 was the daughter who gave out first 
 and compelled the pack train to halt 
 while she and her horse rested. And 
 the daughter was obliged to change 
 from one horse to another, while the 
 same horse was able to carry the mother, 
 a slightly heavier woman, through the 
 trip. And the back of the horse which 
 the daughter had ridden chiefly was in 
 
such a condition from saddle galls that 
 the animal, two months before a mag- 
 nificent creature, had to be shot. 
 
 I hear you say, "But that was an 
 extreme case." Perhaps it was, but it 
 supports the verdict of the old moun- 
 taineers who refuse to let any horse they 
 prize be saddled with "those gol-darned 
 woman fripperies." 
 
 There is also another side. A woman 
 at best is physically handicapped when 
 roughing it with husband or brother. 
 Then why increase that handicap by 
 wearing trailing skirts that catch on 
 every log and bramble, and which de- 
 mand the services of at least one hand to 
 hold up (fortunately this battle is already 
 won), and by choosing to ride side-sad- 
 dle, thus making it twice as difficult 
 to mount and dismount by yourself, 
 which in fact compels you to seek the 
 
 u. 
 
assistance of a log, or stone, or a friendly 
 hand for a lift? Western riding is not 
 Central Park riding, nor is it Rotten 
 Row riding. The cowboy's, or military, 
 seat is much simpler and easier for both 
 man and beast than the Park seat — 
 though, of course, less stylish. That is 
 the glory of it; you can go galloping 
 over the prairie and uplands with never a 
 thought that the trot is more proper, and 
 your course, untrammelled by fenced-in 
 roads, is straight to the setting sun or 
 to yonder butte. And if you want a 
 spice of danger, it is there, sometimes 
 more than you want, in the presence oi 
 badger and gopher holes, to step into 
 which while at high speed may mean 
 a broken leg for your horse, perhaps a 
 broken neck for yourself. But to return 
 to the independence of riding astride : 
 One day I was following a game trail 
 
along a very steep bank which ended 
 a hundred feet below in a granite 
 precipice. It had been raining and 
 snowing in a fitful fashion, and the clay 
 ground was slippery, making a most 
 treacherous footing. One of the pack 
 animals just ahead of my horse slipped, 
 fell to his knees, the heavy pack over- 
 balanced him, and away he rolled over 
 and over down the slope, to be stopped 
 from the precipice only by the happy 
 accident of a scrub tree in the way. 
 Frightened by this sight, my animal 
 plunged, and he, too, lost his footing. 
 Had I been riding side-saddle, nothing 
 could have saved me, for the down- 
 hill was on the near side; but instead 
 I swung out of the saddle on the off 
 side and landed in a heap on the up- 
 hill, still clutching the bridle. That 
 act saved my horse's life, probably, 
 
as well as my own. For the sudden 
 weight I put on the upper side as I swung 
 off enabled him to recover his balance 
 just in time. I do not pretend to say 
 that I can dismount from the off side 
 as easily as from the near, because I am 
 not accustomed to it. But I have fre- 
 quently done it in emergencies, while a 
 side-saddle leaves one helpless in this 
 case as in many others. 
 
 Besides being unable to mount and 
 dismount without assistance it is very 
 difficult to get side-saddle broken horses, 
 and it usually means a horse so broken 
 in health and spirits that he does not 
 care what is being strapped on his back 
 and dangling on one side of him only. 
 And to be on such an animal means 
 that you are on the worst mount of the 
 outfit, and I am sure that it requires 
 little imagination on any one's part to 
 
know therein lies misery. Oh ! the 
 weariness of being the weakest of the 
 party and the worst mounted — to be 
 always at the tail end of the line, never 
 to be able to keep up with the saddle 
 horses when they start off for a canter, 
 to expend your stock of vitality, which 
 you should husband for larger matters, 
 in urging your beast by voice and quirt 
 to further exertion ! Never place your- 
 self in such a position. The former 
 you cannot help, but you can lessen it 
 by making use of such aids to greater 
 independence as wearing short skirts 
 and riding astride, and having at least 
 as good a horse as there is in the out- 
 fit. Then you will get the pleasure 
 from your outing that you have the 
 right to expect — that is, if you adhere 
 to one other bit of advice, or rather 
 two. 
 
 8/ 
 
 N 
 
 M 
 
 
 ; ; 
 
h 
 
 The first is : See that for your camp- 
 ing trip is provided a man cook. 
 
 I wish that I could put a charm over 
 the next few words so that only the 
 woman reader could understand, but 
 as I cannot I must repeat boldly : 
 Dear woman who goes hunting with 
 her husband, be sure that you have it 
 understood that you do no cooking, or 
 dishwashing. I think that the reason 
 women so often dislike camping out is 
 because the only really disagreeable part 
 of it is left to them as a matter of course. 
 Cooking out of doors at best is trying, 
 and certainly you cannot be care free, 
 camp-life's greatest charm, when you 
 have on your mind the boiling of prunes 
 and beans, or when tears are starting 
 from your smoke-inflamed eyes as you 
 broil the elk steak for dinner. No, 
 indeed ! See that your guide or your 
 

 m 
 
 T 
 
 horse vi knows how to cook, 
 
 and expects to do it. He is used to 8 
 id, anyway, is paid tor it. Ho is N 
 earning his living, you arc taking a 3 
 ition. £ 
 
 Now tor the second advice, which is p 
 dicil to the above : In return tor 
 g to potter with the tood and 
 tinwa Eat 
 
 ever] : s set before you, shut 
 
 your eyes to possible dirt, or, it you 
 leave the particular horror in 
 ched, but without com- 
 ment. Perhaps in d on you may 
 assume the role or cook yourself Oh, 
 if you do, you only ex- 
 your woes for worse or.es. 
 It you provide yourself with the fol- 
 cles and insist upon having 
 • reserved for you, and then let the 
 cook furnish everything else, you will 
 ill right : — 
 
TEAKS STARTING FROM YOUR SMOKE-INFLAMED . 
 
43 
 
 An aluminum plate made double for hot 
 m water. This is a very little trouble to fill, 
 n and insures a comfortable meal ; other- 
 jn wise your meat and vegetables will be 
 d cold before you can eat them, and the 
 P gravy will have a thin coating of ice on 
 o it. It is always cold night and morning 
 in the mountains. And if you do not 
 need the plate heated you do not have 
 to fill it; that's all. I am sure my hot- 
 water plate often saved me from indi- 
 gestion and made my meals things to 
 enjoy instead of to endure. 
 
 Two cups and saucers of white enamel 
 ware. They always look clean and do 
 not break. 
 
 One silver-plated knife and fork and 
 two teaspoons. 
 
 One folding camp chair. 
 N. B. — Provide your husband or 
 brother or sister precisely the same ; no 
 more, no less. 
 
Japanese napkin 'S, enough to provide 
 two a day for the party. 
 
 Tzvo white enamel vegetable dishes. 
 
 One folding camp table. 
 
 One candle lamp, with enough candles. 
 
 Then leave all the rest of the cook- 
 ing outfit to your cook and trust in 
 Providence. (If you do not approve 
 of Providence, a full aluminum cooking 
 outfit can be bought so that one pot or 
 pan nests in the other, the whole very 
 complete, compact and light.) 
 
 Come what may, you have your own 
 particular clean hot plate, cup and 
 saucer, knife, fork, spoon and napkin, 
 with a table to eat from and a chair to 
 sit on and a lamp to see by, if you are 
 eating after dark — which often hap- 
 pens — and nothing else matters, but 
 food. 
 
 If you want to be canny you will 
 
have somewhere in your own pack a 
 modest supply of condensed soups and 
 vegetables, a box or two of meat 
 crackers, and three or four bottles of 
 bouillon, to be brought out on occa- 
 sions of famine. Anyway it is a com- 
 fort to know that you have provided 
 against the wolf. 
 
 So much for your part of the eating; 
 now for the sleeping. If you do not 
 sleep warm and comfortable at night, 
 the joys of camping are as dust in the 
 mouth. The most glorious morning 
 that Nature ever produced is a weari- 
 ness to the flesh of the owl-eyed. So 
 whatever else you leave behind, be sure 
 your sleeping arrangements are com- 
 fortable. The following is the result of 
 three years' experience : — 
 
 A piece of waterproof brown canvas,*] by 
 10 feet, bound with tape and supplied 
 
46 
 
 with two heavy leather straps nine feet 
 long, with strong buckles at one end and 
 fastened to the canvas by means of can- 
 vas loops, and one leather strap six feet 
 long that crosses the other two at right 
 angles. 
 
 One rubber air bed, 36 by 76 inches 
 (don't take a narrower size or you will 
 be uncomfortable), fitted with large size 
 double valve at each end. This bed is 
 six inches thick when blown full of air. 
 Be sure that sides are inserted, thus 
 making two seams to join together the 
 top and bottom six inches apart. If the 
 top and bottom are fastened directly to- 
 gether, your bed slopes down at the 
 sides, which is always disagreeable. 
 
 A sleeping bag, with the canvas cover 
 made the full 36 inches wide. This 
 cover should hold two blanket bags 
 of different weight, and if you are wise 
 
 V 
 
 N 
 
 f\ 
 
you will have made an eider-down bag 
 to fit inside all of these for very cold 
 weather. The eider bag costs about 
 j\ $16.00 or $18.00, but is worth it if you 
 p are going to camp out in tne moun- 
 tains after August. Do without one or 
 two summer hats, but get it, for it is 
 the keynote of camp comfort. 
 
 Then you want a lamb's wool night 
 wrapper, a neutral grey or brown in 
 color, a set of heavy night flannels, 
 some heavy woollen stockings and a 
 woollen tarn o' shanter large enough to 
 pull down over the ears. A hot-water 
 bag, also, takes up no room and is 
 heavenly on a freezing night when the 
 wind is howling through the trees and 
 snow threatens. N. B. — See that your 
 husband or brother has a similar outfit, 
 or he will borrow yours. 
 
 The sleeping bags should be sepa- 
 
v^ 
 
 rated and dried either by sun or fire 
 every other day. $ j 
 
 Always keep all your sleeping things n 
 together in your bed roll, and your hus- ^1 
 band's things together in his bed bun- p 
 die. It will save you many a sigh p 
 and weary hunt in the dark and cold. § 
 The tent and such things, you can afford 
 to leave to your guide or to luck. If 
 one wishes to provide a tent, brown 
 canvas is far preferable to white. It 
 does not make a glare of light, nor does 
 it stand out aggressively in the land- 
 scape. You have your little nightly 
 kingdom waiting for you and can sleep 
 cosily if nothing else is provided. 
 Whenever possible, get your bed blown 
 up and your sleeping bags in order on 
 top and your sleeping things together 
 where you can put your hands on them 
 during the daylight, or if that is impos- 
 
sible, make it the first thing you do 
 when you make camp, while the cook 
 is getting supper. Then, as you eat 
 supper and sit near the camp fire to 
 keep warm, you have the sweet con- 
 sciousness that over there in the black- 
 ness is a snug little nest all ready to 
 receive your tired self. And if some 
 morning you want to see what you have 
 escaped, just unscrew the air valve to 
 your bed before you rise, and when you 
 come down on the hard, bumpy ground, 
 in less time than it takes to tell, you 
 will agree with me that there is nothing 
 so rare as resting on air. Nimrod used 
 to play this trick on me occasionally 
 when it was time to get up — it is more 
 efficacious than any alarm clock — but 
 somehow he never seemed to enjoy it 
 when I did it to him. 
 
 For riding, it is better to carry your 
 
own saddle and bridle and to buy a 
 saddle horse upon leaving the railroad. 
 You can look to the guides for all the 
 rest, such as pack saddles, pack animals, 
 etc. 
 
 My saddle is a strong but light-weight 
 California model ; that is, with pommel 
 and cantle on a Whitman tree. It is 
 fitted with gun-carrying case ot the 
 same leather and saddle-bag on the skirt 
 of each side, and has a leather roll at 
 the back strapped on to carry an extra 
 jacket and a slicker. (A rain-coat is 
 most important. I use a small size of 
 the New York mounted policemen's 
 mackintosh, made by Goodyear. It 
 opens front and back and has a protect- 
 ing cape for the hands.) The saddle 
 has also small pommel bags in which 
 are matches, compass, leather thongs, 
 knife and a whistle (this last in case I 
 
51 
 
 V 
 O 
 M 
 
 N 
 D 
 E 
 R 
 F 
 O 
 O 
 T 
 
 I. SADDLE COVER FOR WET WEATHER. 
 
 Designed by A. A. Anderson. 
 
 II. POLICEMAN'S equestrian rain coat. 
 
get lost), and there are rings and strings 
 in which other bundles such as lunch 
 can be attached while on the march. A 
 horsehair army saddle blanket saves the 
 animal's back. Nimrod's saddle is ex- 
 actly like mine, only with longer and 
 larger stirrups. 
 
 You have now your personal things 
 for eating, sleeping and riding. It 
 remains but to clothe yourself and you 
 are ready to start. Provide yourselr 
 with two or three champagne baskets 
 covered with brown waterproof can- 
 vas, with stout handles at each end 
 and two leather straps going round the 
 basket to buckle the lid down, and 
 a stronger strap going lengthwise over 
 all. Or if you do not mind a little 
 more expense, telescopes made of leath- 
 eroid, about 22 inches long, 1 1 inches 
 wide and 9 inches deep, with the lower 
 
corners rounded so they will not stick 
 into the horse, and fitted with straps 
 and handles, make the ideal travelling 
 case ; for they can be shipped from 
 place to place on the railroad and can 
 be packed, one on each side of a horse. 
 They are much to be preferred to the 
 usual Klondike bag for convenience in 
 packing and unpacking one's things 
 and in protecting them. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to say that 
 clothes have to be kept down to the 
 limit of comfort. Into the telescopes or 
 baskets should go warm flannels, extra 
 pair of heavy boots, several flannel shirt 
 waists, extra riding habit and bloomers, 
 fancy neck ribbons and a belt or two — 
 for why look worse than your best at 
 any time? — a long warm cloak and a 
 chamois jacket for cold weather, snow 
 overshoes, warm gloves and mittens too, 
 
 § 
 T 
 
o 
 
 M 
 
 M 
 
 A 
 
 E ' 
 
 N 
 
 D 
 
 E 
 
 R 
 
 F 
 
 O 
 
 o 
 
 T 
 
 and some woollen stockings. Be sure 
 you take flannels. This is the advice 
 of one who never wears them at any 
 other time. A veil or two is very use- 
 ful, as the wind is often high and biting, 
 and I was much annoyed with wisps ol 
 hair around my eyes, and also with my 
 hair coming down while on horseback, 
 until I hit upon the device of tying a 
 brown liberty silk veil over the hair and 
 partially over the ears before putting 
 on a sombrero. This veil was not at 
 all unbecoming, being the same color as 
 my hair, and it served the double pur- 
 pose of keeping unruly locks in order 
 and keeping my ears warm. A hair net 
 is also useful. 
 
 Then you must not forget a rubber 
 bath tub, a rubber wash basin, sponge, 
 towels, soap, and toilet articles generally, 
 including camphor ice for chapped lips 
 
and pennyroyal vaseline salve for insect 
 bites. A brown linen case is invalu- 
 able to hold all these toilet necessa- 
 ries, so that you can find them quickly. 
 A sewing kit should be supplied, a flask 
 of whiskey, and a small "first-aid" out- 
 fit; a bottle of Perry Davis pain killer 
 or Pond's extract; but no more bottles 
 than must be, as they are almost sure 
 to be broken. In your husband's box, 
 ammunition takes the place of toilet 
 articles. I shall pass over the guns with 
 the bare mention that I use a 30.30 
 Winchester, smokeless. 
 
 For railroad purposes all this outfit 
 for two goes into two trunks and a box 
 — one trunk for all the bedding and 
 night things: the other for all the cloth- 
 ing, guns, ammunition, eating things, 
 and incidentals. The box holds the 
 saddles, bridles, and horse things. 
 
 F 
 
 § 
 
 T 
 
In a pack train, the bed-rolls, weigh- 
 ing about fifty pounds each, go on either 
 side of one horse, and the telescopes on 
 each side of another horse — in both 
 cases not a full load, and leaving room 
 on the top of the pack for a tent and 
 other camp things. The saddles, oi 
 course, go on the saddle horses. The 
 cost of such an outfit, in New York, 
 is about two hundred dollars each ; but 
 it lasts for years and brings you in large 
 returns in health and consequent hap- 
 piness. 
 
 I am willing to wager my horsehair 
 rope (specially designed for keeping off 
 snakes) that a summer in the Rockies 
 would enable you to cheat time of at 
 least two years, and you would come 
 home and join me in the ranks of con- 
 verts from the usual summer sort of 
 thing. Will you try it? If you do, 
 
how you will pity your unfortunate 
 friends who have never known what it 
 is to sleep on the south side of a sage 
 brush, and honestly say in the morning, 
 " It is wonderful how well I am feeling." 
 But to begin : — 
 
 J i V 1 1 
 
III. 
 
 THE FIRST PLUNGE 
 
 OF THE 
 
 WOMAN TENDERFOOT. 
 
III. 
 
 
 T was about midnight 
 in the end of August 
 when Nimrod and I 
 tumbled off the train 
 at Market Lake, Idaho. 
 Next morning, after a 
 comfortable night's rest at the "hotel," 
 our rubber beds, sleeping bags, saddles, 
 guns, clothing, and ourselves were 
 packed into a covered wagon, drawn 
 by four horses, and we started for 
 Jackson's Hole in charge of a driver 
 who knew the road perfectly. At least, 
 that was what he said, so of course he 
 
must have known it. But his memory 
 failed him sadly the first day out, which 
 reduced him to the necessity of inquir- 
 ing of the neighbours. As these were 
 unsociably placed from thirty to fifty p 
 miles apart, there were many times p 
 when the little blind god of chance 8 
 ruled our course. 
 
 We put up for the night at Rex- 
 burgh, after forty long miles of alkali 
 dust. The Mormon religion has sent a 
 thin arm up into that country, and the 
 keeper of the log building he called a 
 hotel was of that faith. The history 
 of our brief stay there belongs properly 
 to the old torture days of the Inqui- 
 sition, for the Mormon's possessions of 
 living creatures were many, and his 
 wives and children were the least of 
 them. 
 
 Another day of dust and long hard 
 
miles over gradually rising hills, with 
 the huge mass of the Tetons looming 
 ever nearer, and the next day we 
 climbed the Teton Pass. 
 
 There is nothing extraordinary about 
 climbing the Teton Pass — to tell about. 
 We just went up, and then we went 
 down. It took six horses half a day to 
 draw us up the last mile — some twenty 
 thousand seconds of conviction on my 
 part (unexpressed, of course; see side 
 talk) that the next second would find 
 us dashed to everlasting splinters. And 
 it took ten minutes to get us down ! 
 
 Of the two, I preferred going up. If 
 you have ever climbed a greased pole 
 during Fourth of July festivities in your 
 grandmother's village, you will under- 
 stand. 
 
 When we got to the bottom there 
 was something different. Our driver 
 
 
 \ 
 
 P<^^y^ 
 
informed us that in two hours we should 
 be eating dinner at the ranch house 
 
 in Jackson's Hole, where we expected ti'' 
 
 to stop for a while to recuperate from 'J 
 
 the past year's hard grind and the past p 
 
 two weeks of travel. This was good ^ 
 
 news, as it was then five o'clock and o 
 . T 
 
 our midday meal had been light — de- 
 spite the abundance of coffee, soggy 
 potatoes, salt pork, wafer slices of meat 
 swimming in grease, and evaporated 
 apricots wherein some nice red ants 
 were banqueting. 
 
 " We'll just cross the Snake River, 
 and then it'll be plain sailing," he said. 
 Perhaps it was so. I was inexperi- 
 enced in the West. This was what fol- 
 lowed : — 
 
 Closing the door on the memory of 
 my recent perilous passage, I prepared 
 to be calm inwardly, as I like to think 
 
I was outwardly. The Snake River 
 is so named because for every mile it 
 goes ahead it retreats half way along- 
 side to see how well it has been done. 
 I mention this as a pleasing instance 
 of a name that really describes the 
 thing named. But this is after knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 About half past five, we came to a 
 rolling tumbling yellow stream where 
 the road stopped abruptly with a horrid 
 drop into water that covered the hubs 
 of the wheels. The current was strong, 
 and the horses had to struggle hard 
 to gain the opposite bank. I began to 
 thank my patron saint that the Snake 
 River was crossed. 
 
 Crossed ? Oh, no ! A narrow strip 
 of pebbly road, and the high willows 
 suddenly parted to disclose another 
 stream like the last, but a little deeper, 
 
 Hll!'':': ,! 
 
 ^._ 
 
 Willi"""" 
 
a little wider, a little worse. We crossed 
 it. I made no comments. 
 
 At the third stream the horses re- 
 belled. There are many things four 
 horses can do on the edge of a wicked 
 looking river to make it uncomfortable, 
 but at last they had to go in, plunging 
 madly, and dragging the wagon into 
 the stream nearly broadside, which 
 made at least one in the party consider 
 the frailty of human contrivances when 
 matched against a raging flood. 
 
 Soon there was another stream. I 
 shall not describe it. When we eventu- 
 ally got through it, the driver stopped 
 his horses to rest, wiped his brow, went 
 around the wagon and pulled a few 
 ropes tighter, cut a willow stick and 
 mended his broken whip, gave a hitch 
 to his trousers, and remarked as he 
 started the horses : 
 
 " Now, when we get through the 
 
Snake River on here a piece, we'll be 
 all right." 
 
 " I thought we had been crossing it 
 for the past hour," I was feminine 
 enough to gasp. 
 
 "Oh, yes, them's forks of it; but the 
 main stream's on ahead, and it's mighty 
 treacherous, too," was the calm reply. 
 
 When we reached the Snake River, 
 there was no doubt that the others were 
 mere forks. Fortunately, Joe Miller 
 and his two sons live on the opposite 
 bank, and make a living by helping 
 people escape destruction from the 
 mighty waters. Two men waved us 
 back from the place where our driver 
 was lashing his horses into the rushing 
 current, and guided us down stream 
 some distance. One of them said : 
 
 " This yere ford changes every week, 
 but I reckon you might try here." 
 
 We did. 
 
Had my hair been of the dramatic 
 kind that realises situations, it would 
 have turned white in the next ten min- 
 utes. The water was over the horses' 
 backs immediately, the wagon box was 
 afloat, and we were being borne rapidly 
 down stream in the boiling seething 
 flood, when the wheels struck a shingly 
 bar which gave the horses a chance to halt 
 swim, half plunge. The two men, who 
 were on horseback, each seized one of 
 the leaders, and kept his head pointed 
 for a cut in the bank, the only place 
 where we could get out. 
 
 Everything in the wagon was afloat. 
 A leather case with a forty dollar fish- 
 ing rod stowed snugly inside slipped 
 quietly off down stream. I rescued my 
 camera from the same fate just in time. 
 Overshoes, wraps, field glasses, guns, 
 were suddenly endowed with motion. 
 
Another moment and we should surely 
 have sunk, when the horses, by a su- 
 preme effort, managed to scramble on 
 to the bank, but were too exhausted to 
 draw more than half of the wagon 
 after them, so that it was practically on 
 end in the water, our outfit submerged, 
 of course, and ourselves reclining as 
 gracefully as possible on the backs of 
 the seats. 
 
 Had anything given away then, there 
 might have been a tragedy. The two 
 men immediately fastened a rope to the 
 tongue of the wagon, and each winding 
 an end around the pommel of his sad- 
 dle, set his cow pony pulling. Our 
 horses made another effort, and up we 
 came out of the water, wet, storm tossed, 
 but calm. Oh, yes — calm ! 
 
 After that, earth had no terrors for 
 me ; the worst road that we could bump 
 
over was but an incident. I was not 
 surprised that it grew dark very soon, 
 and that we blundered on and on for 
 hours in the night until the near wheeler 
 just lay down in the dirt, a dark spot 
 in the dark road, and our driver, after 
 coming back from a tour of inspection 
 on foot, looked worried. I mildly asked 
 if we would soon cross Snake River, 
 but his reply was an admission that he 
 was lost. There was nothing visible 
 but the twinkling stars and a dim out- 
 line of the grim Tetons. The prospect 
 was excellent for passing the rest of the 
 night where we were, famished, freez- 
 ing, and so tired I could hardly speak. 
 But Nimrod now took command. 
 His first duty, of course, being a man, 
 was to express his opinion of the driver 
 in terms plain and comprehensive; then 
 he loaded his rifle and fired a shot. If 
 
there were any mountaineers around, 
 they would understand the signal and 
 answer. 
 
 We waited. All was silent as before 
 Two more horses dropped to the ground. 
 Then he sent another loud report into 
 the darkness. In a few moments we 
 thought we heard a distant shout, then 
 the report of a gun not far away. 
 
 Nimrod mounted the only standing 
 horse and went in the direction of the 
 sound. Then followed an interminable 
 silence. I hallooed, but got no answer. 
 The wildest fears for Nimrod's safety 
 tormented me. He had fallen into a 
 gully, the horse had thrown him, he was 
 lost. 
 
 Then I heard a noise and listened 
 eagerly. The driver said it was a coy- 
 ote howling up on the mountain. At 
 last voices did come to me from out of 
 
the blackness, and Nimrod returned 
 with a man and a fresh horse. The man 
 was no other than the owner of the 
 house for which we were searching, and 
 in ten minutes I was drying myself by 
 his fireplace, while his hastily aroused 
 wife was preparing a midnight supper 
 for us. 
 
 To this day, I am sure that driver's 
 worst nightmare is when he lives over 
 again the time when he took a tender- 
 foot and his wife into Jackson's Hole, 
 and, but for the tenderfoot, would have 
 made them stay out overnight, wet, 
 famished, frozen, within a stone's throw 
 of the very house for which they were 
 looking. 
 

 ?\ 
 
 IV. 
 
 WHICH TREATS OF THE 
 IMPS AND MY ELK. 
 
IV. 
 
 F you want to see elk, 
 you just follow up the 
 road till you strike a 
 trail on the left, up over 
 that hog's back, and 
 that will bring you in 
 a mile or so on to a grassy flat, and in 
 two or three miles more you come to a 
 lake back in the mountains." 
 
 Mrs. Cummings, the speaker, was no 
 ordinary woman of Western make. She 
 had been imported from the East by 
 her husband three years before. She 
 had been 'forelady in a corset factory,' 
 
when matrimony had enticed her away, 
 and the thought that walked beside her 
 as she baked, and washed, and fed the 
 calves, was that some day she would go 
 'back East.' And this in spite of the 
 fact that for those parts she was very 
 comfortable. 
 
 Her log house was the largest in the 
 country, barring Captain Jones's, her 
 nearest neighbour, ten miles up at Jack- 
 son's Lake, and his was a hotel. Hers 
 could boast of six rooms and two 
 clothes' closets. The ceilings were 
 white muslin to shut off the rafters, the 
 sitting room had wall-paper and a rag 
 carpet, and in one corner was the post- 
 office. 
 
 The United States Government Post- 
 office of Deer, Wyoming, took up two 
 compartments of Mrs. Cummings' writ- 
 ing desk, and she was called upon to be 
 
 F 
 
 Q 
 
 o 
 
 T 
 

 SHE WAS POSTMISTRESS TWICE A WEEK. 
 
postmistress fifteen minutes twice a 
 week, when the small boy, mounted on 
 a tough little pony, happened around 
 with the leather bag which carried the 
 mail to and from Jackson, thirty miles 
 below. 
 
 " I'd like some elk meat mighty well 
 for dinner," Mrs. Cummings continued, 
 as she leaned against the kitchen door 
 and watched us mount our newly ac- 
 quired horses, "but you won't find 
 game around here without a guide — 
 Easterners never do." 
 
 Nimrod and I started off in joyous 
 mood. The secret of it, the fascination 
 of the wild life, was revealed to me. At 
 last I understood why the birds sing. 
 The glorious exhilaration of the moun- 
 tains, the feeling that life is a rosy dream, 
 and that all the worry and the fever and 
 the fret of man's making is a mere 
 
illusion that has faded away into the 
 past, and is not worth while ; that the 
 real life is to be free, to fly over the 
 grassy mountain meadow with never 
 a limitation offence or house, with the 
 eternal peaks towering around you, ter- 
 rible in their grandeur and vastness, yet 
 inviting. 
 
 We struck the trail all right, we 
 thought, but it soon disappeared and 
 we had to govern our course by imagi- 
 nation, an uncertain guide at best. We 
 got into dreadful tangles of timber; the 
 country was all strange, and the trees 
 spread over the mountain for miles, so 
 that it was like trying to find the way 
 under a blanket ; but we kept on rid- 
 ing our horses over fallen logs and 
 squeezing them between trees, all the 
 time keeping a sharp watch over them, 
 for they were fresh and scary. 
 
Finally, after three hours' hard climb- 
 ing, we emerged from the forest on to 
 a great bare shoulder of the mountain, 
 from which the whole country around, 
 vast and beautiful, could be seen. We 
 took bearings and tried to locate that 
 lake, and we finally decided that a 
 wooded basin three miles away looked 
 likely to contain it. 
 
 In order to get to it, we had to cross 
 a wooded ravine, very steep and torn 
 out by a recent cloudburst. We rode 
 the horses down places that I shudder 
 in remembering, and I had great 
 trouble in keeping away from the front 
 feet of my horse as I led him, especially 
 when there were little gullies that had 
 to be jumped. 
 
 It was exciting enough, and hard 
 work, too, every nerve on a tingle and 
 one's heart thumping with the unwont- 
 
 (C 
 
 v. 
 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 ■ 
 
 ( 
 
 
 
 / 
 
 
 
 A 
 
 k 
 
 
 t" 
 
 
 ,-'"'A v 
 
 y^\ 
 
 /j\ 
 
 
 H. 
 
ed exercise at that altitude; but oh, the 
 glorious air, the joy of life and motion 
 that was quite unknown to my recep- 
 tion- and theatre-going self in the dim 
 far away East ! 
 
 We searched for that lake all day, 
 and at nightfall went home confident 
 that we could find it on the morrow. 
 
 Mrs. Cummings' smile clearly ex- 
 pressed ' I told you so,' and she re- 
 marked as she served supper : " When 
 my husband comes home next week, 
 he will take you where you can find 
 game." 
 
 The next morning we again took 
 some lunch in the saddle bag and start- 
 ed for that elusive spot we had chris- 
 tened Cummings' Lake. About three 
 o'clock we found it — a beautiful patch 
 of water in the heart of the forest, 
 nestling like a jewel, back in the moun- 
 tains. 
 
 F 
 
 8 
 
 T 
 
We picketed the horses at a safe dis- 
 tance, so that they could not be seen or 
 heard from the lake. At one end the 
 shore sloped gradually into the water, 
 and here Nimrod discovered many 
 tracks of elk, a few deer, and one set of 
 black bear. He said the lake was evi- 
 dently a favourite drinking place, that 
 a band of elk had been coming daily 
 to water, and that, according to their 
 habits, they ought to come again be- 
 fore dusk. 
 
 So we concealed ourselves on a little 
 bluff to the right and waited. The sun 
 had begun to cast long lines on the 
 earth, and the little circle of water was 
 already in shadow when Nimrod held 
 up his finger as a warning for silence. 
 We listened. We were so still that the 
 whole world seemed to be holding its 
 breath. 
 
 I heard a faint noise as of a snapping 
 
branch, then some light thuds along the 
 ground, and to the left of us out of the 
 dark forest, a dainty creature flitted 
 along the trail and playfully splashed 
 into the water. Six others of her sis- 
 ters followed her, with two little ones, 
 and they were all splashing about in 
 the water like so many sportive mer- 
 maids when their lordly master ap- 
 peared — a fine bull elk who seemed to 
 me, as he sedately approached the edge 
 of the lake, to be nothing but horns. 
 
 I shall never forget the picture of this 
 family at home — the quiet lake encir- 
 cled by forest and towered over by 
 mountains; the gentle graceful crea- 
 tures full of life playing about in the 
 water, now drinking, now splashing it 
 in cooling showers upon one another; 
 the solicitude of a mother that her 
 young one should come to no harm ; 
 
and then the head of them all proceed- 
 ing with dignity to bathe with his 
 harem. 
 
 Had I to do again what followed, I 
 hope I should act differently. Nimrod 
 was watching them with a rapt expres- 
 sion, quite forgetful of the rifle in his 
 hands, when I, who had never seen any- 
 thing killed, touched his arm and whis- 
 pered : " Shoot, shoot now, if you are 
 going to." 
 
 The report of the rifle rang out like 
 a cannon. The does fled away as if by 
 magic. The stag tried also to get to 
 shore, but the ball had inflicted a wound 
 which partially paralysed his hindquar- 
 ters. At the sight of the blood and the 
 big fellow's struggles to get away, the 
 horror of the thing swept over me. 
 
 "Oh, kill him, kill him!" I wailed. 
 " Don't let him suffer ! " 
 
But here the hunter in Nimrod an- 
 swered : " If I kill him now, I shall 
 never be able to get him. Wait until 
 he gets out of the water." 
 
 The next few seconds, with that 
 struggling thing in the water, seemed 
 an eternity of agony to me. Then an- 
 other loud bang caused the proud head 
 with its weight of antlers to sink to the 
 wet bank never to rise again. 
 
 Later, as I dried my tears, I asked 
 Nimrod : 
 
 " Where is the place to aim if you want 
 to kill an animal instantly, so that he will 
 not suffer, and never know whathit him?" 
 
 " The best place is the shoulder." He 
 showed me the spot on his elk. 
 
 "But wouldn't he suffer at all?" 
 
 " Well, of course, if you hit him in 
 the brain, he will never know; but that 
 is a very fine shot. Your target is only 
 
an inch or two, here between the eye 
 and the ear, and the head moves more 
 than the body. But," he said, " you 
 would not kill an elk after the way you 
 have wept over this one ? " 
 
 " If — if I were sure he would not 
 suffer, I might kill just one," I said, 
 conscious of my inconsistencies. My 
 woman's soul revolted, and yet I was 
 out West for all the experiences that 
 the life could give me, and I knew, if 
 the chance came just right, that one elk 
 would be sacrificed to that end. 
 
 The next day, much to Mrs. Cum- 
 mings' surprise, we had elk steak, the 
 most delicious of meat when properly 
 cooked. The next few days slipped by. 
 We were always in the open air, riding 
 about in those glorious mountains, and 
 it was the end of the week when a turn 
 of the wheel brought my day. 
 
 
First, it becomes necessary to confide 
 in you. Fear is a very wicked companion 
 who, since nursery days, had troubled me 
 very little; but when I arrived out West, 
 he was waiting for me, and, so that I need 
 never be without him, he divided him- 
 self into a band of little imps. 
 
 Each imp had a special duty, and 
 never left me until he had been crushed 
 in silent but terrible combat. There 
 was the imp who did not like to be 
 alone in the mountains, and the imp 
 who was sure he was going to be lost 
 in those wildernesses, and the imp who 
 quaked at the sight of a gun, and the 
 imp who danced a mad fierce dance 
 when on a horse. All these had been 
 conquered, or at least partially re- 
 duced to subjection, but the imp who 
 sat on the saddle pommel when there 
 was a ditch or stream to be jumped had 
 
 A 
 
hitherto obliged me to dismount and 
 get over the space on foot. 
 
 This morning, when we came to a 
 nasty boggy place, with several small 
 water cuts running through it, I obeyed 
 the imp with reluctance. Well, we got 
 over it — Blondey, the imp, and I — with 
 nothing worse than wet feet and shat- 
 tered nerves. 
 
 I attempted to mount, and had one 
 foot in the stirrup and one hand on the 
 pommel, when Blondey started. Like 
 the girl in the song, I could not get up, 
 I could not get down, and although I 
 had hold of the reins, I had no free 
 hand to pull them in tighter, and you 
 may be sure the imp did not help me. 
 Blondey, realising there was something 
 wrong, broke into a wild gallop across 
 country, but I clung on, expecting every 
 moment the saddle would turn, until I 
 
got my foot clear from the stirrup. 
 Then I let go just as Blondey was 
 gathering himself together for another 
 ditch. 
 
 I was stunned, but escaped any seri- 
 ous hurt. Nimrod was a great deal 
 more undone than I. He had not dared 
 to go fast for fear of making Blondey 
 go faster, and he now came rushing up, 
 with the fear of death upon his face 
 and the most terrible swears on his lips. 
 
 Although a good deal shaken, I be- 
 gan to laugh, the combination was so 
 incongruous. Nimrod rarely swears, 
 and was now quite unconscious what 
 his tongue was doing. Upon being as- 
 sured that all was well, he started after 
 Blondey and soon brought him back to 
 me; but while he was gone the imp and 
 I had a mortal combat. 
 
 I did up my hair, rearranged my 
 
habit, and, rejecting NimrocTs offer of 
 his quieter horse, remounted Blondey. 
 We all jumped the next ditch, but the 
 shock was too much for the imp in his 
 weakened condition; he tumbled off 
 the pommel, and I have never seen him 
 since. 
 
 Our course lay along the hills on the 
 east bank of Snake River that day. We 
 discovered another beautiful sapphire 
 lake in a setting of green hills. Several 
 ducks were gliding over its surface. 
 We watched them, in concealment of 
 course, and we saw a fish hawk capture 
 his dinner. Then we quietly continued 
 along the ridge of a high bluff until we 
 came to an outstretched point, where 
 beneath us lay the Snake Valley with 
 its fickle-minded river winding through. 
 
 The sun was just dropping behind 
 the great Tetons, massed in front of us 
 
across the valley. We sat on our horses 
 motionless, looking at the peaceful and 
 majestic scene, when out from the shad- 
 ows on the sandy flats far below us 
 came a dark shadow, and then leisurely 
 another and another. They were elk, 
 two bulls and a doe, grazing placidly in 
 a little meadow surrounded by trees. 
 
 We kept as still as statues. 
 
 Nimrod said. " There is your chance." 
 
 " Yes," I echoed, " here is my 
 chance." 
 
 We waited until they passed into the 
 trees again. Then we dismounted. 
 Nimrod handed me the rifle, saying: 
 
 " There are seven shots in it. I will 
 stay behind with the horses." 
 
 I took the gun without a word and 
 crept down the mountain side, keeping 
 under cover as much as possible. The 
 sunset quiet surrounded me ; the deadly 
 
 R 
 F 
 
 § 
 
 T 
 
quiet of but one idea — to creep upon 
 that elk and kill him — possessed me. 
 That gradual painful drawing nearer to 
 my prey seemed a lifetime. I was con- 
 scious of nothing to the right, or to the 
 left of me, only of what I was going to 
 do. There were pine woods and scrub 
 brush and more woods. Then, sud- 
 denly, I saw him standing by the river 
 about to drink. I crawled nearer until 
 I was within one hundred and fifty yards 
 of him, when at the snapping of a twig 
 he raised his head with its crown of 
 branching horn. He saw nothing, so 
 turned again to drink. 
 
 Now was the time. I crawled a few 
 feet nearer and raised the deadly weap- 
 on. The stag turned partly away from 
 me. In another moment he would be 
 gone. I sighted along the metal bar- 
 rel and a terrible bang went booming 
 
 .itrfSJiSsno 
 
through the dim secluded spot. The 
 elk raised his proud, antlered head and 
 looked in my direction. Another shot 
 tore through the air. Without another 
 move the animal dropped where he 
 stood. He lay as still as the stones be- 
 side him, and all was quiet again in the 
 twilight. 
 
 I sat on the ground where I was and 
 made no attempt to go near him. So 
 that was all. One instant a magnificent 
 breathing thing, the next — nothing. 
 
 Death had been so sudden. I had no 
 regret, I had no triumph — just a sort 
 of wonder at what I had done — a sur- 
 prise that the breath of lite could be 
 taken away so easily. 
 
 Meanwhile, Nimrod had become 
 alarmed at the long silence, and, tying 
 the horses, had followed me down the 
 mountain. He was nearly down when 
 
he heard the shots, and now came rush- 
 ing up. 
 
 " I have done it," I said in a dull 
 tone, pointing at the dark, quiet object 
 on the bank. 
 
 " You surely have." 
 
 Nimrod paced the distance — it was 
 one hundred and thirty-five yards — as 
 we went up to the elk. How beautiful 
 his coat was, glossy and shaded in 
 browns, and those great horns — eleven 
 points — that did not seem so big now 
 to my eyes. 
 
 Nimrod examined the carcass. 
 
 " You are an apt pupil," he said. 
 "You put a bullet through his heart 
 and another through his brain." 
 
 " Yes," I said ; " he never knew what 
 killed him." But I felt no glory in the 
 achievement. 
 
o 
 
 I 
 
 A 
 
 E ^ 
 
 N 
 
 D 
 
 E 
 
 R 
 
 F 
 
 O 
 
 O 
 
 T 
 
 V. 
 
 LOST IN THE MOUNTAINS. 
 
w 
 
 I w 
 
 G 
 
 M 
 
 >A 
 
 N 
 D 
 E 
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 F 
 i O 
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 m 
 
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 WL 
 
 ^* <*** 
 
 M 
 
 { 
 
 AVE you ever been lost 
 in the mountains'? — not 
 the peaceful, cultivated 
 child hills of the Cats- 
 kills, but in real moun- 
 tains, where the first out- 
 post of civilisation, a lonely ranch house, 
 is two weeks' travel away, and where 
 that stream on your left is bound for the 
 Pacific Ocean, and that stream on your 
 right over there will, after four thousand 
 miles, find its way into the Atlantic 
 Ocean, and where the air you breathe is 
 
twelve thousand feet above those seas ? 
 I have. 
 
 The situation is naturally one you 
 would not fish out of the grab bag of 
 fate if you could avoid it. When you 
 suddenly find it on your hands, however, 
 there is only one thing to do — keep 
 your nerve, grasp it firmly, and look, at 
 it closely. If you have a horse and a 
 gun and a cartridge, it is not so bad. I 
 had these, and I had better than all these, 
 I had Nimrod — but only half of Nim- 
 rod. The working half was chained up 
 by my fears, for such is the power of a 
 woman. I will explain. 
 
 In crossing over the Continental Di- 
 vide of the Rocky Mountains, we were 
 guests in the pack train of a man who 
 was equally at home in aNew York draw- 
 ing-room or on a Wyoming bear hunt, 
 and he had made mountain travelling a 
 
fine art. Besides ourselves, there were 
 the horse wrangler, the cook (of whom 
 you shall hear later), and sixteen horses, 
 and we started from Jackson's Lake for 
 the Big Horn Basin, several hundred 
 miles over the pathless uninhabited 
 mountains. 
 
 No one who has not tried it knows 
 how difficult it is for two or three men 
 to keep so many pack animals in line, 
 with no pathway to guide ; and once they 
 are started going nicely, it is nothing- 
 short of a calamity to stop them, especial- 
 ly when it is necessary to cover a cer- 
 tain number of miles before nightfall in 
 order that they may have feed. 
 
 We were on the Pacific side of the 
 Wind River Divide, and must get to the 
 top that night. The horses were travel- 
 ling nicely up the difficult ascent, so when 
 Nimrod got his feet wet crossing a 
 
 V 
 
 
 jf / 
 
 x^ 
 
 .'.I 
 
stream about noon, he and I thought we 
 would just stop and have a little lunch, 
 dry the shoes, and catch up with the 
 pack train in half an hour. 
 
 From the minute the last horse van- 
 ished out of sight behind a rock, desola- 
 tion settled upon me. That slender line 
 of living beings somewhere on ahead 
 was the only link between us and civi- 
 lisation — civilisation which I under- 
 stood, which was human and touchable 
 — and the awful vastness of those end- 
 less peaks, wherein lurked a hundred 
 dangers, and which seemed made but to 
 annihilate me. 
 
 Of course, the fire would not burn, 
 and the shoes would not dry. Blondey 
 wandered off and had to be brought 
 back, and it seemed an age before we 
 were again in the saddle, following the 
 trail the animals had made. 
 
 o 
 
 /t 
 
w 
 
THE TRAIL WAS LOST IN A GULLY. 
 
w But Nimrod was blithe and uncon- 
 
 m cerned, so I made no sign of the craven 
 n soul within me. For an hour or two we 
 
 T 
 
 jn followed the trail, urging our horses as 
 d much as possible, but the ascent was 
 P difficult, and we could not gain on the 
 o speed of the pack train. Then the trail 
 was lost in a gully where the animals had 
 gone in every direction to get through. 
 My nerves were now on the rack of 
 suspense. 
 
 Where were they *? Surely, we must 
 have passed them ! We were on the 
 wrong trail, perhaps going away from 
 them at every step ! 
 
 The screws of fear grew tighter every 
 moment during the following hours. 
 Nimrod soon found what he considered 
 to be the trail, and we proceeded. 
 
 At last we got to the top. No sign 
 of them. I could have screamed aloud; 
 
?}.- 
 
 a great wave of soul destroying fear en- 
 compassed me — wild black fear. I 
 could not reason it out. We were lost ! 
 
 Nimrod scoffed at me. The track 
 was still plain, he said; but I could not 
 read the hieroglyphics at my feet, and 
 there was no room in my mind for con- 
 fidence or hope. Fear filled it all. 
 
 There we were with the mighty forces 
 of the insensate world around, so pitiless, 
 so silently cruel, it seemed to my city- 
 bred soul. It was the spot where Nature 
 spread her wonders before us, one tiny 
 spring dividing its waters east and west 
 for the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, for 
 this was the highest point. 
 
 We attempted to cross that hateful 
 divide, that at another time might have 
 looked so beautiful, when suddenly Nim- 
 rod's horse plunged withers deep in a 
 bog, and in his struggles to get out 
 
 
 A 
 
threw Nimrod head first from the saddle 
 
 8 into the mud, where he lay quite still. 
 
 "n I faced the horror of death at that mo- 
 
 jn merit. Of course, this was what I had 
 
 d been expecting, but had not been able 
 
 p to put into words. Nimrod killed ! My 
 
 8 other fears dwindled away before this 
 
 one, or, rather, it seemed to wrap them 
 
 in itself, as in a cloak. For an instant 
 
 I could not move — there alone with a 
 
 dead or wounded man on that awful 
 
 mountain top. 
 
 But here was an emergency where I 
 could do something besides blindly fol- 
 low another's lead. I caught the fright- 
 ened animal as it dashed out of the 
 treacherous place (to be horseless is al- 
 most a worse fate than to be wounded), 
 and Nimrod, who was little hurt, quickly 
 recovered and managed to scramble to 
 dry ground, and again into the saddle. 
 
T 
 
 Forcing our tired horses onward, we V 
 again found a trail, supposedly the right $ 
 one, but there was that haunting fear n^ 
 that it was not. For the only signs were rX 
 the bending of the grass and the occa- § 
 sional rubbing of the trees where the R 
 animals had passed. And these might o 
 have been done by a band of elk. 
 
 It was growing dusk and still no pack 
 train in sight. No criminal on trial for 
 his life could have felt more wretchedly 
 apprehensive than I. At last we came 
 to a stream. Nimrod, who had dis- 
 mounted to examine more closely, said: 
 
 " The trail turns off here, but it is very 
 dim in the grass." 
 
 " Where ?" I asked, anxiously. 
 
 He pointed to the ground. I could 
 make out nothing. " Oh, let us hurry ! 
 They must have gone on." 
 
 " I think it would be safer to follow 
 these tracks for a time at least, to see 
 
where they come out. There are some 
 tracks across the stream there, but they 
 are older and dimmer and might have 
 been made by elk." 
 
 " Oh, do go on ! Surely the tracks 
 across the stream must be the ones.'' 
 To go on, on, and hurry, was my one 
 thought, my one cry. 
 
 Nimrod yielded. Thus I and my 
 wild fear betrayed the hunter's instinct. 
 We went on for many weary minutes. 
 .We lost all tracks. Then Nimrod fired 
 a shot into the air. He would not do 
 it before, because he said we were not 
 lost, and that there was no need for worry 
 — worry, when for hours blind fear had 
 held me in torture ! 
 
 There was no answer to the shot. 
 
 In five minutes he fired again. Then 
 we heard a report, very faint. I would 
 not believe that I had heard it at all. 
 I raised my gun and fired. This time a 
 
shot rattled through the branches over- 
 head, unpleasantly near. It was clearly 
 from behind us. We turned, and after 
 another interchange of shots, the cook 
 appeared. 
 
 I was too exhausted to be glad, but a 
 feeling of relief glided over me. He 
 led us to the stream where Nimrod had 
 wanted to turn off, and from there we 
 were quickly in camp, very much to our 
 host's relief. I dropped at the foot of a 
 tree, and said nothing for an hour — my 
 companions were men, so I did not have 
 to talk if I could not — then I arose as 
 usual and was ready for supper. 
 
 Of course, Nimrod was blamed for 
 not being a better mountaineer. ' He 
 ought to have seen that broken turf by 
 the trail,' or those ' blades of fresh pulled 
 grass in the pine fork.' How could they 
 know that a woman and her fears had 
 
J 
 
 N 
 
 s 
 
 hampered him at every step, especially 
 as you see there was no need ? 
 
 Always regulate your fears according 
 to the situation, and then you will not go 
 into the valley of the shadow of death, 
 when you are only lost in the mountains. 
 
o 
 
 M 
 
 ^ 
 
 VI. 
 THE COOK. 
 
VI. 
 
 HAD but a bare speak- 
 ing acquaintance with 
 the grim silent moun- 
 taineer who was cook 
 to our party. Two days 
 after he had appeared 
 like an angel of heaven on our gloomy 
 path I had an opportunity of knowing 
 him better. I quote from my journal : 
 
 Camp Jim, Shoshone Range, Septem- 
 ber 23 : They left me alone in camp to- 
 day. No, the cook was there. 
 
a 
 
 D 
 
 They left me the cook for protection 
 against the vast solitude, the mighty 
 grandeur of the mountains, and the pos- 
 sible, but improbable, bear. Nice man, 
 that cook — he confessed with pride to 
 many robberies and three murders! Only 
 a month before engaging as cook on 
 this trip, he had been serving a life term 
 for murder; but had been released 
 through some political 'pull.' 
 
 Our host, in company with another 
 game warden, had discovered him in 
 the mountains, where he had gone 
 immediately from the penitentiary and 
 resumed his unlawful life of killing 
 game. But he had hidden his prizes so 
 effectively that there was no evidence 
 but his own, which, of course, is not 
 accepted in law. Thus he welcomed 
 these two men of justice to his camp, 
 told graphically of his killing — then 
 
offered them a smoke, smiling the while 
 at their discomfiture. 
 
 Both his face and hands were scarred 
 from many bar room encounters, and he 
 unblushingly dated most of his remarks 
 by the period when he ' was rusticatin' 
 in the Pen.' He had brought his own 
 bed and saddle and pack horses on the 
 trip so that he could ' cut loose ' from 
 the party in ca',e k things got too hot ' for 
 him. 
 
 Such was the cook. 
 
 Immediately after breakfast Nimrod 
 and our host equipped themselves for 
 the day's hunt, and went off in opposite 
 directions, like Huck Finn and T'om Saw- 
 yer on the occasion of their memorable 
 first smoke. 
 
 Our camp was beside a rushing brook 
 in a little glade that was tucked at the 
 foot of towering mountains where no 
 
track had been for years, if ever. 
 
 1 us sighed the mighty pines of 
 
 s forest. Hundreds of miles 
 
 he barrier of nature, were 
 
 hu y of the noise and strife 
 
 of the Here, alone in the 
 
 solitudes, n atomswander- 
 
 ingontheti. ^ and — the 
 
 cook and I. 
 
 I sat on my rubber be it and 
 
 thought — there was , do 
 
 — and was cold, cold f n. 
 in, and from the inside out. x 
 a thing alive, not even myself— 
 but the cook. 
 
 Outside, I could hear him washii. c 
 the breakfast tinware, and whistling some 
 kind of a jiggling tune that ran up and 
 down me like a shiver. This went on 
 for an eternity. 
 
 Suddenly it stopped, and I heard the 
 
 
faintest crunch on the thin layer or 
 snow and the rattling of more snow as 
 it slid off my tent from a blow that had 
 been struck on the outside. 
 
 I jumped to the door of the tent. It 
 was the cook. 
 
 " Purty cold in there, ain't it % You'd 
 a good sight better come to the fire. 
 Ain't you got a slicker 1 ?" 
 
 I put on a mackintosh and overshoes 
 and went to the fire. The weather was 
 now indulging in a big flake snow that 
 slid stealthily to the ground and disap- 
 peared into water on whatever obstacle it 
 found there. It found me. The cook 
 was cleaning knives — the cooking 
 knives, the eating knives, and a full 
 set of hunting knives, long and short, 
 slim and broad, all sharp and efficacious. 
 
 He handled them lovingly, rubbed 
 off some blood rust here and there, and 
 
occasionally whetted one to a still more 
 razor edge and threw it into a near by 
 tree, where it stuck, quivering. 
 
 There was no conversation, but I did 
 not feel forgotten. 
 
 I turned my back on the cook and 
 gazed into the fire, a miserable smould- 
 ering affair, and speculated on why I 
 had never before noticed how much 
 spare time there was in a minute. It 
 may have been five of these spacious 
 minutes, it may have been fifteen, that 
 had passed away when the cook ap- 
 proached me. I could feel him com- 
 ing. He came very close to me — and 
 to the fire. 
 
 He put on some beans. 
 
 Then he went away, and there were 
 many more minutes, many more. 
 
 Then something touched my arm. 
 At last it had come (what we expect, 
 
"v 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 * &. v ^ 
 
 ■ 
 
 WHETTED ONE TO A RAZOR EDGE AND THREW IT INTO A TREE 
 WHERE IT STUCK QUIVERING. 
 
w 
 
 o 
 
 V N 
 
 eA 
 
 N 
 D 
 I E 
 R 
 F 
 O 
 O 
 T 
 
 if it be disagreeable, usually does come). 
 I never moved a muscle. This time 
 the pressure on my arm was unmis- 
 takable. I turned quickly and saw — 
 the cook — with a gun ! 
 
 The cook, gun, knives, fire, snow, 
 and stars danced a mad jig before me 
 for an instant. Then the cook suddenly <^ 
 resumed his proper position, and I saw 
 that his disengaged hand was held in an 
 attitude of warning for silence. He 
 pointed off into the woods and appeared 
 to be listening. Soon I thought I heard 
 a snapping of a branch away off up the 
 mountain. 
 
 "Bear," the cook whispered. "Fol- 
 low me." 
 
 I followed. It was hard work to get 
 over logs and stones without noise, in a 
 long mackintosh, and, besides, I wished 
 that I had brought a gun. I should 
 
have felt more comfortable about both 
 man and beast. I struggled on for a 
 while, when the thought suddenly struck 
 home that if I went farther I should not 
 be able to find my way back to camp. 
 Everything is relative, and those empty 
 tents and smouldering fire seemed a 
 haven of security compared to the sit- 
 uation of being unarmed, and lost in 
 the wilderness — with the cook. 
 
 I watched my chance and sneaked 
 back to camp to get a gun. I was 
 willing to believe the cook's bear story, 
 but I wanted a gun. When I got to 
 camp there were many good reasons for 
 not going back. 
 
 After a time I heard two shots close 
 at hand, and soon the cook appeared. 
 He said he could not find the bear's 
 track, and lost me, so thought he had 
 better look me up and be on hand in 
 
T 
 
 # case I had returned to camp, and the 
 
 m bear should come. 
 
 n I thanked the cook for his solicitude. 
 
 Jn To while away the time, I put up a 
 
 d target and commenced practising with 
 
 p a 30-30 rifle at fifty yards range. 
 
 o I shot very badly. 
 
 The cook obligingly interested him- 
 self in my performance and kept tally 
 on my aim, pointing out to me when it 
 was high, when it was low, to the right 
 or to the left. 
 
 Then he took his six shooter and 
 put a half dozen bullets in the bull's- 
 eye offhand. 
 
 I lost my interest in shooting. 
 The cook gave me some lunch, and 
 while I was eating he stood before the 
 fire looking at it through the fingers of 
 his outstretched hand, with a queer 
 squint in his cold gray eyes, as though 
 
sighting along a rifle barrel, while a 
 cigarette hung limply from his mouth. 
 
 Then in response to a winning smile 
 (after all, a woman's best weapon) he 
 opened the floodgates of his thoughts 
 and poured into my ears a succession 
 of bloodcurdling adventures over which 
 the big, big * I ' had dominated. [ 
 
 " Yes," he said musingly of his second 
 murder, as he removed his squint from 
 the fire to me, and a ghost of a smile 
 played around his lips ; " yes, it took 
 six shots to keep him quiet, and you 
 could have covered all the holes with a 
 cap box — and his pard nearly got me. 
 
 " That was the year I lost my pard, 
 ~ Dick Elsen. We was at camp near 
 Fort Fetterman. We called a man 
 'Red' — his name was Jim Capse. 
 Drink was at the bottom of it. Red he 
 sees my pard passing a saloon, and he 
 
 II W I NE5?> LIQUORS 
 
 fl 
 
 \\^: 
 
 .■'■■' £• 
 
 
says, ' Hello, where did you come from ? 
 Come and have a drink ! ' Pard says, 
 'No, I don't want nothing!' 'Oh, 
 come along and have a drink!' Dick 
 says, 'No, thanks, pard, I'm not drink- 
 ing to-night.' 'Well, I guess you'll 
 have a drink with me ' ; and Red pulls 
 out his six shooter. Dick wasn't quick 
 enough about throwing up his hands, 
 and he gets killed. Then Irish Mike 
 says to Red, ' You better hit the breeze,' 
 but we ketched him — a telegraph pole 
 was handy— I says, 'Have you got 
 anything to say % ' ' You write to my 
 mother and tell her that a horse fell on 
 me. Don't tell her that I got hung,' 
 Red says ; and we swung him." 
 
 By the time he had thus proudly 
 stretched out his three dead men before 
 my imagination, in a setting of innumer- 
 able shooting scraps and horse stealings, 
 
the hunters returned — my day with the 
 multi-murderous cook was over — and 
 nothing had happened. 
 
 It is only fair to quote Nimrod's reply 
 to one who criticised him for leaving 
 me thus: 
 
 " Humph ! Do you think I don't 
 know those wild mountaineers ? They 
 are perfectly chivalrous, and I could 
 feel a great deal safer in leaving my 
 wife in care of that desperado than with 
 one of your Eastern dudes." 
 
 \ / ) W/ 
 
I2g 
 
 O 
 
 >8 
 
 N 
 D 
 C 
 R 
 F 
 O 
 O 
 T 
 
 VII. 
 
 AMONG THE CLOUDS. 
 
 3 
 
VII. 
 
 ANY a time as a child 
 I used to lie on my 
 back in the grass and 
 stare far into the wide 
 blue sky above. It 
 seemed so soft, so ca- 
 ressing, so far away, and yet so near. 
 Then, perhaps, a tiny woolly cloud would 
 drift across its face, meet another of its 
 kind, then another and another, until 
 the massed up curtain hid the playful 
 blue, and amid grayness and chill, where 
 all had been so bright, I would hurry 
 
under shelter to avoid the storm. That, 
 outside of fairy books, an earthbound 
 being could actually be in a cloud, was 
 beyond my imagination. Indeed, it 
 seems strange now, and were it not for 
 the absence of a cherished quirt, I should 
 be ready to think that my cloud experi- 
 ence had been a dream. 
 
 The day before, we had been in a 
 great hurry to cross the Wind River 
 Divide before a heavy snowfall made 
 travel difficult, if not impossible. We 
 had no wish to be snowbound for the 
 winter in those wilds, with only two 
 weeks' supply of food, and it was for 
 this same reason we had not stopped to 
 hunt that grizzly who had left a tourteen 
 inch track over on Wiggins' Creek — 
 the same being Wahb of the Big Horn 
 Basin, about whom I shall have some- 
 thing to say later. 
 
 8/ 
 
 ft 
 
We were now camped in a little val- 
 ley whose creek bubbled pleasantly 
 under the ice. Having cleared away 
 three feet of snow for our tents, we de- 
 cided to rest a day or two and hunt, as 
 we were within two days' easy travel of 
 the first ranch house. 
 
 It was cold and snowy when Nimrod 
 and I started out next morning to look 
 for mountain sheep. I followed Nim- 
 rod's horse for several miles as in a 
 trance, the white flakes falling silently 
 around me, and wondered how it would 
 be possible for any human being to 
 find his way back to camp ; but I had 
 been taught my lesson, and kept silent. 
 
 I even tried to make mental notes ot 
 various rocks and trees we passed, but 
 it was hopeless. They all looked alike 
 to me. In a city, no matter how big or 
 how strange, I can find home unerring- 
 
ly, and Nimrod is helpless as a babe. 
 In the mountains it is different. When 
 I finally raised my eyes from the horse's 
 tail in front, it was because the tail and 
 the horse belonging to it had stopped 
 suddenly. 
 
 We were in the middle of a brook. 
 It is highly unpleasant to be stopped in 
 the middle of an icy brook when your 
 horse's feet break through the ice at each 
 step, and you cannot be sure how deep 
 the water is, nor how firm the bottom 
 he is going to strike, especially as ice- 
 covered brooks are Blondey's pet abhor- 
 rence, and the uncertainty of my progress 
 was emphasised by Blondey's attempts to 
 cross on one or two feet instead of four. 
 
 However, I looked dutifully in the 
 direction Nimrod indicated and saw 
 a long line of elk heads peering over 
 the ridge in front and showing darkly 
 
against the snow. They were not 
 startled. 
 
 Those inquisitive heads, with ears 
 alert, looked at us for some time, and 
 then leisurely moved out of sight. We 
 scrambled out of the stream and com- 
 menced ascending the mountain after 
 them. The damp snow packed on 
 Blondey's hoofs, so that he was walking 
 on snowballs. When these got about 
 five inches high, they would drop off and 
 begin again. It is needless to say that 
 these varying snowballs did not help 
 Blondey's sure-footedness, especially as 
 the snow was just thick enough to con- 
 ceal the treacherous slaty rocks beneath. 
 For the first time I understood the 
 phrase, to be * all balled up.' 
 
 Between being ready to clear myself 
 from the saddle and jump off on the up 
 side, in case Blondey should fall, and 
 
keeping in sight of the tail of the other 
 horse, I had given no attention to the 
 landscape. 
 
 Suddenly I lost Nimrod, and every- 
 thing was swallowed up in a dark misty p 
 vapour that cut me off from every object. ^ 
 Even Blondey's nose and the ground at e 
 my feet were blurred. Regardless of 
 possibly near-by elk, I raised a frightened 
 yell. My voice swirled around me and 
 dropped. I tried again, but the sound 
 would not carry. 
 
 The icy vapour swept through me — 
 a very lonely forlorn little being indeed. 
 I just clung to the saddle, trusting to 
 Blondey's instinct to follow the other 
 animal, and tried to enjoy the fact that 
 I was getting a new sensation. Even 
 when one could see, every step was 
 treacherous, but in that black fog I 
 might as well have been blind and deaf. 
 
Then Blondey dislodged some loose 
 rock, and went sliding down the moun- 
 tain with it. There was not a thing I 
 ^ could do, so I shut my eyes for an 
 J d instant. We brought up against a 
 p boulder, fortunately, with no special 
 i 8 damage — except to my nerves. Not 
 being a man, I don't pretend to having 
 enjoyed that experience — and there, 
 not six feet away, was a ghostly figure 
 that I knew must be Nimrod. 
 
 He did not greet me as a long lost, 
 for such I surely felt, but merely re- 
 marked in a whisper : 
 
 " We are in a cloud cap. It is set- 
 tling down. The elk are over there. 
 Keep close to me." And he started along 
 the ridge. I felt it was so thoughtful of 
 him to give me this admonition. I would 
 much rather have been returned safely 
 to camp without further injury and be- 
 
c 
 
 fore I froze to the saddle ; but I grimly 
 kept Blondey's nose overlapping his $ 
 mate's back and said nothing — not even n* 
 when I discovered that my cherished rid- ' J 
 ingwhiphad left me. It probably was not p 
 fifty feet away, on that toboggan slide, *p 
 but it seemed quite hopeless to find any- 8 
 thing in the freezing misty grayness that 
 surrounded us. 
 
 We continued our perilous passage. 
 Then I was rewarded by a sight seldom 
 accorded to humans. It was worth all 
 the fatigue, cold, and bruises, for that 
 appallingly illogical cloud cap took a 
 new vagary. It split and lifted a little, 
 and there, not three hundred yards away, 
 in the twilight of that cold wet cloud, 
 on that mountain in the sky, were two 
 bull elk in deadly combat. Their far 
 branching horns were locked together, 
 and they swayed now this way, now 
 
NOT THREE HUNDRED YARDS AWAY . . . WERE TWO BULL ELK 
 IN DEADLY COMBAT. 
 
T 
 
 that, as they wrestled for the supremacy 
 m of the herd of does, which doubtless 
 n was not far away. We could not see 
 jn clearly : all was as in a dream. There 
 d was not a sound, only the blurred 
 p outlines through the blank mist of two 
 o mighty creatures struggling for victory. 
 One brief glimpse of this mountain 
 drama ; then they sank out of sight, and 
 the numbing grayness and darkness once 
 more closed around us. 
 
 On the way back to camp, Blondey 
 shied at a heap of decaying bones that 
 were still attached to a magnificent pair 
 of antlers. They were at the foot of a 
 cliff, over which the animal had prob- 
 ably fallen. The gruesome sight was 
 suggestive of the end of one of those 
 shadowy creatures, fighting back there 
 high up on the mountain in the mist 
 and the darkness. 
 
We saw no mountain sheep, but oh, 
 the joy of our camp fire that night ! 
 For we got back in due time all right 
 — Nimrod and the gods know how. 
 To feel the cheery dancing warmth 
 from the pine needles driving away 
 cold and misery was pure bliss. One 
 thing is certain about roughing it for 
 a woman: — there is no compromise. 
 She either sits in the lap of happiness 
 or of misery. The two are side by side, 
 and toss her about a dozen times a day 
 
 but happiness never lets her go for 
 long. 
 
*43, 
 
 o 
 
 M 
 
 ;A 
 N 
 
 A 
 
 VIII. 
 AT YEDDAR'S. 
 
 5 
 
VIII. 
 
 IFE at Yeddar's ranch 
 on Green River, where 
 Nimrod and I left the 
 pack train, is different 
 from life in New York; 
 likewise the people are 
 different. And as every Woman-who- 
 goes-hunting-with-her-husband is sure 
 to go through a Yeddar experience, I 
 offer a few observations by way of en- 
 lightenment before telling how I killed 
 my antelope. (If you wish to be 
 proper, always use the possessive for 
 animals you have killed. It is a Wes- 
 tern abbreviation in great favour.) 
 
A two-story log house, a one-room 
 log office, a log barn, and, across the 
 creek, the log shack we occupied, fifty 
 miles from the railroad, and no end of 
 miles from anything else, but wilderness 
 — that was Yeddar's. 
 
 Old Yeddar — Uncle John, the 
 guides and trappers and teamsters 
 called him — had solved the problem 
 of ideal existence. He ran this rough 
 road house without any personal ex- 
 penditure of labour or money. He sold 
 whisky in his office to the passing 
 teamsters and guides, and relied upon 
 the same to do the chores around the 
 place, for which he gave them grub, 
 the money for which came from the 
 occasional summer tourist, such as we. 
 
 Mrs. Spiker ' did ' for him in the 
 summer for her board and that of her 
 little girl, and in the winter he and a 
 
w 
 o 
 
 M 
 
 A 
 
 E ' 
 
 N 
 
 D 
 
 E 
 
 R 
 
 F 
 
 O 
 
 o 
 
 T 
 
 pard or two rustled for themselves, 
 on bacon, coffee, and that delectable 
 compound of bread and water known 
 as camp sinkers. He got some money 
 for letting the horses from two East- 
 ern outfits run over the surrounding 
 country and eat up the Wyoming gov- 
 ernment hay. Thus he loafs on through 
 the years, outside or inside his office, 
 without a care beyond the getting of 
 his whisky and his tobacco. Of course 
 he has a history. He claims to be 
 from a ' high up ' Southern family, 
 but has been a plainsman since 1851. 
 He has lived among the Indians, has 
 several red-skinned children somewhere 
 on this planet, and seems to have 
 known all the wild tribe of stage driv- 
 ers, miners, and frontiersmen with rapid- 
 firing histories. 
 
 Once a week, if the weather were 
 
fine, Uncle John would tie a towel and 
 a clean shirt to his saddle, throw one 
 leg across the back of Jim, his cow 
 pony, blind in one eye and weighted 
 with years unknown, and the two would 
 jog a mile or so back in the moun- 
 tains, to a hot sulphur spring, where 
 Yeddar would perform his weekly toilet. 
 He was not known to take off his 
 clothes at any other time, and if the 
 weather were disagreeable the pilgrim- 
 age was omitted. 
 
 The cheapest thing at Yeddar's, ex- 
 cept time, was advice. You could not 
 tie up a dog without the entire estab- 
 lishment of loafers bossing the job. A 
 little active co-operation was not so easy 
 to get, however. One day I watched 
 a freighter get stuck in the mud down 
 the road l a piece.' One by one, the 
 whole number of freighters, moun- 
 
 
 /t 
 
 i 
 
taineers and guides then at Yeddar's 
 lounged to the place, until there were 
 nine able-bodied men ranged in a row 
 watching the freighter dig out his 
 wagon. No one offered to help him, 
 but all contented themselves with crit- 
 icising his methods freely and inquir- 
 ing after his politics. 
 
 During the third week of our stay, 
 Uncle John raised the price of our 
 board — and such board ! — giving as an 
 excuse that when we came he did not 
 know that we were going to like it so 
 well, or stay so long ! Please place 
 this joke where it belongs. 
 
 The charm that held us to this rough 
 place was the abundance of game. The 
 very night we got there, I was standing 
 quietly by the cabin door at dusk, when 
 down the path came two of the prettiest 
 does that the whole of the Blacktail 
 
tribe could muster. Shoulder to shoul- 
 der, with their big ears alert, they picked 
 their way along, and under cover of the 
 deepening twilight advanced to exam- 
 ine the dwelling of the white man. 
 
 I watched them with silent breath. 
 They were not ten yards away. Then 
 they saw me and, wheeling around, 
 stopped, the boldest a little in advance 
 of her companion, with the right fore- 
 foot raised for action. I made no move. 
 The graceful things eyed me suspi- 
 ciously for several seconds and then 
 advanced a little in a one-sided fashion. 
 
 A laugh from Yeddar's office, across 
 the creek, where Uncle John and Dave 
 were having a quiet game of pinochle, 
 caused a short retreat up the road. 
 About fifty yards away, they stopped, 
 and there, in the twilight, in that wild 
 glen, they put themselves through a 
 
DOWN THE PATH CAME TWO OF THE PRETTIEST BLACKTAILS. 
 
A 
 
 series of poses so graceful, so unstudied, 
 so tender, so deer-like, that my heart 
 was thrilled with joy at the mere artistic 
 beauty of the scene. Then the loud- 
 mouthed alarm of a dog sent them 
 silently into the forest gloom. 
 
 Nimrod wanted some photographs of 
 animals from life, and the energy which 
 we put forth to obtain these was a con- 
 stant surprise and disturbance to Uncle 
 John and his co-loafers. They could 
 understand why one might trap an ani- 
 mal, but to let it go again unhurt, after 
 spending hours over it with a camera, 
 was a problem that required many 
 drinks and much quiet cogitation in 
 the shade of the office. 
 
 For days we tried to get a wood- 
 chuck. At last we succeeded, and I 
 find this note written in my journal for 
 that date : — 
 
"Oct. 15th: Nimrod caught a wood- 
 chuck to-day, a baby one, and we called 
 him Johnny. Johnny stayed with us 
 all day in his cage, while Nimrod made 
 a sketch of him and I took his picture. 
 Then, in the late afternoon, we took 
 him back to his home in the stone-clad 
 hill, and put him among his brothers 
 and sisters, who peeped cautiously at us 
 from various rocky niches, higher up 
 the hill. 
 
 Little Johnny must have had a great 
 deal to say of the strange ways and food 
 of the big white animal. It must have 
 been hard, too, for him to have found 
 suitable woodchuck language to express 
 his sensations when he was carried, oh ! 
 such a long way, in a big sack that grew 
 on the side of his captor; and of the 
 taste of peppermint candy, which he ate 
 in his prettiest style, sitting on his 
 
haunches and clutching the morsel in 
 both forepaws like any well-bred baby 
 woodchuck. And then those delicious 
 sugar cookies that Mrs. Spiker had just 
 baked ! How could he make his igno- 
 rant brother chuckies appreciate those 
 cookies ! Poor little Johnny is a marked 
 woodchuck. He has seen the world." 
 
 When Nimrod went hunting skunks, 
 the group at the office gave us up. 
 " Locoed, plumb locoed," was the ver- 
 dict. 
 
 Mnwo y OU ever been on a skunk 
 ut perhaps you have no preju- 
 ] had. My code of action for a 
 s, if you see a black and white 
 animal, don't stop to admire its beau- 
 tiful bushy tail, but give a good imita- 
 tion of a young woman running for her 
 life. 
 
This did not suit Nimrod. He as- 
 sured me that there was no danger if 
 we treated his skunkship respectfully, 
 and, as I was the photographer, I put on 
 my old clothes and meekly fell in line. 
 Nimrod set several box traps in places 
 where skunks had been. These traps 
 were merely soap boxes raised at one 
 end by a figure four arrangement of 
 sticks, so that when the animal goes in- 
 side and touches the bait the sticks fall 
 apart, down comes the box, and the an- 
 imal is caged unhurt. The next morn- 
 ing we went the rounds. The first trap 
 was unsprung. The second one was 
 down. Of course we could not see in- 
 side. Was it empty? Was the occu- 
 pant a rat or a skunk, and if so, what 
 was he going to do? 
 
 Nimrod approached the trap. Just 
 then a big tree chanced to get between 
 
 A 
 
me and it. I stopped, thinking that as 
 good a place as any to await develop- 
 ments. 
 
 " It's a skunk all right," Nimrod an- 
 nounced gleefully. 
 
 The box was rather heavy, so Nim- 
 rod went to Yeddar's, which was not far 
 away, to see if he could get one of the 
 loungers to help carry the captive to a 
 large wire cage that we had rigged up 
 near our shack. 
 
 There were six men near the office, 
 bronzed mountaineers, men of guns and 
 grit, men who had spent their lives 
 facing danger; but, when it came to fac- 
 ing a skunk, each looked at Nimrod 
 as one would at a crazy man and had 
 important business elsewhere. For once 
 I thoroughly appreciated their point of 
 view, but as there was no one else I 
 took one end of the box, and we started. 
 
It was a precarious pilgrimage, but we 
 moved gently and managed not to out- 
 rage the little animal's feelings. 
 
 When the men saw us coming 
 across the creek, with one accord they 
 all went in and took a drink. 
 
 We gingerly urged Mr. Skunk into 
 the big cage, and with the greatest cau- 
 tion, never making a sudden move, I 
 took his picture. All was as merry as a 
 marriage bell, and might have continued 
 so but for that puppy Sim. That is the 
 trouble with skunks; they will lose 
 their manners if startled, and dogs startle 
 skunks. 
 
 Of course the puppy barked; of 
 course the skunk did not like it. He 
 ruffled up his cold black nose, and ele- 
 vated his bushy tail — his beautiful, 
 plumy tail. I opened the door of his 
 cage and, snatching the puppy, fled. 
 
The skunk was a wise and good ani- 
 mal, really a gentleman, if treated 
 politely. He appreciated my efforts on 
 his behalf. He forbearingly lowered 
 his tail, composed his fur, and walked 
 out of the cage and into the near-by 
 woods as tamely as a house tabby out 
 for a stroll. 
 
f\ 
 
 IX. 
 
 MY ANTELOPE. 
 
 5: 
 
T was a week later when 
 I did something which 
 those old guides could 
 understand and appre- 
 ciate — I made a dead 
 shot. I committed a 
 murder, and from that time, the brother- 
 hood of pards was open to us, had we 
 cared to join. It was all because I 
 killed an antelope. 
 
 Nimrod and I started out that morn- 
 ing with the understanding that, if we 
 saw antelope, I was to have a chance. 
 
 In about six miles, Nimrod spied two 
 white specks moving along the rocky 
 
ridge to the east of us, which rose ab- 
 ruptly from the plain where we were. 
 I was soon able to make out that they 
 were antelope. But the antelope had 
 also seen us, and there was as much 
 chance of getting near to them, by di- 
 rect pursuit, as of a snail catching a 
 hare. So we rode on calmly northward 
 for half a mile, making believe we had 
 not seen them, until we passed out of 
 sight behind a long hill. Then we be- 
 gan an elaborate detour up the moun- 
 tain, keeping well out of sight, until we 
 judged that the animals, providing 
 they had not moved, were below us, 
 under the rocky ledge nearly a mile 
 back. 
 
 We tied up the horses on that dizzy 
 height, and stole, Nimrod with a car- 
 bine, I with the rifle, along a treacherous, 
 shaly bank which ended, twenty feet 
 
♦ 
 
 A MISSTEP WOULD HAVE SENT US FLYING 
 OVER THE CLIFF. 
 
below, in the steep rocky bluffs that 
 formed the face of the cliff. Every step 
 was an agony of uncertainty as to how 
 far one would slide, and how much 
 loose shale one would dislodge to rattle 
 down over the cliff and startle the ante- 
 lope we hoped were there. To move 
 about on a squeaking floor without dis- 
 turbing a light sleeper is child's play 
 compared with our progress. A mis- 
 step would have sent us flying over the 
 cliff, but I did not think of that — my 
 only care was not to startle the shy 
 fleet-footed creatures we were pursuing. 
 I hardly dared to breathe ; every muscle 
 and nerve was tense with the long sus- 
 pense. 
 
 Suddenly I clutched Nimrod's arm 
 and pointed at an oblong tan coloured 
 bulk fifty yards above us on the moun- 
 tain. 
 
" Antelope ! Lying down ! " I whis- 
 pered in his ear. He nodded and mo- 
 tioned me to go ahead. I crawled 
 nearer, inch by inch, my gaze riveted 
 on that object. It did not move. I Q 
 grew more elated the nearer it allowed p 
 me to approach. It was not so very o 
 hard to get at an antelope, after all. 
 I felt astonishingly pleased with my 
 performance. Then — rattle, crash — 
 and a stone went bounding down. 
 What a pity, after all my painful con- 
 tortions not to do it ! I instantly raised 
 the rifle to get a shot before the swift 
 animal went flying away. 
 
 But it was strangely quiet. I stole 
 a little nearer — and then turned and 
 went gently back to Nimrod. He was 
 convulsed with silent and unnecessary 
 laughter. My elaborate stalk, had been 
 made on — a nice buff stone. 
 
We continued our precarious jour- 
 ney for another quarter of a mile, when 
 I motioned that I was going to try to 
 get a sight of the antelope, which, ac- 
 cording to my notion, were under the 
 rock some hundred feet below, and 
 signed to Nimrod to stay behind. 
 
 Surely my guardian angel attended 
 that descent. I slid down a crack, in 
 the rock three feet wide, which gave 
 me a purchase on the sides with my 
 elbows and left hand. The right hand 
 grasped the rifle, to my notion an 
 abominably heavy awkward thing. 
 One of these drops was eight feet, 
 another twelve. A slip would probably 
 have cost me my life. Then I crawled 
 along a narrow ledge for about the 
 width of a town-house front, and, mak- 
 ing another perilous slide, landed on 
 a ledge so close to the creatures I was 
 
hunting that I was as much startled as 
 they. 
 
 Away those two beautiful animals 
 bounded, their necks proudly arched 
 and their tiny feet hitting the only safe 
 places with unerring aim. They were 
 far out of range before I thought to 
 get my rifle in position, and my ran- 
 dom shot only sent them farther out on 
 the plain, like drifting leaves on autumn 
 wind. 
 
 It was impossible to return the way 
 I had come; so I rolled and jumped 
 and generally tumbled to the grassy hill 
 below, and waited for Nimrod to go 
 back along the shaly stretch, and bring 
 down the horses the way they had gone 
 
 up- 
 Then we took some lunch from the 
 
 saddle bags and sat down in the wav- 
 ing, yellow grass of the foot hill with a 
 
 
 fi 
 
 S 
 
 T 
 
sweep of miles before us, miles of grassy 
 tableland shimmering in the clear air 
 like cloth of gold in the sun, where 
 cattle grow fat and the wild things still 
 are at home. 
 
 During lunch Nimrod tried to con- 
 vince me that he knew all the time that 
 the antelope I stalked on the mountain- 
 side was a stone. Of course wives 
 should believe their husbands. The 
 economy of State and Church would 
 collapse otherwise. However, the ap- 
 pearance of a large band of antelope, 
 a sight now very rare even in the Rock- 
 ies, caused the profitless discussion to 
 be engulfed in the pursuit of the real 
 thing. 
 
 The antelope were two miles away, 
 mere specks of white. We could not 
 tell them from the twinkling plain until 
 they moved. We mounted immedi- 
 
w\\ 
 
 ately and went after those antelope — by- 
 pretending to go away from them. For mj 
 three hours, we drew nearer to the quietly n 
 browsing animals. We hid behind low 'I 
 hills, and crawled down a water-course, p 
 and finally dismounted behind the very p 
 mound of prairie on the other side of § 
 which they were resting, a happy, 
 peaceful family. There were twenty 
 does, and proudly in their midst moved 
 the king of the harem, a powerful buck 
 with royal horns. 
 
 The crowning point of my long day's 
 hunt was before me. That I should 
 have my chance to get one of the finest 
 bucks ever hunted was clear. What 
 should I do, should I hit or miss? 
 Fail ! What a thought — never ! 
 
 Just then a drumming of hoofs 
 which rapidly faded away showed that 
 the wind had betrayed us, and the 
 
whole band was off like a flight of 
 arrows. 
 
 "Shoot! Shoot!" cried Nimrod, 
 but my gun was already up and levelled 
 on the flying buck — now nearly a hun- 
 dred yards away. 
 
 Bang ! The deadly thing went forth 
 to do its work. Sliding another car- 
 tridge into the chamber, I held ready 
 for another shot. 
 
 There was no need. The fleet-footed 
 monarch's reign was over, and already 
 he had gone to his happy hunting 
 ground. The bullet had gone straight 
 to his heart, and he had not suffered. 
 But the does, the twenty beating hearts 
 of his harem ! There they were, not 
 one hundred yards away, huddled to- 
 gether with ears erect, tiny feet alert 
 for the next bound — yet waiting for 
 their lord and master, the proud tyrant, 
 
 « f 
 
so strangely still on the ground. Why 
 did he not come 1 ? And those two crea- 
 tures whose smell they feared — why did 
 he stay so near*? 
 
 They took a few steps nearer and 
 again waited, eyes and ears and uplift- 
 ed hoofs asking the question, " Why 
 doesn't he come*? Why does he let 
 those dreadful creatures go so close? " 
 Then, as we bent over their fallen hero, 
 they knew he was forever lost to them, 
 and fear sent them speeding out of sight. 
 
 ~f\ 
 
X. 
 
 A MOUNTAIN DRAMA. 
 
UT hunting does not 
 make one wholly a 
 brute, crying, ' Kill, 
 kill ! ' at every chance. 
 In fact I have no more 
 to confess in that line. 
 Another side to it is shown by an in- 
 cident that happened about a week later. 
 We were riding leisurely along, a mile 
 or so from the spot where my antelope 
 had yielded his life to my vanity, when 
 we saw, several miles away in the low 
 hills, two moving flecks of white which 
 might mean antelope. 
 
We watched. The two spots came 
 rapidly nearer, and were clearly ante- 
 lope. We were soon able to make out 
 that one was being chased by the other; 
 then that they were both bucks, the 
 one in the rear much the heavier and 
 evidently the aggressor. Then from 
 behind a hill came the cause of it all — 
 a bunch of lady antelope, who kept 
 modestly together and to one side, and 
 watched the contest that should decide 
 their master. Surely this unclaimed 
 harem was my doing ! 
 
 All at once, the two on-coming figures 
 saw us. The first one paused, doubtful 
 which of the two dangers to choose. 
 His foe caught up with him. He 
 wheeled and charged in self-defence, 
 their horns met with a crash, and the 
 smaller was thrown to the ground. He 
 was clearly no match for his opponent. 
 
 He sprang to his feet. His only 
 
safety was in flight, but where? His 
 strength was nearly gone. He ran a 
 short distance away from us, circling 
 our cavalcade. His foe was nearly up 
 to him again. He stopped an instant 
 with uplifted foot, then turned and 
 made directly for vs. Three loaded 
 guns hung at our saddles, but no hand 
 went towards them. Not thirty feet 
 away from our motionless horses the 
 buck dropped, exhausted. We could 
 easily have lassoed him. His adversary 
 kept beyond gunshot, not daring to fol- 
 low him into the power of an enemy all 
 wild things fear; and an eagle who had 
 perched on a rock near by, in hopes of 
 a coming feast, flapped his wings and 
 slowly flew away to search elsewhere for 
 his dinner. The conquering buck walked 
 back to his spoils of war, and soon mar- 
 shalled them out of sight behind a hill. 
 The young buck almost at our feet 
 
quickly recovered. He was not seri- 
 ously hurt, only frightened and winded. 
 He rose to his feet and stood for an in- 
 stant looking directly at us, his head 
 with its growing horns held high in the p 
 air, as if to thank us for the protection p 
 from a lesser foe he had so boldly asked § 
 and so freely received of an all power- 
 ful enemy. Then, turning, he lightly 
 sped over the plain in an opposite direc- 
 tion, and the eagle, who had kept us in 
 sight until now, perhaps with a linger- 
 ing hope, rose swiftly upwards and was 
 lost to sight. 
 
 One elk with an eleven-point crown, 
 and one antelope, of the finest ever 
 brought down, is the tax I levied on 
 the wild things. Of the many, many 
 times I have watched them and left 
 them unmolested, and of the lessons they 
 have taught me, under Nimrod's gui- 
 
|7w dance, I have not space to tell, for the 
 real fascination of hunting is not in the 
 killing but in seeing the creature at 
 home amid his glorious surroundings, 
 and feeling the freely rushing blood, the 
 health-giving air, the gleeful sense of 
 joy and life in nature, both within and 
 without. 
 
 N 
 
 N 
 D 
 E 
 R 
 F 
 O 
 O 
 T 
 
XI 
 
 WHAT I KNOW ABOUT 
 
 WAHB OF THE BIGHORN 
 
 BASIN. 
 
XL 
 
 FOURTEEN- INCH 
 
 track is big, even for a 
 grizzly. That was the 
 size of Wahb's. The 
 first time I saw it, the 
 hole looked bigenough 
 for a baby's bath tub. 
 
 We were travelling in Mr. A.'s pack 
 train across the Shoshones from Idaho 
 to Wyoming. It was the first of Octo- 
 ber, and by then, in that region, winter 
 is shaking hands with you — pleasant 
 hands to be sure, but a bit cool. The 
 night before we had made a picturesque 
 
camp on the lee side of a rock cliff 
 which was honeycombed with caves. A 
 blazing camp fire was built at the mouth 
 of one of these and we lounged on the 
 rock ledges inside, thoroughly protected 
 from the wind and cold. A storm was 
 brewing. We could hear the pine trees 
 whistle and shriek as they were lashed 
 about in the forest across the brook. 
 The lurid light of the fire showed us 
 ourselves in distorted shadows. The 
 whole place seemed wild and wicked, 
 like a robber camp, and under its spell 
 one thought things and felt things thaf 
 would have been impossible in the sun 
 shine, where everything is revealed. It 
 began to snow, but we laughed at that. 
 What did it matter in the shelter of the 
 cave ? For the first time in days I was 
 thoroughly toasted on all sides at once. 
 We had changed abruptly from the 
 
steam-heated Pullman to camping in 
 snow, and it takes a few days to get 
 used to such a shock. We told tales as 
 weird as the scene, until far into the 
 night. The next morning the sun was 
 bright, but the cook had to cut a hole 
 in the ice blanket over the brook to 
 get water. We dared not linger at our 
 robber camp, for at any time a big snow- 
 storm might come that would cover 
 the Wind River Divide, which we had 
 to cross, with snow too deep for the 
 horses to travel. 
 
 Two days later, the weather still 
 promising well, we decided to camp for 
 a few days on the Upper Wiggin's 
 Fork to hunt. It was a lovely spot; 
 one of those little grassy parks which 
 but for the uprising masses of mountains 
 and towering trees might have sur- 
 rounded your country home. 
 
That first night as we sat around the 
 camp fire there came out of the black- 
 ness behind us a faint greeting — 
 Wheres Who — Where s Who — from a 
 denizen of this mountain park, the 
 great horned owl. The next morning 
 we packed biscuits into our saddle-bags 
 and separated for the day into two par- 
 ties, Nimrod and the Horsewrangler, 
 the Host and myself, leaving the 
 Cook to take care of camp. We were 
 hunting for elk, mountain lion, or 
 bear. Nimrod had his camera, as well 
 as his gun, a combination which the 
 Horsewrangler eyed with scant toler- 
 ance. 
 
 The Host led me down the Wiggin's 
 Fork for two miles, when we came out 
 upon a sandy, pebbly stretch which 
 in spring the torrents entirely covered, 
 but now had been dried up for 
 
 3 
 
 T 
 
months. I was following mechanically, 
 guiding Blondey's feet among the 
 cobblestones, for nature had paved the 
 place very badly, without much thought 
 for anything beyond the pleasure of 
 being alive, when the Host suddenly 
 stopped and pointed to the ground. 
 There I made out the track of a huge 
 bear going the way we were, and be- 
 yond was another, and another. Then 
 they disappeared like a row of post- 
 holes into the distance. The Host said 
 there was only one bear in that region 
 that could make a track like that; in 
 spite of the fact that this was beyond 
 his range, it must be Meeteetsee Wahb. 
 He got off his horse and measured the 
 track Yes, the hind foot tracked four- 
 teen inches. What a hole in the ground 
 it looked ! 
 
 The Host said the maker of it was 
 
probably far away, as he judged the 
 track to be several weeks old. I had 
 heard so many tales of this monster 
 that when I gazed upon his track I felt 
 as though I were looking at the auto- 
 graph of a hero. 
 
 We saw other smaller grizzly and 
 black bear tracks that day, so it was 
 decided to set a bear bait. Our Host 
 was a cattle king, and could wage war 
 on bears with a good conscience. The 
 usual three-cornered affair of logs was 
 fixed, the trap in the centre and elk 
 meat as a decoy. Horse meat is more 
 alluring, but we deemed we would not 
 need that, since we had with us "a 
 never-failing bear charm." Its object 
 was to suggest a lady bear, and thus 
 attract some gallant to her side. The 
 secret of the preparation of this charm 
 had been confided to Nimrod by an old 
 
 
 A 
 
hunter the year before. It was a liquid 
 composed of rancid fish oil, and — but 
 I suppose I must not tell. A more un- 
 godly odour I have never known. Nim- 
 rod put a few drops of it on his horse's 
 feet, and all the other horses straightway 
 ostracised him for several days till the 
 worst of it wore away. Even the cook 
 allowed " it was all-fired nasty." So 
 some of this bear charm went on the 
 bait. 
 
 The next morning, as we started out 
 for the day to roam the mountains, we 
 first inspected the bear pen. Nothing 
 had been near it. Indeed that charm 
 would keep everything else away, if not 
 the bear himself. 
 
 The next day it was the same story, 
 but this really was no argument for or 
 against the charm, because, as I was told, 
 bears in feeding usually make about a 
 
two weeks' circuit, and although we 
 had seen many tracks they were all stale, 
 demonstrating in a rough way that if N 
 we could linger for a week or two we ^1 
 would be sure to catch some one of the p 
 trackers on the return trip. p 
 
 This we could not do, as the expected § 
 snow-storm was now threatening, and 
 we were still two days from the Divide. 
 To be snowed up there would be serious. 
 Before we could get packed up the snow 
 began, falling steadily and quietly as 
 though reserving its forces for later vio- 
 lence. We had been travelling about 
 an hour from where we broke camp, 
 when Nimrod beckoned me to join 
 him where he had halted with the 
 Horsewrangler a little off the line the 
 pack train was following. I rode up 
 quietly, thinking it might be game. 
 But no; Horsewrangler pointed to a 
 
little bank where there was a circular 
 opening in the trees. I looked, but did 
 not understand. 
 
 " Do you see that dip in the ground 
 there where the snow melts as fast as it 
 drops'?" 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Wal, that there's a bear bath." 
 
 " A bear's bath ! " I exclaimed, sus- 
 pecting a hoax. 
 
 "Yes, a sulphur spring. I reckon 
 this here one belongs to the Big 
 Grizzly." 
 
 We examined the place with much 
 interest, but found no fresh tracks, and 
 the snow had covered most of the stale 
 ones, as " of course he ain't got no call 
 for it in winter. Like as not, he's denned 
 up somewheres near, though it's a mite 
 early." 
 
 This was thrilling. Perhaps we 
 
might pass within a few feet of Wahb 
 and never know it. It was like being 
 told that the ghost of the dear departed 
 is watching you. Nimrod pointed out 
 to me a tree with the bark scratched 
 and torn off for several feet — one of 
 Wahb's rubbing trees. He located the 
 sunning ledge for me, and then we re- 
 luctantly hurried on, for the journey 
 ahead promised to be long and hard. 
 Indeed I found it so. 
 
 There were many indications that the 
 storm was a serious one, and not the 
 least of these was the behaviour of the 
 little chief hare, or pika. As we as- 
 cended the rocky mountain-side we saw 
 many of these little creatures scurrying 
 hither and thither with bundles of hay 
 in their mouths, which they deposited 
 in tiny hay-cocks in sheltered places 
 under rocks. So hard were they work- 
 
A 
 
 ing that they could not even stop to be 
 afraid of us. As all the party, but my- 
 self, knew, this meant bad weather and 
 winter; for these cute, overgrown rats 
 are reliable barometers, and they gave 
 every indication that they were belated 
 in getting their food supply, which had 
 been garnered in the autumn after the 
 manner of their kind, properly housed 
 for winter use. 
 
 All that day we worked our way 
 through the forest with the silent snow 
 deepening around us, ever up and up, 
 eight thousand, nine thousand, ten thou- 
 sand feet. It was an endless day 01 
 freezing in the saddle, and of snow 
 showers in one's face from the overladen 
 branches. I was frightfully cold and 
 miserable. Every minute seemed the 
 last I could endure without screeching. 
 But still our Host pushed on. It was 
 
necessary to get near enough to the top 
 of the Continental Divide so that we $ jj 
 could cross it the next day. It began w 
 to grow dark about three o'clock ; the 'I 
 storm increased. I kept saying over p 
 and over to myself what I was deter- p 
 mined I should not say out loud: § 
 
 " Oh, please stop and make camp ! 
 I cannot stay in this saddle another 
 minute. My left foot is frozen. I 
 know it is, and the saddle cramp is un- 
 bearable. I am so hungry, so cold, so 
 exhausted ; oh, please stop ! " Then, 
 having wailed this out under my breath, 
 I would answer it harshly : " You 
 little fool, stop your whimpering. The 
 others are made of flesh and blood 
 too. We should be snowbound if we 
 stopped here. Don't be a cry-baby. 
 There is lots of good stuff in you yet. 
 This only seems terrible because you 
 are not used to it, so brace up." 
 
THUS I FOUGHT THROUGH THE AFTERNOON. 
 
Then 1 would even smile at Nimrod 
 who kept keen watch on me, or wave 
 my hand at the Host, who was in front. 
 This appearance of unconcern helped 
 me for a few seconds, and then I would 
 begin the weary round : " Oh, my foot, 
 my back, my head ; I cannot endure it 
 another moment ; I can't, I can't." Yet 
 all the while knowing that I could and 
 would. Thus I fought through the 
 afternoon, and at last became just a 
 numb thing on the horse with but one 
 thought, " I can and will do it." So at 
 last when the order came to camp in 
 four feet of snow ten thousand feet 
 above the sea, with the wind and snow 
 blowing a high gale, I just drew rein 
 and sat there on my tired beast. 
 
 We disturbed a band of mountain 
 sheep that got over the deep snow with 
 incredible swiftness. It was my first 
 view of these animals, but it aroused no 
 
enthusiasm in me, only a vague wonder 
 that they seemed to be enjoying them- 
 selves. Finally Nimrod came and pulled 
 me off, I was too stiff and numb to get 
 down myself. Then I found that the 
 snow was so deep I could not go four 
 feet. Not to be able to move about 
 seemed to me the end of all things. I 
 simply dropped in the snow — it was 
 impossible to ever be warm and happy 
 again — and prepared at last to weep. 
 
 But I looked around first — Nimrod 
 was coaxing a pack animal through the 
 snow to a comparatively level place 
 where our tent and bed things could 
 be placed. The Host was shovelling 
 a pathway between me and the spot 
 where the Cook was coaxing a fire. The 
 Horse wrangler was unpacking the horses 
 alone (so that I might have a fire the 
 sooner\ They were all grim — doubtless 
 
as weary as I — but they were all working 
 for my ultimate comfort, while I was 
 about to repay them by sitting in the 
 snow and weeping. I pictured them in 
 four separate heaps in the snow, all 
 weeping. This was too much ; I did 
 not weep. Instead by great effort I 
 managed to get my horse near the fire, 
 and after thawing out a moment unsad- 
 dled the tired animal, who galloped off 
 gladly to join his comrades, and thus I 
 became once more a unit in the eco- 
 nomic force. 
 
 But bad luck, had crossed its fingers 
 at me that day without doubt, and I 
 had to be taught another lesson. I tell 
 of it briefly as a warning to other 
 women ; of course men always know 
 better, instinctively, as they know how 
 to fight. I presume you will agree that 
 ignorance is punished more cruelly than 
 
any other thing, and that in most cases 
 good intentions do not lighten the 
 offence. My ignorance that time was 
 of the effect of eating snow on an empty 
 stomach. My intentions were of the 
 best, for, being thirsty, I ate several 
 handfuls of snow in order to save the 
 cook from getting water out of a brook 
 that was frozen. But my punishment 
 was the same — a severe chill which 
 made me very ill. 
 
 I had been cold all day, but that is a 
 very different thing from having a chill. 
 I felt stuffed with snow ; snow water ran 
 in my veins, snow covered the earth, the 
 peaks around me. I was mad with 
 snow. They gave me snow whisky 
 and put me beside a snow fire. I had 
 not told any one what I had done, not 
 realising what was the mischief maker, 
 and it really looked as though I had 
 heart disease, or something dreadful. 
 
 
 A 
 N 
 
 F 
 8 
 
 
 
 mmMmm JOl. 
 
G 
 
 l\ 
 
 They put rugs and coats around me 
 till I could not move with their weight ; 
 but they were putting them around a 
 snow woman. The only thing I felt 
 was the icy wind, and that went through 
 my shivering, shaking self. The snow 
 was falling quietly and steadily, as it had 
 fallen all day. We must cross yonder 
 divide to-morrow. It was no time to 
 be ill. Every one felt that, and big, 
 black gloom was settling over the camp, 
 when I by way of being cheerful re- 
 marked to the Host: "Do you-ou 
 kno-ow, I feel as though there was 
 n-nothing of me b-but the sno-ow I ate 
 an hour ago." 
 
 " Snow ! " he exclaimed. " Did you 
 eat much ? Well, no wonder you are 
 ill." 
 
 The effect was instantaneous. Every- 
 body looked relieved ; I was not even a 
 heroine. 
 
" I will soon cure you," said the Host, 
 as he poured out more whisky, and the 
 Cook reheated some soup and chocolate. 
 The hot drinks soon succeeded in thaw- 
 ing me from a snow woman back to 
 shivering flesh and blood which was 
 supportable. 
 
 Nimrod looked pleasant again and 
 began studying the mountain sheep 
 tracks. The cook fell to whistling 
 softly from one side of his mouth, while 
 a cigarette dangled from the other, as 
 was his wont when he puttered about 
 the fire. The Horsewrangler was mak- 
 ing everything tight for the night 
 against wind and snow. The Host 
 lighted a cigarette, a calm expression 
 glided over his face, and he became 
 chatty, and, although the storm was just 
 as fierce and the thermometer just as 
 low, peace was restored to Camp Snow. 
 
The next day we crossed the divide, 
 and not a day too soon. The snow was 
 so deep that the trail breaker in front 
 J was in danger of going over a precipice 
 p or into a rock crevice at any time. 
 P After him came the pack animals, so 
 o that they could make a path for us. 
 The path was just the width of the 
 horse, and in some places the walls of it 
 rose above my head. In such places I 
 had to keep my feet high up in the 
 saddle to prevent them from being 
 crushed. For a half day we struggled 
 upwards with danger stalking by our 
 si'des, then on the very ridge of the 
 divide itself, 11,500 feet in the air, with 
 the icy wind blowing a hurricane of 
 blinding snow, we skirted along a preci- 
 pice the edge of which the snow cov- 
 ered so that we could not be sure when 
 a misstep might send us over into 
 
whatever is waiting for us in the next 
 world. 
 
 But fortunately we did not even lose a 
 horse. Then came the plunging down, 
 down, with no chance to pick steps 
 because of the all-concealing snow. 
 Those, indeed, were " stirring times," 
 but we made camp that night in clear 
 weather and good spirits. We were on 
 the right side of the barrier and only- 
 two days from the Palette Ranch — and 
 safety, not to say luxury. 
 
 If you had Aladdin's lamp and asked 
 for a shooting box, you could hardly 
 expect to find anything more ideal than 
 the Palette Ranch. There is no spot 
 in the world more beautiful or more 
 health giving. It is tucked away by 
 itself in the heart of the Rockies, 150 
 miles from the railroad, 40 miles from 
 the stage route, and surrounded on the 
 
 F 
 § 
 
 T 
 
A 
 
 V 
 
 o 
 
 \ N 
 
 N 
 D 
 E 
 R 
 F 
 O 
 G 
 T 
 
 three sides by a wilderness of moun- 
 tains. And when after travelling over 
 these for three weeks with compass as 
 guide, one dark, stormy night we stum- 
 bled and slipped down a mountain side 
 and across an icy brook to its front 
 lawn, the message of good cheer that 
 streamed in rosy light from its windows 
 seemed like an opiate dream. 
 
 We entered a large living room, hung 
 with tapestries and hunting trophies 
 where a perfectly appointed table was 
 set opposite a huge stone fireplace, 
 blazing with logs. Then came a deli- 
 cious course dinner with rare wines, and 
 served by a French chef. The surprise 
 and delight of it in that wilderness — 
 but the crowning delight was the guest- 
 room. As we entered, it was a wealth 
 of colour in Japanese effect, soft glowing 
 lanterns, polished floors, fur rugs, silk- 
 
 £>-zi 
 
 ( > i/Or 
 
 *to 
 
 
furnished beds and a crystal mantel- 
 piece (brought from Japan) which re- 
 flected the fire-light in a hundred tints. 
 Beyond, through an open door, could be 
 seen the tiled bath-room. It was a room B 
 that would be charming anywhere, but p 
 in that region a veritable fairy's cham- § 
 ber. Truly it is a canny Host who 
 can thus blend harmoniously the human 
 luxuries of the East and the natural 
 glories of the West. 
 
 In our rides around the Palette I saw 
 Wahb's tracks once again. The Host 
 had taken us to a far away part of 
 his possessions. Three beautiful wolf 
 hounds frisked along beside us, when 
 all at once they became much excited 
 about something they smelt in a little 
 scrub-pine clump on the right. We 
 looked about for some track or sign 
 
that would explain their behaviour. I 
 
 m spied a huge bear track. 
 
 w " Hah ! " I thought, " Wahb at last," 
 
 Jn and my heart went pit-a-pat as I pointed 
 
 d it out to Nimrod. He recognised it 
 
 P but remained far too calm for my fancy. 
 
 o I pointed into the bushes with signs of 
 
 " Hurrah, it's Wahb." I received in 
 
 reply a shake of the head and a pitying 
 
 smile. How was I to know that the 
 
 dogs were saying as plainly as dogs 
 
 need to " A bobcat treed " *? 
 
 So I followed meekly and soon saw 
 the bobcat's eyes glaring at us from the 
 topmost branches. The Host took a 
 shot at it with the camera which the 
 lynx did not seem to mind, and calling 
 off the disappointed dogs we went on 
 our way. The Host allows no shoot- 
 ing within a radius of twelve miles of the 
 
Palette. Any living thing can find 
 protection there and the result is that 
 any time you choose to ride forth you 
 can see perfectly wild game in their 
 homeland. 
 
 It was not till the next year that I 
 really saw Wahb. It was at his sum- 
 mer haunt, the Fountain Hotel in the 
 Yellowstone National Park. If you 
 were to ask Nimrod to describe the 
 Fountain geyser or Hell Hole, or any 
 of the other tourist sights thereabouts, 
 I am sure he would shake his head and 
 tell you there was nothing but bears 
 around the hotel. For this was the 
 occasion when Nimrod spent the entire 
 day in the garbage heap watching the 
 bears, while I did the conventional 
 thing and saw the sights. 
 
 About sunset I got back to the hotel. 
 
 I 
 
 A 
 
Much to my surprise I could not find 
 Nimrod ; and neither had he been seen 
 since morning, when he had started in 
 the direction of the garbage heap in the 
 woods some quarter of a mile back 
 from the hotel. Anxiously I hurried 
 there, but could see no Nimrod. In- 
 stead I saw the outline of a Grizzly 
 feeding quietly on the hillside. It was 
 very lonely and gruesome. Under 
 other circumstances I certainly would 
 have departed quickly the way I came, 
 but now I must find Nimrod. It was 
 growing dark, and the bear looked a 
 shocking size, as big as a whale. Dear 
 me, perhaps Nimrod was inside — Jonah 
 style. Just then I heard a sepulchral 
 whisper from the earth. 
 
 " Keep quiet, don't move, it's the 
 Big Grizzly." 
 
 I looked about for the owner of the 
 
W> 
 
 A> 
 
 whisper and discovered Nimrod not far 
 
 away in a nest he had made for himself 
 
 in a pile of rubbish. I edged nearer. n 
 
 " See, over there in the woods are 'I 
 
 two black bears. You scared them d 
 
 away. Isn't he a monster?" indicating ^ 
 
 Wahb. §. 
 
 T 
 
 I responded with appropriate enthu- 
 siasm. Then after a respectful silence I 
 ventured to say : 
 
 " How long have you been here ? " 
 
 " All day — and such a day — thir- 
 teen bears at one time. It is worth all 
 your geysers rolled into one. 
 
 " H'm — Have you had anything to 
 eat ? " 
 
 " No." Another silence, then I began 
 again. 
 
 "Arn't you hungry? Don't you 
 want to come to dinner?" 
 
 He nodded yes. Then I sneaked 
 
away and came back as soon as possible 
 with a change of clothes. The scene 
 was as I had left it, but duskier. I 
 stood waiting for the next move. The 
 Grizzly made it. He evidently had 
 finished his meal for the night, and now 
 moved majestically off up the hill 
 towards the pine woods. At the edge 
 of these he stood for a moment, Wahb's 
 last appearance, so far as I am con- 
 cerned, for, as he posed, the fading light 
 dropped its curtain of darkness between 
 us, and I was able to get Nimrod away. 
 
V 
 
 § 
 
 A 
 N 
 
 b 
 
 N 
 D 
 E 
 R 
 F 
 O 
 O 
 T 
 
 XII. 
 
 THE DEAD HUNT. 
 3 
 
X 
 
 XII. 
 
 O hunt the wily puma, 
 the wary elk, or the 
 fleet-footed antelope 
 is to have experiences 
 strange and varied, but 
 for the largest assort- 
 ment of thrills in an equal time the 
 ' dead hunt ' is the most productive. 
 My acquaintance with a ' dead hunt ' 
 
 — which is by no means a ' still hunt ' 
 
 — began and ended at Raven Agency. 
 It included horses, bicycles, and In- 
 dians, and followed none of the cus- 
 tomary rules laid down for a hunt, 
 either in progress or result. 
 
And, not to antagonise the reader, 
 I will say now that it was very naughty 
 to do what I did, an impolite and un- 
 generous thing to do, on a par with 
 the making up of slumming parties to 
 pry into the secrets of the poor. It 
 was the act of a vandal, and at times — 
 in the gray dawn and on the first day 
 of January — I am sorry about it; but 
 then I should not have had that carved 
 bead armlet, and as that is the tail of 
 my story, I will put it in the mouth 
 and properly begin. 
 
 Nimrod and I went to the United 
 States agency for the Asrapako or 
 Raven Indians in — well, never mind, 
 not such a far cry from the Rockies, 
 unless you are one of those uncomfort- 
 able persons who carry a map of the 
 p" United States in your mind's eye — be- 
 cause Burfield was there painting Many 
 
 O 
 
 M 
 
 A, 
 
 N' 
 
 A 
 
Whacks, the famous chief; because 
 Nimrod wanted to know what kind 
 of beasties lived in that region ; and 
 because I wanted a face to face en- 
 counter with the Indian at home. I 
 got it. 
 
 The first duty of a stranger at Raven 
 Agency is to visit the famous battle- 
 field, three miles away; and the Agent, 
 an army officer, very charmingly made 
 up a horseback party to escort us 
 there. He put me on a rawboned 
 bay who, he said, was a "great goer." 
 It was no merry jest. I was nearly 
 the last to mount and quite the first to 
 go flying down the road. The Great 
 Goer galloped all the way there. His 
 mouth was as hard as nails, and I could 
 not check him; still, the ride was no 
 worse than being tossed in a blanket for 
 half an hour. 
 
On the very spot, I heard the story 
 of the tragic Indian fight by one who 
 claimed to have been an eye-witness. 
 Every place where each member of 
 that heroic band fell, doing his duty, is 
 marked by a small marble monument, 
 and as I looked over the battle ground 
 and saw these symbols of beating hearts, 
 long still in death, clustered in twos 
 and threes and a dozen where each had 
 made the last stand, every pillar seemed 
 to become a shadowy soldier ; the whole 
 awful shame of the massacre swept over 
 me, and I was glad to head my horse ab- 
 ruptly for home. And then there were 
 other things to think about, things 
 more intimate and real. No sooner 
 did the Great Goer's nose point in the 
 direction of his stable than he gave a 
 great bound, as though a bee had stung 
 him; then he lowered his head, laid 
 back his ears, and — gallopped home. 
 

 
WE WHIZZED ACROSS THE RAILROAD TRACK IN FRONT OF 
 THE DAY EXPRESS. 
 
w 
 
 ' v I yanked and tugged at the bit. It 
 
 m was as a wisp of hay in his mouth. I 
 
 n might as well have been a monkey or a 
 
 Jn straw woman bobbing up and down on 
 
 d his back. Pound, pound, thump, thump, 
 
 P gaily sped on the Great Goer. There 
 
 o were dim shouts far behind me for a 
 T 
 
 while, then no more. The roadside 
 
 whipped by, two long streaks of green. 
 We whizzed across the railroad track 
 in front of the day express, accom- 
 panied by the engine's frantic shriek of 
 " down brakes." If a shoe had caught 
 in the track — ah ! I lost my hat, my 
 gold hatpin, every hairpin, and brown 
 locks flew out two feet behind. 
 
 Away went my watch, then the all in 
 two pockets, knife, purse, match-box — 
 surely this trail was an improvement on 
 Tom Thumb's bread crumbs. One 
 foot was out of the stirrup. I wrapped 
 the reins around the pommel and clung 
 
*$& 
 
 {(... 
 
 on. There is a gopher hole — that 
 means a broken leg for him, a clavicle 
 and a few ribs for me. No; on we go. 
 Ah, that stony brook ahead we soon 
 must cross ! Ye gods, so young and so 
 fair ! To perish thus, the toy of a raw- 
 boned Great Goer ! 
 
 Pound, pound, pound, the hard road 
 rang with the thunder of hoofs. Could 
 I endure it longer? Oh, there is the 
 stream — surely he will stop. No ! He 
 is going to jump! It's an awful dis- 
 tance ! With a frantic effort I got my 
 feet in the stirrups. He gathered him- 
 self together. I shut my eyes. Oh ! 
 We missed the bank and landed in the 
 water — an awful mess. But the Great 
 Goer scrambled out, with me still on 
 top somehow, and started on. I pulled 
 on the reins again with every muscle, 
 trying to break his pace, or his neck — 
 
 R 
 
 F 
 
 8 
 
 T 
 
anything that was his. Then there was 
 a flapping noise below. We both 
 heard it, we both knew what it was — 
 the cinch worked loose, that meant the 
 saddle loose. 
 
 In desperation I clutched the Great 
 Goer's mane with both hands and, lean- 
 ing forward, yelled wildly in his ears : 
 
 "Whoa, whoa! The saddle's turn- 
 ing ! Whoa ! Do you wa-ant to ki-ill 
 
 me?" 
 
 Do not tell me that the horse is not a 
 noble, intelligent animal with a vast 
 comprehension of human talk and sym- 
 pathy for human woe. For the Great 
 Goer pulled up so suddenly that I 
 nearly went on without him in the line 
 of the least resistance. Then he stood 
 still and went to nibbling grass as pla- 
 cidly as though he had not been doing 
 racing time for three miles, and I 
 
should have gone on forever believing 
 in his wondrous wit had I not turned $ 
 and realised that he was standing in his H /y 
 own pasture lot. ' I 
 
 Seeking to console my dishevelled t> 
 self as I got off, I murmured, " Well, f 
 it was a sensation any way — an abso- o 
 lutely new one," just as Nimrod gal- 
 lopped up, and seeing I was all right, 
 called out : 
 
 " Hello, John Gilpin ! " That is the 
 way with men. 
 
 My scattered belongings were gath- 
 ered up by the rest of the party, and 
 each as he arrived with the relic he had 
 gathered, made haste to explain that his 
 horse had no chance with my mount. 
 
 I thanked the Agent for the Great 
 Goer without much comment. (See 
 advice to Woman-who-goes-hunting- 
 with-her-husband.) But that is why, 
 
N 
 D 
 E 
 R 
 F 
 O 
 O 
 T 
 
 the next day, when Burfield confided 
 to me that he knew where there were 
 some ' Dead-trees ' (not dead trees) 
 that could be examined without fear 
 of detection, I preferred to borrow the 
 doctor's wife's bicycle. 
 
 Dead-trees'? Very likely you know 
 what I did not until I saw for myself, 
 that the Asrapako, in common with 
 several Indian tribes, place their dead 
 in trees instead of in the ground. As 
 the trees are very scarce in that arid 
 country, and only to be found in gullies 
 and along the banks of the Little Big 
 Buck River, nearly every tree has its 
 burden of one or more swathed-up 
 bodies bound to its branches, half hid- 
 den by the leaves, like great cocoons 
 — most ghastly reminders of the end 
 of all human things. 
 
 It was to a cluster of these ' dead- 
 
trees,' five miles away, that Burfield 
 guided me, and it was on this ride that 
 the wily wheel, stripped of all its glam- 
 our of shady roads, tete-a-tetes, down 
 grades, and asphalts, appeared as its p 
 true, heavy, small seated, stubborn self. p 
 I can undertake to cure any bicycle § 
 enthusiast. The receipt is simple and 
 here given away. First, take two 
 months of Rocky Mountains with a 
 living sentient creature to pull you up 
 and down their rock-ribbed sides, to 
 help out with his sagacity when your 
 own fails, and to carry you at a long 
 easy lope over the grassy uplands some 
 eight or ten thousand feet above the 
 sea in that glorious bracing air. Sec- 
 ondly, descend rapidly to the Montana 
 plains — hot, oppressive, enervating — or 
 to the Raven Agency, if you will, and 
 attempt to ride a wheel up the only hill 
 
:29 
 
 T 
 
 in all that arid stretch of semi desert, a 
 m rise of perhaps three hundred feet. 
 n It is enough. You will find that your 
 
 P head is a sea of dizziness, that your 
 d lungs have refused to work, that your 
 P heart is pounding aloud in agony, and 
 8 you will then and there pronounce the 
 wheel an instrument of torture, devised 
 for the undoing of woman. 
 
 I tried it. It cured me, and, once 
 cured, the charms of the wheel are as 
 vapid as the defence of a vigilant com- 
 mittee to the man it means to hang. 
 Stubborn — it would not go a step with- 
 out being pushed. It would not even 
 stand up by itself, and I literally had to 
 push it — it, as well as myself on it — in 
 toil and dust and heat the whole way. 
 Nimrod said his bicycle betrayed itself, 
 too, only not so badly. Of course, that 
 was because he was stronger. The 
 
-ii- 
 
 ni 
 
 ;-.\_. 
 
 •% 
 
 I"") 
 
 / C5> 
 
 
 \ <^> 
 
 \ 
 
 \ 
 
 ) 
 
 %. 
 
 
 "S^ 
 
 "** 
 
 ~*2i 
 
 .? \ 
 
 •?>. 
 
 \. 
 
 % 
 
 "3 
 
 i % 
 
 
 } X 
 
 } "'■■-... 
 
 
 r/ ^~- 3l» 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 weaker one is, the more stubbornly bi- 
 cycles behave. Every one knows that. 
 And they are so narrow minded. They 
 needs must stick to the travelled road, 
 and they behave viciously when they 
 get in a rut. Imagine hunting ante- 
 lope across sage-brush country on a 
 bicycle ! I know a surveyor who tried 
 it once. They brought him home with 
 sixteen broken bones and really quite 
 a few pieces of the wheel, improved to 
 Rococo. Bah ! Away with it and its 
 limitations, and those of its big brother, 
 the automobile ! Sing me no death 
 knell of the horse companion. 
 
 At last, with the assistance of trail 
 and muscle, the five miles were cov- 
 ered, and we came to a dip in the earth 
 which some bygone torrent had hol- 
 lowed out, and so given a chance for a 
 little moisture to be retained to feed 
 
 v 
 
 -«=> 
 
 X 
 
the half-dozen cottonwoods and rank 
 grass that dared to struggle for exist- 
 ence in that baked up sage-brush waste 
 which the government has set aside for 
 the Raven paradise. 
 
 We jumped — no, that is horse talk 
 — we sprawled off our wheels and left 
 the stupid things lying supinely on 
 their sides, like the dead lumpish 
 things they are, and descended a steep 
 bank some ten feet into the gully. 
 
 It was a gruesome sight, in the hour 
 before sunset, with not a soul but our- 
 selves for miles around. The lowering- 
 sun lighted up the under side of the 
 leaves and branches and their strange 
 burdens, giving an effect uncanny and 
 weird, as though caused by unseen foot- 
 lights. Not a sound disturbed the op- 
 pressive quiet, not the quiver of a twig. 
 Five of the six trees bore oblong bun- 
 
 
dies, wrapped in comforters and blank- 
 ets, and bound with buckskin to the 
 branches near the trunk, fifteen or 
 twenty feet from the ground, too high 
 for coyotes, too tight for vultures. But 
 what caught our attention as we 
 dropped into the gully was one of the 
 bundles that had slipped from its fas- 
 tenings and was hanging by a thong. 
 
 It needed but a tug to pull it to the 
 ground. Burfield supplied that tug, 
 and we all got a shock when the 
 wrappings, dislodged by the fall, parted 
 at one end and disclosed the face of a 
 mummy. I had retreated to the other 
 end of the little dip. not caring to wit- 
 ness some awful spectacle of disinte- 
 gration; but a mummy — no museum- 
 cased specimen, labelled ' hands off/ but 
 a real mummy of one's own finding 
 — was worth a few shudders to examine. 
 
 A 
 
I looked into the shrivelled, but 
 otherwise normal, face of the Indian 
 woman. What had been her lite, her 
 heart history, now as completely gone 
 as though it had never been — thirty 
 years of life struggle in snow and sun, 
 with, perhaps, a little joy, and then 
 what ? 
 
 Seven brass rings were on her thumb 
 and a carved wooden armlet encircled 
 the wrist. These I was vandal enough 
 to accept from Burfield. There were 
 more rings and armlets, but enough is 
 enough. As the gew-gaws had a pecu- 
 liar, gaseous, left-over smell, I wrapped 
 them in my gloves, and surely if trifles 
 determine destiny, that act was one of 
 the trifles that determined the fact that 
 I was to be spared to this life for yet a 
 while longer. For, as I was carelessly 
 wrapping up my spoil, with a nose very 
 
E 
 
 much turned up, Burfield suddenly 
 started and then began bundling the 
 wrappings around the mummy at great 
 speed. Something was serious. I stoop- 
 ed to help him, and he whispered : 
 
 " Thought I heard a noise. If the p 
 Indians catch us, there'll be trouble, § 
 I'm afraid." T 
 
 We hastily stood the mummy on 
 end, head down, against the tree, and 
 tried to make it look as though the 
 coyotes had torn it down, after it had 
 fallen within reach, as indeed they had, 
 originally. Then we crawled to the 
 other end of the gully, scrambled up 
 the bank, and emerged unconcernedly. 
 
 There was nothing in sight but long 
 stretches of sage brush, touched here 
 and there by the sun's last gleams. We 
 were much relieved. Said Burfield : 
 
 " The Indians are mighty ugly over 
 
that Spotted Tail fight, and if they had 
 caught us touching their dead, it might 
 have been unhealthy for us." 
 
 " Why, what would they do *? " I 
 asked, suddenly realising what many 
 white men never do — that Indians are 
 emotional creatures like ourselves. The 
 brass rings became uncomfortably con- 
 spicuous in my mind. 
 
 " Well, I don't suppose they would 
 dare to kill us so close to the agency, 
 but I don't know ; a mad Injun's a bad 
 Injun." 
 
 Nevertheless, this opinion did not 
 deter him from climbing a tree where 
 three bodies lay side by side in a curi- 
 ous fashion ; but I had no more in- 
 terest in 'dead-trees,' and fidgeted. 
 Nimrod had wandered off some dis- 
 tance and was watching a gopher hole- 
 up for the night. The place in the fad- 
 
ing light was spooky, but it was of live 
 Indians, not dead ones, that I was 
 thinking. 
 
 There is a time for all things, and 
 clearly this was the time to go back to 
 Severin's dollar-a-day Palace Hotel. 
 I started for the bicycles when two 
 black specks appeared on the horizon 
 and grew rapidly larger. They could 
 be nothing but two men on horseback 
 approaching at a furious gallop. It 
 was but yaller-covered-novel justice that 
 they should be Indians. 
 
 "Quick, Burfield, get out of that 
 tree on the other side ! " It did not 
 take a second for man and tree to be 
 quit of each other, at the imminent 
 risk of broken bones. I started again 
 for the wheels. 
 
 " Stay where you are," said Bur- 
 field ; " we could never get away on 
 
those things. If they are after us, we 
 must bluff it out." 
 
 There was no doubt about their 
 being after us. The two galloping fig 
 ures were pointed straight at us and 
 were soon close enough to show that 
 they were Indians. We stood like 
 posts and awaited them. Thud, thud 
 — ta-thud, thud — on they charged at a 
 furious pace directly at us. They were 
 five hundred feet away — one hundred 
 feet — fifty. 
 
 Now, I always take proper pride in 
 my self possession, and to show how 
 calm I was, I got out my camera, and 
 as the two warriors came chasing up 
 to the fifty-foot limit, I snapped it. I 
 had taken a landscape a minute before, 
 and I do not think that the fact that 
 that landscape and those Indians ap- 
 peared on the same plate is any proof 
 
-r 
 
 that I was in the least upset by the red 
 men's onset. Forty feet, thirty — on 
 they came — ten — were they going to 
 run us down*? 
 
 Five feet full in front of us they g 
 pulled in their horses to a dead stop — p 
 unpleasantly close, unpleasantly sud- ^ 
 den. Then there was an electric si- 
 lence, such as comes between the light- 
 ning's flash and the thunder's crack. 
 The Indians glared at us. We stared 
 at the Indians, each measuring the 
 other. Not a sound broke the still- 
 ness of that desolate spot, save the 
 noisy panting of the horses as they 
 stood, still braced from the shock of 
 the sudden stop. 
 
 For three interminable minutes we 
 faced each other without a move. 
 Then one of the Indians slowly roved 
 his eyes all over the place, searching 
 
FIVE FEET FULL IN FKONT OF US, THEY PULLED THEIR HOUSES 
 TO A DEAD STOP. 
 
suspiciously. From where he stood 
 the tell-tale mummy was hidden by the 
 bank and some bushes, and the tell-tale 
 brass rings and armlet were in my 
 gloves which I held as jauntily as pos- 
 sible. He saw nothing wrong. He 
 turned again to us. We betrayed no 
 signs of agitation. Then he spoke 
 grimly, with a deep scowl on his ugly 
 face : 
 
 "No touch 'em; savey 4 ?" giving a 
 significant jerk of the head towards the 
 trees. 
 
 We responded by a negative shake 
 of the head. Oh, those brass rings ! 
 Why did I want to steal brass rings 
 from the left thumb of an Indian wo- 
 man mummy! Me! I should be carv- 
 ing my name on roadside trees next ! 
 
 There was another silence as before. 
 None of us had changed positions, so 
 
much as a leaf's thickness. Then the 
 ad Indian, _~ im and ugly as the 
 first, spoke sullenly : 
 
 ••No touch 'em: savev?" He laid 
 his hand suggestively on something in ^ 
 his belt- | 
 
 Again we shook our heads in a war § 
 that deprecated the very idea of such a 
 They gave another dissatisfied 
 look around, and slowly turned their 
 ho: c : 
 
 We waited breathless to see which 
 they would go. It they went on 
 the other side or the gully, they must 
 surely see that bundle on the ground 
 and — who can tell what might hap- 
 pen"? But they did not. With many 
 a look backwards, they slowly rode 
 awav. and with them the passive ele- 
 ments of a tragedy. 
 
 I tied my ill-gotten, ill-smelling pelf 
 
:.- • 
 
 on the handle bar of the doctor's wire's 
 bicycle, and we hurried home like 
 spanked children. That night, aftei I 
 had delivered unto the doctors wire 
 her own. and disinfected the gewgaws 
 in carbolic. I added two more subjects 
 to my Never-again lis: — bicycling in 
 Montana and "dead hur." 
 
 v^' 
 
XIII. 
 
 JUST RATTLESNAKES. 
 
 33) 
 
XIII. 
 
 T is a blessing that a 
 rattlesnake has to coil 
 before it can spring. 
 No one has ever writ- 
 ten up life from a rat- 
 tler's point of view, 
 although it has been unfeelingly stated 
 that fear of snakes is an inheritance 
 from our simian ancestors. 
 
 To me, I acknowledge, a rattler is 
 just a horrid snake ; so, when we were 
 told at Markham that rattlers were more 
 common than the cattle which grazed 
 
on every hill, I discovered that there 
 were yet new imps to conquer in my 
 world of fear. Shakspere has said some 
 nice things about fear — " Of all the 
 wonders, ... it seems to me most 
 strange that men should fear " — but he 
 never knew anything about squirming 
 rattlesnakes. 
 
 The Cuttle Fish ranch is five miles 
 from Markham. That thriving metrop- 
 olis has ten houses and eleven saloons, 
 in spite of Dakota being 'prohibition.' 
 Markham is in the heart of the Bad 
 Lands, the wonderful freakish Bad 
 Lands, where great herds of cattle 
 range over all the possible, and some 
 of the impossible, places, while the rest 
 of it — black, green, and red peaks, hills 
 of powdered coal, wicked land cuts 
 that no plumb can fathom, treacherous 
 clay crust over boiling lava, arid hor- 
 
 u 
 
 i 
 
 D 
 E 
 R 
 F 
 
 8 
 
 T 
 
;>» 
 
 rid miles of impish whimsical Nature 
 — is Bad indeed. 
 
 Nimrod and I had been lured to the 
 Cuttle Fish ranch to go on a wolf 
 hunt. The house was a large two storey 
 affair of logs, with a long tail of one 
 storey log outbuildings like a train of 
 box cars. We sat down to dinner the 
 first night with twenty others, a queer 
 lot truly to find in that wild uncivil- 
 ised place. There was an ex-mayor 
 and his wife from a large Eastern city; 
 a United States Senator — the toughest 
 of the party — who appeared at table 
 in his undershirt; four cowboys, who 
 were better mannered than the two 
 New York millionaires' sons who had 
 been sent there to spend their college 
 vacation and get toughened (the pro- 
 cess was obviously succeeding); they 
 made Nimrod apologise for keeping 
 
 W 
 
 H 
 
 it KsHoH^ 
 
his coat on during dinner) ; the three 
 brothers who owned the ranch, and 
 the wife of one of them; several chil- 
 dren ; a prim and proper spinster from 
 Washington — how she got there, who 
 can tell? — and Miss Belle Hadley, the 
 servant girl. 
 
 In studying the case of Belle I at 
 last appreciated the age-old teaching 
 that the greatest dignity belongs to the 
 one who serves. Else why did the ex- 
 mayor's wife bake doughnuts, and the 
 rotund Senator toil at the ice cream 
 freezer with the thermometer at 112 
 degrees, and the millionaires' sons call 
 Belle " Miss Hadley," and I make 
 bows for her organdie dress, while she 
 curled her hair for a dance to be 
 held that evening ten miles away, 
 and to which she went complacently 
 with her pick of the cowboys and her 
 
employers' two best horses, while they 
 stayed at home and did her work ! Else 
 why did this one fetch wood for her, 
 that one peel the potatoes, another wash 
 the dishes ? And when she and the 
 rest of us were seated at meals, and 
 something was needed from the kitchen, 
 why did the unlucky one nearest the 
 door jump up and forage % Belle was 
 never nearest the door. She sat at the 
 middle of the long table, so that she 
 could be handy to everything that was 
 'circulating.' But I refer this case to 
 the author of those delightful papers on 
 the " Unquiet Sex," and hark back to 
 my story. 
 
 That night the moon was full, and 
 the coyotes made savage music around 
 the lonely ranch house. First from the 
 hill across the creek came a snappy 
 wozv-zvow, yac-yac, and then a long 
 
drawn out 000-00 ; then another voice, a 
 soprano, joined in, followed by a bari- 
 tone, and then the star voice of them 
 all — loud, clear, vicious, mournful. For 
 an instant I saw him silhouetted against 
 the rising moon on the hill ridge, head 
 thrown back and muzzle raised, as he 
 gave to the peaceful night his long, 
 howling bark, his " talk at moon " as 
 the Indians put it. The ranchman re- 
 marked that there were " two or three 
 out there," but I knew better. There 
 were dozens, perhaps hundreds, of 
 them ; I am not deaf. 
 
 The next morning we were up with 
 the dawn and started by eight to run 
 down Mountain Billy, the grey wolf 
 who lived on the ranchmen of the Bad 
 Lands. Our outfit was as symmetrical 
 as a pine cone — dogs, horses, mess 
 wagon, food, guns, and men. All we 
 
THE COYOTES MADE SAVAGE MUSIC. 
 
needed was the grey wolf. I was the 
 only woman in the party, and, like 
 "Weary Waddles," tagged behind. 
 
 It was the middle of September, and 
 the weather should have known better. 
 But it was the Bad Lands, and there 
 was a hot spell on. By three o'clock 
 the thermometer showed ii6}4 in the 
 shade, and I believed it. The heat 
 and glare simmered around us like fire. 
 The dogs' tongues nearly trailed in the 
 baked dust, the horses' heads hung low, 
 an iron band seemed ever tightening 
 around my head, as the sun beat down 
 upon all alike with pitiless force. 
 
 When we came to the Little Missoula, 
 even its brackish muddy water was 
 welcome, and I shut my eyes to the 
 dirt in the uninviting brown fluid, and 
 my mind to the knowledge of the hor- 
 rid things it would do to me, and drank. 
 
Tepid, gritty, foul — was it water I 
 had swallowed ? The horse assigned to 
 me, a small, white, benevolent animal 
 named ' Whiskers,' waded in knee 
 deep and did the same. Whiskers was 
 a 'lady's horse,' which, being inter- 
 preted, meant aged eighteen or twenty, 
 with all spirit knocked out by hard 
 work ; a broken down cow pony, in 
 fact, or, in local parlance, a ' skate,' a 
 * goat.' He had lagged considerably 
 behind the rest of the party. 
 
 However, Whiskers did not matter; 
 nothing mattered but the waves on 
 waves of heat that quivered before my 
 eyes. I shut them and began repeat- 
 ing cooling rhymes, such as ' twin 
 peaks snow clad,' ' From Greenland's 
 Icy Mountains,' and the ' Frozen 
 North,' by way of living up to Pro- 
 fessor James' teachings. Whiskers was 
 
N 
 D 
 E 
 R 
 F 
 G 
 O 
 T 
 
 ambling on, half-stupefied with the 
 heat, as I was, when from the road just 
 in front came a peculiar sound. I did 
 not know what it was, but Whiskers 
 did, and he immediately executed a 
 demi volte (see Webster) with an en- 
 ergy I had not thought him capable of. 
 Again came the noise, yes, surely, 
 just as it had been described — like 
 dried peas in a pod — and gliding across 
 the road was a big rattlesnake. I con- 
 fess had Whiskers been so inclined, I 
 should have been content to have 
 passed on with haughty disdain. But 
 Whiskers performed a left flank move- 
 ment so nearly unseating me that I 
 deemed it expedient to drop to the 
 ground, and Whiskers, without wait- 
 ing for orders, retreated down the road 
 at what he meant for a gallop. The 
 rattler stopped his pretty gliding motion 
 
 ,*i* 
 
: ?m me. and seemed in do 
 Then he began to take on a tew quirks 
 
 Hr s going :; ;::'_ and then to 
 
 : ■■ v- 5.. i I. :e:.. -_ .. : .-/._-.. 
 :*: r. ~.v >;"-;•;' -t.._.7- I: ••■.-„; --. ::■ 
 
 .? 
 
 I knew that tradition had fixed the 
 ::::■:* ' r„: :: - : : 7 ..-- i .._;.. r.s: ra> 
 " f?r_ikr: :. r --: n:ore :: r.ecessarj . 
 i 5:::k :;:kr J re r:e:e"; . .ir.i :r. 
 .-- ..--:.. -7 •■ . . ■ 7- ■ . -- : . ; : -* 
 -: 1 : .. r - I bad no 1 
 
 d Jt a stick in sight, and not 
 k ;:cr.e : jj ■ :hi- 2 hiz- -.-_::: bu: 
 there :ne rattier. I cast anol 
 
 despairing glance around and saw. al- 
 most at my feel ~d half hidden by 
 brash, x e-al inches 01 rusty iron 
 — blessed be the pass _ who 
 
 had thrown it there. I da: - ards 
 
 it ar. : lesjf :e tradition, turned on the 
 


 ■ 
 
 
 
 ■-:■ 
 
 «=5 
 
 THE HORRID THING WAS READY FOR ME. 
 
' rattler armed with the goodly remains 
 |m of — a frying pan. 
 
 n The horrid thing was ready for me 
 
 with darting tongue and flattened head 
 — another instant it would have sprung. 
 Smash on its head went my val- 
 iant frying pan and struck a deadly 
 blow, although the thing managed to 
 get from under it. I recaptured my 
 weapon and again it descended upon 
 the reptile's head, settling it this time. 
 Feeling safe, I now took hold of the 
 handle to finish it more quickly. Oh, 
 that tail — that awful, writhing, lash- 
 ing tail ! I can stand Indians, bears, 
 wolves, anything but that tail, and 
 a rattler is all tail, except its head. If 
 that tail touches me I shall let go. It 
 did touch me, I did not let go. Pride 
 held me there, for I heard the sound 
 of galloping hoofs. Whiskers' empty 
 
saddle had alarmed the rest of the 
 party. 
 
 My snake was dead now, so I put 
 one foot on him to take his scalp — his 
 rattles, I mean — when horrid thrills 
 coursed through me. The uncanny 
 thing began to wriggle and rattle with 
 old-time vigour. I do not like to think 
 of that simian inheritance. But, forti- 
 fied by Nimrod's assurance that it was 
 ' purely reflex neuro-ganglionic move- 
 ment,' I hardened my heart and cap- 
 tured his ' pod of dry peas.' 
 
 Oh, about the wolf hunt ! That was 
 all, just heat and rattlesnakes. 
 
 The hounds could not run; one died 
 from sunstroke while chasing a jack 
 rabbit. No one lifted a finger if it 
 could be avoided. All the world was 
 an oven, and after three days we gave 
 up the chase, and leaving Mountain 
 
 F 
 
 § 
 
 T 
 
Billy panting triumphantly somewhere 
 in his lair, trailed back to the ranch 
 house with drooping heads and fifteen 
 rattle-snakes' tails. Oh, no, the hunt 
 was not a failure — for Mountain Billy. 
 
 I 
 
 
 Ti 
 
XIV. 
 AS COWGIRL. 
 
XIV. 
 
 ILL the time of the 
 "WB" round-up all 
 cows looked alike to 
 me. We were still at 
 the Cuttle Fish ranch, 
 which was in a state or 
 great activity because of the fall round- 
 up. Belle, the servant girl, had received 
 less attention of late and had been 
 worked harder, a combination of disa- 
 greeables which caused her to threaten 
 imminent departure. The cowboys, who 
 had been away for several days gather- 
 ing in the stragglers that had wandered 
 
into the wild recesses of those uncanny 
 Bad Land hills, assembled in full force 
 for the evening meal, and announced, 
 between mouthfuls, that the morrow 
 was to be branding day for the several 
 outfits, about two thousand head of 
 cattle in all, the ' WB' included, which 
 were rounded up on the Big Flat two 
 miles distant from the ranch. 
 
 This was the chance for me to be re- 
 lieved of my crass ignorance concern- 
 ing round-ups, really to have a definite 
 conception of the term instead of the 
 sea of vagueness and conjecture into 
 which I was plunged by the usual de- 
 scription — "Oh, just a whole lot of cattle 
 driven to one place, and those that need 
 it are cut out and frescoed." How many 
 was a whole lot, how were they driven, 
 where were they driven from, what 
 were they cut out with, how were 
 
they branded, and when did they need 
 it"? My ignorance was hopeless and 
 pathetic, and those to whom I applied 
 were all too familiar with the process 
 to be able to describe it. I might as 
 well have asked for a full description or 
 how a man ate his dinner. 
 
 "Will you take me to the round- 
 up to-morrow *?" I asked of the k WB' 
 boss. 
 
 " Well, I could have a team hitched 
 up, and Bob could drive you to the 
 Black Nob Hill, where you can get a 
 good view," was the tolerant reply. 
 
 Bob had wrenched his foot the day 
 before, when roping a steer, and was 
 therefore incapacitated for anything but 
 ' woman's work ' — ' a soft job.' 
 
 " Oh, but I do not want to be so far 
 away and look on ; I want to be in it." 
 
 He looked at me out of the angle of 
 
his eye to make sure that I was in 
 earnest. " 'Tain't safe," he said. 
 
 " Then you mean to say that every 
 cowboy risks his life in a round-up?" 
 
 " Oh, well, they're men and take 
 their chances. Besides, it's their busi- 
 ness." 
 
 I never yet have been able to have 
 a direct question answered by a true 
 mountaineer or plainsman by a simple 
 yes or no. Is there something in the 
 bigness of their surroundings that 
 causes the mind to spread over an idea 
 and lose directness like a meadow 
 brook *? 
 
 However, by various wiles known to 
 my kind, the next morning at daybreak 
 I was mounted upon the surest-footed 
 animal in the 'bunch.' 
 
 " She's a trained cow pony and 
 won't lose her head," the boss re- 
 marked. 
 
Thus equipped, I was allowed to 
 m accompany the cowboys to their work, 
 n with the understanding that I was to 
 |v keep at a safe distance from the herd. 
 d Van Anden, a famous 'cutter out,' 
 p whatever that meant, was deputed 
 8 to have an especially watchful eye 
 upon me. Van Anden was a sur- 
 prisingly graceful fellow, who got his 
 six foot of stature in more places dur- 
 ing the day than any of the smaller 
 men. He was evidently a cowboy be- 
 cause he wanted to be one. There 
 were many traces of a college educa- 
 tion and a thorough drilling in good 
 manners in an Eastern home, which 
 report said could still be his if he so 
 wished ; and report also stated that he 
 remained a bachelor in spite of being 
 the most popular man in the country, 
 because of a certain faithless siren who 
 with gay unconcern casts languishing 
 
<2>- 
 
 *ft 
 
 - «5^« 
 
 >1 
 
 glances and spends papa's dollars at 
 Newport. 
 
 But this was no Beau Brummel day. 
 There was work to do, and hard work, 
 as I soon discovered. We had ridden 
 perhaps a mile; my teeth were still 
 chattering in the early morning cold 
 (breaking ice on one's bath water and 
 blowing on one's fingers to enable one 
 to lace heavy boots may suit a cow- 
 boy : I do not pretend to like it), when 
 we began to notice a loud bellowing in 
 the distance. Instantly my compan- 
 ions spurred their horses and we went 
 speeding over the Little Missoula bot- 
 tom lands, around scrub willows and 
 under low hanging branches of oak, 
 one of which captured my hat, after 
 breaking both of the hat pins, and 
 nearly swept me from the saddle. 
 
 On I rushed with the rest, hatless, 
 
and as in a cloud of fury. Van Anden 
 took a turn around that tree and was at 
 my side again with the hat before I 
 realised what he was doing. I jerked 
 out a " thank you " between lopes, and 
 of course forbore to remark that a 
 hat without pins was hollow mockery. 
 I dodged the next low branch so suc- 
 cessfully that the pommel in some mi- 
 raculous way jumped up and smashed 
 the crystal in my watch, the same being 
 carried in that mysterious place, the 
 shirt waist front, where most women 
 carry their watches, pocket books, and 
 love letters. 
 
 When we got into the open the ter- 
 rible bellowing — a combination of shriek, 
 groan, and roar in varying pitch— grew 
 louder, and I could just discern a wav- 
 ing ghostly mass in the gray morning 
 mist. I wondered if this were the herd, 
 
but found it was only the cloud of dust 
 in which it was enveloped. 
 
 Four of the cowboys had already 
 disappeared in different directions. I 
 heard the 'WB' boss say, "Billy, to 
 the left flank. Van, them blamed heif- 
 ers," as he flew past them. 
 
 Van dashed forward, I gave my 
 black mare a cut with the quirt and 
 followed. Van's face, as he turned 
 around to remonstrate, was a study of 
 surprise, distress, and disgust, for I was 
 undoubtedly breaking rules. 
 
 "Don't bother about me," I called 
 as airily as possible, as I shot past him. 
 He had checked his horse's speed, but 
 now there was nothing to do but to 
 follow me as fast as he could. I shall 
 have to record that he swore, as he 
 turned sharply to the right into a group 
 of cattle. Poor man, it was dreadful 
 
 
 fi 
 
 F 
 
 § 
 
 T 
 
 
to saddle him with a woman at such a 
 juncture, but I was not a woman just 
 then. I was a green cowboy and 
 frightened to death, as the cattle closed 
 around me, a heavy mass of ponderous 
 forms, here wedged in tightly and bel- 
 lowing, some with the pain of being 
 crushed, some for their calves. I ex- 
 pected every instant to be trampled 
 under foot. 
 
 " Stick to your horse, whatever you 
 do, and work to the left," I heard Van 
 shouting to me over the backs of a 
 dozen cows. The dust, the noise, and 
 the smell of those struggling creatures 
 appalled and sickened me. How was 
 I ever going to work to the left in that 
 jam *? I could see nothing but backs 
 and heads and horns. I allowed myselt 
 one terrified groan which was fortu- 
 nately lost in the general uproar. But 
 
the pony had been in such a situation 
 before, if I had not, and she taught me 
 what to do. She gave a sudden spring 
 forward when a space just big enough 
 for her appeared, then wove her way 
 a few paces forward between two ani- 
 mals who had room enough on the 
 other side of them to give way a little, 
 while the space I had just left had 
 closed up, a tight mass of groaning 
 creatures. 
 
 Thus we worked our way to the left 
 whenever there was a chance, and at 
 last through the dust I could see the 
 heavenly open space beyond. Forget- 
 ting my tactics, I made straight for it, 
 and was caught in one of those terrible 
 waves of tightly pressed creatures 
 which is caused by those on the out- 
 side pressing towards the centre, and 
 the centre giving until there is no more 
 
 T 
 
space, when comes the crush. Fortu- 
 nately I was on the outskirts of this 
 crush, and by holding my feet up high 
 we managed to squeeze through that 
 dreadful, dust covered, stamping, snort- 
 ing bedlam into the glorious free air 
 and sunshine. Already I had a much 
 better conception of what a ' whole lot ' 
 of cattle meant. 
 
 From the vantage ground of a little 
 hill I could see the whole herd, and 
 realised that I had been in only a small 
 bunch of it, composed of cows and 
 calves. Had I gone to the right I 
 should soon have gotten into a raging 
 mass of some thousand head of bulls. 
 They were pawing and tearing up the 
 ground that but a little before had been 
 covered with grass and late flowers, and 
 occasionally goring one another. The 
 cowboys were riding on the outskirts 
 
of this life-destroying horde, forcing the 
 stragglers back into line, and by many 
 a sudden dash forward, then to the right, 
 sharp wheel about, and more spurts this 
 way and that, were slowly driving it to- p 
 ward another mass of cattle, a half mile p 
 further on, which could be distinguished o 
 only by the clouds of dust which en- 
 veloped it. 
 
 Van Anden, meanwhile, in the small 
 bunch with which I had had such an 
 intimate acquaintance, was acting as 
 though he had lost his wits, or so it 
 seemed to me until I began to under- 
 stand what he was doing. He would 
 dart into the bunch, scattering cattle 
 right and left, and would weave in and 
 out, out and in, waving his arms, 
 shouting, throwing his rope, occasion- 
 ally hitting an animal across the nose 
 or the flank, sometimes twisting their 
 
tails, dodging blows and kicks, and fi- 
 nally emerge driving before him a cow 
 followed by her calf. These another 
 cowboy would take charge of and drive 
 to a small bunch of cows and calves 
 which I now noticed for the first time, 
 separating them from their relations, 
 who remonstrated in loud bellowings, 
 stampings and freakish, brief, ill judged 
 attacks. And then I understood what 
 it meant to 'cut out' cattle from 'a 
 whole lot.' 
 
 When the calves and cows were 
 finally separated, it was necessary to 
 drive them also to the Big Flat for the 
 afternoon's work of branding those 
 that ' needed it.' Van guarded the 
 rear of the bunch and of course I rode 
 with him, that is as near as I could, 
 for he was as restless as a blue bottle fly 
 in a glass jar, dashing hither and thither, 
 
age to no one. 
 
 A particularly fractious heifer at 
 this point suddenly changed my con- 
 templation of Van Anden's charac- 
 ter into a lively share of Van Anden's 
 job. The creature was making good 
 
 keeping those crazy creatures together, 
 and ever pushing them forward. The $ W 
 dust and heat and noise and smell and N 
 continual action made my head ache. ^T 
 So this was cowboy life, Van's choice ! p 
 I thought of a certain far away, well p 
 ordered home, with perhaps a sweet § 
 voiced mother and well groomed sis- 
 ter, and wondered, even while I knew 
 the answer. On the one hand, peace, 
 comfort, affection, and the eternal 
 sameness ; on the other, effort, hard- 
 ship, fighting sometimes, but ever with 
 the new day a whole world of unlived 
 possibilities, change, action, and bond- 
 
I STARTED ON A GALLOP, SWINGING ONE ARM. 
 
time straight towards me, and as I had 
 dropped considerably behind the herd 
 in order to breathe some tresh air and 
 to be free from the dust, I knew that it 
 meant a long hard chase for Van and 
 his tired horse if I did not head off that 
 heifer; I felt I owed him that much. I 
 had seen the cowboys do that very 
 thing a hundred times that morning, 
 but you cannot stand on your toe by 
 watching a ballet dancer do it. How- 
 ever, I started on a gallop, slanting diag- 
 onally towards the creature, swinging 
 one arm frantically (I really could not 
 let go with both) and yelling " Hi, hi ! " 
 I wondered what would happen next, 
 for to be honest, I was exquisitely 
 scared. Why scared ? It is not for me 
 to explain a woman's dread ot the un- 
 known and untried. 
 
 I heard Van shouting, but could not 
 
understand. To know you are right 
 and then go ahead is a pretty plan, but 
 how to know? The animal did not 
 stop or swerve from its course. We 
 would surely collide. What was I to 
 do ? Oh, for a precedent ! Evidently 
 the mare was aware of one, for she 
 wheeled to the right just in time to 
 miss the oncoming heiter, and we 
 raced alongside for a few seconds. I 
 had so nearly parted company with my 
 mount in the last manoeuvre (centaurs 
 would have an enormous advantage 
 as cowboys) that I had lost all desire 
 to help Van and only wanted to get 
 away from that heifer, to make an hon- 
 ourable dismount, and go somewhere 
 by myself where a little brook babbled 
 nothings, and the forget-me-nots pla- 
 cidly slept. Rough riding and adven- 
 tures of the Calamity Jane order tempt- 
 ed me no more. 
 
 8/7 
 
 T 
 
 E 
 
 /-i 
 
 F 
 
 § 
 f 
 
Whether now the heifer did the 
 proper thing or not, I cannot say, 
 but she circled around with me on the 
 outer side (I suspect my cow pony 
 knew how it was done) and was half 
 way back, to the herd when Van took 
 it in charge. His face bore a broad 
 grin for the first time that day, from 
 what emotions caused I have never 
 been able to determine. I, of course, 
 said nothing. 
 
 Then, oh, the joy of that round up 
 dinner ! The ' WB' outfit had a meal 
 tent, a mess wagon, and a cook for the 
 men, and a rope corral, food and water 
 for the horses. Everybody was happy 
 for the noon hour, save the unlucky 
 ones whose turn it was to guard the 
 herd. Bob had driven the ex-mayor's 
 wife, the sad eyed spinster, and Nim- 
 rod over to join us at dinner. The 
 boss greeted Nimrod with the assur- 
 
ance that I was ' all right ' and could 
 apply any time for a job. I may as 
 well say that Nimrod had allowed me 
 to go without him in the morning, be- 
 cause the cattle business was no novelty 
 to him ; because daybreak rising did not 
 appeal to him as a pastime ; and because, 
 at the time I broached the subject, being 
 engaged in writing a story, he had re- 
 moved but one-eighth of his mind for 
 the consideration of mundane affairs, 
 and that, as any one knows, is insuffic- 
 ient to judge fairly whether the winged 
 thing I was reaching out for was a fly 
 or a bumble bee. In the morning, the 
 story being finished and the other seven- 
 eights of brain at liberty to dwell upon 
 the same question, he decided to follow 
 me, with the result that in the afternoon 
 I rode in the wagon. 
 
 The cowboy meal, which I believe 
 
was not elaborated for us, was a 
 healthy solid affair of meat, vege- 
 tables, hot biscuit, coffee, and prunes, 
 appetisingly cooked and unstintingly 
 served, for the Bad Land appetite is 
 like unto that of the Rocky Mountains, 
 lusty and big. The saddling of fresh 
 horses made a lively scene for a few 
 moments in the corral ; then the men 
 rode off for the afternoon's business of 
 branding. 
 
 The ranch party packed itself into 
 a three-seated buckboard and we fol- 
 lowed behind. We went at a wide 
 safe distance from the half-crazed 
 herds, which had been driven this way 
 and that until they knew not what they 
 wanted, nor what was wanted of them, 
 to where a huge fire was blazing and 
 rapidly turning cold black iron to red 
 hot. These irons were fashioned in 
 
curious shapes, from six to ten inches 
 long and fastened to a four foot iron 
 handle. The smell of burning flesh 
 was in the air, and horrid shrieks. Be- 
 yond was the ceaseless bellowing and 
 stamping and weaving of the herds. 
 
 From the time I got into the wagon 
 and became a mere onlooker, my point 
 of view changed. The exhilaration of 
 action had disappeared. I was a cowboy 
 no longer. The cattle in the morning 
 had been stupid foolish creatures, dan- 
 gerous in their blind strength, which 
 must be made to do what one willed. 
 Now they were poor, dumb, persecuted 
 beasts which must be tormented, even 
 tortured (for who shall say that red hot 
 iron on tender flesh is not torture ?) and 
 eventually butchered for the swelling 
 of man's purse. I saw the riders dash 
 towards an animal who ' needed brand- 
 
ing ' — which I discovered to mean one 
 that had hitherto escaped the iron, or 
 that had changed owners — throw a rope 
 over its head or horns, fasten the other 
 end to the pommel, and drag it to the 
 fire, where it was thrown and tied. 
 Then it was seized by several men who 
 sat on its head and legs to hold it com- 
 paratively still while another took the 
 hot brand from the fire and pressed it 
 against the quivering side of the animal. 
 It was then released and, bawling with 
 pain and fright, allowed to return to its 
 mother, who had been kept off by an- 
 other rider. A sound at my side in- 
 formed me that the little old maid was 
 weeping copiously. 
 
 It is a pity I could not have had the 
 cowboy's point of view, for mine was 
 most unpleasant, but my little glimpse 
 of the other side was gone, and gladly 
 
 ^ ./,.• 
 
 =fr* 
 
 
 
I drove away from the mighty smells 
 and sounds of that unfortunate mass of 
 seething life, subjected to the will of a 
 dozen men, Van Anden the worst of 
 the lot. And as we went silently 
 through the sweet cool air, crisp as 
 an October leaf, where a bluebird 
 was twittering a wing-free song on 
 the poplar yonder, where silver-turned 
 willows were gently swaying, and a 
 jolly chipmunk was rippling from log 
 to stone, I wondered whether the New- 
 port girl had really done so wrong after 
 all. 
 
o 
 
 M 
 
 t\ 
 
 E N 
 
 N 
 
 D 
 
 E 
 
 R 
 
 | XV. 
 
 THE SWEET PEA LADY. 
 
 SOME ONE ELSE'S 
 MOUNTAIN SHEEP. 
 
 "3 
 
XV. 
 
 T was at Winnipeg 
 (you do not want to 
 know how we got 
 there) that I first 
 walked into the aura 
 of the Sweet Pea Lady, 
 and by so doing prepared the way for 
 the shatterment of another illusion — 
 namely, that ' little deeds of kindness ' 
 always result in mutual pleasure. 
 
 Flowers and fruit in Manitoba are 
 treasured as sunshine in London, for 
 you must remember that Manitoba is 
 a very new country, that it is only a 
 
paltry few thousands of years since its 
 thousands of miles were scraped flat as 
 a floor. Everything even yet looks so 
 immodest on those vast stretches. The 
 clumps of trees stand out in such a 
 bold brazen fashion. The houses ap- 
 pear as though stuck on to the land- 
 scape. Even an honest brown cow can 
 not manage to melt herself into the 
 endless stretch of prairies. In fact, the 
 little scenic accidents of trees and hol- 
 lows, which mean fruit and flowers, are 
 mainly due to man. 
 
 So, when our friends who saw us off 
 on the west-bound Canadian Pacific left 
 in our sleeper two huge bouquets of 
 sweet peas and ten pounds of black- 
 berries, we knew that the finest garden 
 in Winnipeg had been rifled to do us 
 pleasure. Now, I dearly love flowers 
 and fruit, as I did the giver, but ten 
 
pounds of great, fat blackberries and 
 an armful of sweet peas in a cramped 
 stuffy Pullman caused my heart to re- 
 sound in the minor chords. We rallied 
 again and again to demolish the fruit 
 as we voyaged, and sat with one foot 
 on top of the other to avoid crushing 
 the lovely pea blossoms as we fidgeted 
 about, but the results of our efforts, 
 messy fruit in hopeless abundance and 
 withering leaves in dreary profusion, 
 were discouraging. 
 
 When the noon hour came, Nimrod 
 carried the fruit basket into the diner 
 and set it down on the table. The 
 waiter eyed us askance. " It's a dol- 
 lar each for dinner, sah." It was clear 
 we were emigrants. We paid the wait- 
 er's demand and then from soup to 
 coffee ate blackberries — blackberries 
 until we were black in the mouth and 
 
pale in the face. Then we picked up X 
 our basket, upon the contents of which $ <y 
 our labours had apparently made no im- n' 
 pression, and, hastily pushing a plate ' T 
 over the rich red stain it had left on $ 
 the table cloth, departed with our fruit p 
 and a grieved feeling in the region ot § 
 our hearts. It may not be amiss to 
 remark that I have never eaten a 
 blackberry since. To get to our car 
 it was necessary to pass through an- 
 other sleeper, where I noticed a made 
 up berth in which was reclining a 
 young woman, and hovering over her 
 solicitously a man, evidently the hus- 
 band. 
 
 Hope and joy awoke within me — 
 perhaps she would like some black- 
 berries ! No, she would not venture to 
 eat fruit, and with many thanks, oh, 
 many, many thanks, she declined it. 
 
But the blessedness of giving I felt 
 must be mine, so I bribed the porter 
 to take as many sweet peas as he could 
 cany and present them to the sick lady 
 in the next car, and on no account to 
 tell where he got them. I did not want 
 the thanks, neither did I want the sweet 
 peas, but I was illogical enough to 
 hope that the Recording Angel would 
 be busy and accept the act at its face 
 value as a " deed of kindness." 
 
 It must have been a slack day with 
 the angel, for this is a brief but accu- 
 rate account of what followed, and I 
 am willing to leave it to any human, 
 whether my punishment was not out of 
 all proportion to the offense committed : 
 
 One hour later. Train stops for ten 
 minutes. I got out for fresh air and 
 promenade on platform. Behold, the 
 first object that meets my gaze is the 
 
sick lady, miraculously recovered. She 
 swooped down upon me with the dead- 
 ly light of determination in her eyes. 
 I was discovered. There was no es- 
 cape. I was going to be thanked — and 
 I was thanked. Up and down, back- 
 wards and forwards, inside and out, 
 and all hands around. And when she 
 paused breathless her husband took up 
 the theme. It seems she was a semi in- 
 valid, and the sweet peas were quite the 
 most heavenly thing that could have 
 happened to her. Nimrod joined me 
 at this moment and he was thanked 
 separately and dually, for being the 
 husband of his wife, I suppose. At last 
 we were able to retire with profuse 
 bows, tired but exceedingly thankful 
 that the incident, though trying, was 
 ended. 
 
 Three minutes later. Have been driv- 
 en indoors by the sweet pea woman, 
 
b 
 
 as each turn of the walk brought us 
 face to face, when it immediately be- 
 came necessary to nod and smile, and 
 for our husbands to lift hats and smile, 
 until we looked like loose-necked 
 manikins. At least, the sleeper is 
 tranquil, if stuffy. 
 
 Supper time. Have been thanked 
 again by the Sweet Pea Lady, who sat 
 at our table. She had sweet peas in 
 her hair, and at her belt. The husband 
 had a boutonniere of them. 
 
 Next morning, Carberry. Bade an 
 elaborate farewell to the Sweet Pea 
 Lady. She is going straight to the 
 coast where they catch steamer for 
 Japan. Praise be to Allah ! I shall see 
 her no more. The heavy polite is 
 wearing. vmu| 
 
 Next day, Banff Hot Springs. First 
 person on the hotel steps I see is the 
 S. P. Lady. She rushed up and as- 
 
sured me that the S. P.'s were still 
 fresh, and that she and her husband 
 had unexpectedly stopped over for a 
 day. 
 
 Next day. Spent the day avoiding 
 S. P. L. Left for Glacier House in the 
 evening. At least, I shall not see S. 
 P. L. there, as they have to go right 
 through to catch steamer. 
 
 tf-wo days later, Glacier House. Had 
 horrid shock. Found apparition of S. 
 P. Lady sitting beside me at break- 
 fast table. She began to speak, then I 
 knew it was the real thing. She as- 
 sured me that many of the S. P.'s were 
 still fresh, as she had clipped their 
 stems night and morning. I again said 
 good by to her, and to those ghastly 
 flowers. She just has time to catch her 
 steamer. 
 
 tfhree days later: Vancouver. Ran 
 ^ross the S. P. Lady in hotel corridor. 
 
 /t 
 
She saw me first. There was another 
 weary interchange of the heavy polite. 
 Her steamer had been delayed from 
 sailing for two days — in order that we 
 might meet again, I have no doubt. 
 
 Next morning. She's gone. Ring the 
 bells, boom the cannon ! I saw the 
 Japan steamer bear the Sweet Pea 
 Lady rapidly into deep water. At last 
 easeful peace may again dream on my 
 shoulder. When I returned to the hotel 
 the clerk, handed me an envelope enclos- 
 ing a lady's visiting card (kind fate, she 
 lives in Japan) on which was written 
 " In grateful appreciation of your kind- 
 ness," and with the card were two 
 sprays of Pressed Sweet Peas. 
 
 After this when it comes to " scat- 
 tering deeds of kindness on the weary 
 way," I shall be the woman who didn't, 
 and who shall say me nay"? 
 
 However, all this flower and fruit 
 
piece was but an episode ; the event 
 of that journey was the intimate ac- 
 quaintance we made of the Great Gla- 
 cier of the Selkirks, and the nice op- 
 portunity I had to lose my life. And 
 the only reason this tale is not more 
 tragic is because, given the choice, I 
 preferred to lose the opportunity rather 
 than the life. 
 
 I wonder if I can give any idea to 
 one who has not seen it what a snow 
 slide really is; how it sweeps away 
 every vestige of trees, grass, and roots, 
 and leaves a surface of shifting, un- 
 stable earth almost as treacherous as 
 quicksand. 
 
 Nimrod and I had paid a superficial 
 visit to the Glacier the day before : that 
 is, we had gone as far as its forefoot, a 
 hard but thoroughly safe climb, and 
 had explored with awe the green glass 
 
THE WARM BEATING HEART OF A MOUNTAIN SHEEP. 
 
ice caves with which the Great Glacier 
 has seen fit to decorate its lower line, 
 wonderful rooms of ice, emerald in the 
 shadows, with glacial streams for 
 floors. 
 
 So the next morning we started out, 
 intending a little bit to further explore 
 the vast, cold, heartless ice sheet (vaster 
 than all the Swiss glaciers together), 
 but more to hunt for the warm beat- 
 ing heart of a mountain sheep, whose 
 home is here. We had been travel- 
 ling for miles in the wildest kind of 
 earth upheavals, for the Selkirks are 
 still hard and fast in the grip of the ice 
 king; huge boulders, uprooted trees, 
 mighty mountains, released but recent- 
 ly from the glacial wet blanket, when 
 Nimrod discovered the stale track of a 
 mountain sheep. We followed it ea- 
 gerly till it brought us across the path 
 
of a snow slide. At that point it was 
 about five hundred feet across, at an 
 angle of forty-five degrees ; below us a 
 thousand feet was a vicious looking 
 glacial torrent ; above, an equal dis- 
 tance, was the lower edge of the gla- 
 cier, the mother of all this devastation. 
 The fearless-footed mountain sheep 
 had crossed this sliding crumbling- 
 earth and gravel incline with apparent 
 ease. For us it was go on or go back. 
 There was no middle course. The row 
 of tiny hoof marks running straight 
 across from one safe bank to the other 
 deceived us. It could not be so very 
 difficult. We dismounted; Nimrod 
 threw the bridle over his horse's head 
 and started across, leading his beast. 
 The animal snorted as he felt the foot- 
 hold giving way beneath him, but Nim- 
 rod pulled him along. It was impos- 
 
 11 
 
 £%$> 
 
sible to stand still. It would have been 
 as easy for quicksilver to remain at the 
 top of an incline. Amid rattling stones 
 and sliding earth they landed on the 
 firm bank beyond, fully three hundred 
 feet below me. 
 
 It was a shivery sight, but I started 
 expecting the horse would follow. He, 
 however, jerked back snorting and 
 trembling, which unexpected move up- 
 set my equilibrium, uncertain at best, 
 and I fell. Nothing but the happy 
 chance of a tight grip on the reins kept 
 me from sliding down that dreadful 
 bank, over the rock into the water, and 
 so into eternity (Please pardon the Sal- 
 vation Army metaphor). 
 
 I had barely time to right myself and 
 get out of the way of my horse, which 
 now plunged forward upon the sliding 
 rock with me. The terrified animal 
 
lost his head completely. I could not 
 keep away from his hoofs. He would 
 not let me keep in front, I dare not get 
 above for fear I should slip under his 
 feet, or below him for fear he should 
 slide upon me. I lost my balance 
 again while dodging away from him 
 as he plunged and balked, but man- 
 aged to grab his mane and we both 
 slid a horrible distance. I could hear 
 Nimrod shouting on the bank, but did 
 not seem to understand him. I had the 
 stage, centre front, and it was all I 
 could attend to. 
 
 We were now opposite to Nimrod, 
 but only half way across. Such an 
 ominous rolling and tumbling of stones 
 and tons of earth sliding down over 
 the low precipice into the water! I 
 expected to be with it each instant. 
 Nimrod had started out after me. 
 
I COULD NOT KEEP AWAY FROM HIS HOOFS. 
 
Then I understood what he was shout- 
 ing : " Let go that horse." Why, of 
 course ! Why had I not thought of 
 that ? I did let go and, thus freed, man- 
 aged to get across, falling, slipping, 
 but still making progress until I 
 reached the safe ground one hundred 
 feet lower in a decidedly dilapidated 
 condition. My animal followed me in- 
 stinctively for a short distance, and 
 Nimrod got him the rest of the way — I 
 do not know how. It did not interest 
 me then. 
 
 And the saddest of all, the mountain 
 sheep had vanished into the unknown, 
 taking his little tracks with him, so we 
 had to go back in a roundabout way, 
 without sheep, without joy — and with- 
 out a tragedy. 
 
XVI. 
 
 IN WHICH THE TENDER- 
 FOOT LEARNS A NEW 
 TRICK. 
 
 22> 
 
A 
 
 XVI. 
 
 OR those who have 
 driven four-in-hand, 
 this will have no mes- 
 sage. But as four-in- 
 hand literature seems 
 to be somewhat lim- 
 ited and my first lesson was somewhat 
 drastic, I shall venture to tell you how 
 it felt. 
 
 Of coaching there are two kinds : 
 Eastern coaching, with well-groomed 
 full-fed horses, who are never worked 
 harder than is good for them ; with sil- 
 ver-plated harness, and coach with the 
 
latest springs and running gear, um- 
 brella rack, horn, lunch larder, and 
 what not; with footmen or postil- 
 ions, according to the degree of style, 
 to run to the horses' heads at the first 
 hitch; with the gentleman driver in 
 cream box coat and beribboned whip ; 
 with everything down to the pole pin 
 correct and immaculate. 
 
 Then there is Western coaching, 
 which is more properly termed staging, 
 for which is used any vehicle that will 
 hold together and whose wheels will 
 turn round. This is pulled by half- 
 broken shaggy horses which would 
 kick any man who ventured near them 
 with brush or currycomb, and which 
 are sometimes made to travel until they 
 drop in the road. The harness on such 
 coaching trips is an assortment of sin- 
 gle, double, leaders and wheelers sets, 
 
 w 
 
 ft 
 
 
 ft<Pp\ 
 
mended with buckskin or wire and 
 thrown on irrespective of fit. Lucky 
 the cayuse who happens to be the 
 right size for his harness. 
 
 And the driver! No cream box 
 coat for him — provident the one who 
 owns a slicker and a coat of weather 
 green (the same being the result of sun 
 and rain on any given color). And the 
 people in the stage hoist no white and 
 red silk parasols. They are there be- 
 cause they are " going somewhere." My 
 multi-murderous cook taught me the 
 distinction between "just travellin' " and 
 " going somewhere." 
 
 As for the roads — oh, those Rocky 
 Mountain roads ! They make coaching 
 quite a different thing from that on the 
 smooth boulevards around New York. 
 I have twice made seventy-five miles in 
 twelve hours, by having four relays, but 
 
 Vy<. 
 
 - - '"V 
 
 / 
 
the average rate of travel is about 
 twenty miles in eight hours. And the 
 day when I first took the ribbons in my 
 hands to guide four horses we were 
 from nine in the morning till five at 
 night going twelve miles. This was 
 the way of it : 
 
 Nimrod and I were on a hunting trip 
 in the Canadian Rockies, and as the 
 government map said there was a road, 
 though not a good one, we decided to 
 carry our belongings in a four-horse 
 wagon, in which we could also ride if 
 we liked, and to have saddle horses be- 
 sides. 
 
 Green, a man of the region, was the 
 driver and cook, and we had as guest a 
 famous bear hunter from the Sierra 
 Nevadas. On the first two days out 
 from the little mountain town where 
 we started, we saw many tracks of 
 
black bear, which encouraged the hunt- 
 ers to think that they might find a 
 grizzly (which, by the way, they did 
 not). 
 
 The dust was thick and red, envelop- 
 ing us all day long like some horrible 
 insistent monster that had resolved it- 
 self into atoms to choke, blind and 
 strangle us. Nimrod looked like a clay 
 man — hair, eyebrows, mustache, skin, 
 and clothes were all one solid coating 
 of red dust. We were all alike. Even 
 the sugar, paper-wrapped in the bot- 
 tom of a box, covered by other boxes, 
 bags and a canvas, became adulterated 
 almost past use. 
 
 On the fourth day this changed, and 
 we camped at the foot of a granite 
 mountain. It made one think of the 
 Glass Mountain of fable, with its 
 smooth stretches of polished rock shin- 
 
ing in the sun. That a human being 
 should dare to take a wagon over such 
 a place seemed incredible. Yet there 
 the road was, zigzagging up the rocky 
 slope, while here and there the jagged 
 outlines of blasted rock showed where 
 the all-powerful dynamite had been 
 used to make a resting place for strain- 
 ing horses. 
 
 That morning excitement surrounded 
 our out-of-door breakfast table. We 
 had had strange visitors during the 
 night, while we slept. A mountain 
 lion, the beautiful tan-coated vibrant- 
 tailed puma, had nosed within ten feet 
 of me and then, not liking the camp-fire 
 glow and unalarmed by my inert form, 
 had silently retreated. 
 
 It made me feel creepy to see how 
 easily that lithe-limbed powerful crea- 
 ture might have had me for a midnight 
 
meal. But I was not trying to do 
 him harm, and so he granted me the 
 same tolerance. Then, too, not far 
 away was a bear track, and the canned 
 peaches were fewer than the night 
 before. 
 
 All of this caused Nimrod and the 
 bear-hunter to saddle their horses early; 
 and agreeing to meet us at night on the 
 other side of the mountain, where the 
 map showed a stream, they set out for a 
 day's hunt. Nimrod's horse having 
 gone slightly lame, I offered mine, a 
 swift-footed intelligent dear, and agreed 
 to ride in the wagon. 
 
 It was the same old story. Virtue 
 is somebody else's reward. I never 
 had a worse day in the mountains. 
 Green and I started blithely enough by 
 nine, which had meant a 5:30 rising in 
 the cold gray dawn. The horses had 
 
 (vr 
 
been worked every day since the start, 
 and were jaded. 
 
 We went slowly along the only level 
 road in our journey that day; but the 
 load did not seem to be riding well, 
 and at the beginning of the ascent 
 Green got out to investigate. He said 
 the spring was out of order. The 
 wagon was what is known as a thor- 
 ough-brace, which means that there are 
 two large loopy steel bands on which 
 the wagon box rests; the loops are 
 filled in with countless strips of leather, 
 forming a pad for the springs to play 
 on. (The Century Dictionary will 
 please not copy this definition.) The 
 Deadwood stage coach was a thorough- 
 brace, I believe. 
 
 Another interesting out-of-date de- 
 tail in the construction of this wagon 
 was that the brake had no mechanical 
 
device for holding it in position when 
 it was put on hard, and the driver had 
 to rely upon his strength of limb to 
 keep it in place. It seems that Green, 
 in pounding these bits of leather in the 
 spring, had badly crushed his left hand. 
 He said nothing to me, and I did not no- 
 tice that, contrary to custom, he was driv- 
 ing with his right hand, which he usu- 
 ally reserved for the whip and the brake. 
 We crossed the shallow brook and 
 started up the very steep and very rocky 
 road, when everything happened at 
 once. Two of the horses refused to 
 pull and danced up and down in the 
 one spot, a sickening thing for a horse 
 to do. This meant the instant applica- 
 tion of the brake. We had already be- 
 gun to slip backward (the most un- 
 comfortable sensation I know, barring 
 actual pain). Nimrod's horse, tied on 
 
behind, gave a frightened snort and 
 broke his rope. Green attempted to 
 take the reins with his left hand. They 
 dropped from his grasp, and I saw that 
 his fingers were purple and black. 
 
 " Grab the lines, can you ? " he said, 
 as he seized the whip and put both feet 
 on the brake. The leaders were cur- 
 veting back on the wheelers in a way 
 which meant imminent mix up, their 
 legs over traces and behind whiffle- 
 trees. On the right of us was solid 
 rock up, on the left solid rock down, 
 one hundred feet to the stream, and just 
 ahead was the sharp turn the road made 
 to a higher ledge in its zigzag up the 
 mountain. 
 
 I had always intended to learn to 
 drive four-in-hand, but this first lesson 
 left me no pleasure in the learning. 
 There were no little triumphs of diffi- 
 
 N 
 
 /t 
 
culties mastered, no gentle surprises, no 
 long, smooth, broad, and level stretches 
 with plenty of room to pull a rein and 
 see what would happen. I had to 
 spring into the situation with know- 
 ledge, as Minerva did into life, full 
 grown. It was no kindergarten way of 
 learning to drive four-in-hand. 
 
 I grabbed the reins in both hands. 
 There were yards of them, rods of them, 
 miles of them — they belonged to a six 
 or sixteen horse set. I do not know 
 which. I sat on them. They writhed 
 in my lap, wrapped around my feet, and 
 around the gun against my knee, in a 
 hopeless and dangerous muddle. Of 
 course the reins were twisted. I did 
 not know one from the other. I gave 
 a desperate jerk which sent the leaders 
 plunging to the right, where fortunately 
 they brought up against the rock wall. 
 
Had they gone the other way nothing 
 but our destiny could have saved us 
 from going over the edge. Crack went 
 the whip in the right place. 
 
 " Slack the lines ! " Green cried, as 
 he eased the brake. A lash of the whip 
 for each wheeler, and we started for- 
 ward, the horses disentangling them- 
 selves from the harness as by a miracle, 
 just as the rear wheels were hovering 
 over the bluff. Green dropped the 
 whip (his left hand was quite useless) 
 and straightened out the reins for me. 
 
 " Can you do it"? " he asked, grasping 
 the whip, as the horses showed signs of 
 stopping again. To attend to the brake 
 was physically impossible. Green could 
 not do it and drive with one hand. 
 
 "Yes," I said, "but watch me" — an 
 injunction scarcely necessary. 
 
 If ever a woman put her whole mind 
 
i 
 
 <> 
 
 
 WE STARTED FORWARD, JUST AS THE REAR WHEELS WERE 
 HOVERING OVER THE EDGE. 
 
to a thing, I did on that four-in-hand. 
 There was no place for mistakes. There 
 was no place for anything but the right 
 thing, and do it I must or run the risk 
 of breaking my very dusty, very brown, 
 but none the less precious neck. 
 
 A sharp turn in a steep road with 
 rocks a foot high disputing the right 
 of way with the wheels, a heavy load, 
 horses that do not want to pull, and a 
 green driver — that was the situation. 
 If it does not appeal to you as one ot 
 the horribles in life, try it once. 
 
 "Run your leaders farther up the 
 bank — left, left ! Getup,Milo! Frank, 
 get out of that! Now sharp to the 
 right. IVhoa! Steady I Left — left, I 
 say! Milo, ivhoa ! Now to the right, 
 quick! Let 'em on the bank more. 
 Nellie, easy — whoa! Steady, George!" 
 Crack went the whip on the leaders. 
 
" Hold your lines tighter. Pull that 
 nigh leader. Get out of that, Frank! 
 Now steady, boys ! Don't pull — there ! " 
 
 Down went the brake ; we were safely 
 round the turn, and all hands rested for 
 a moment. 
 
 Thus we worked all that morning, 
 Green with the brake, the whip, and his 
 tongue ; I with the lines, what strength 
 I had and mother wit in lieu of ex- 
 perience. 
 
 There were stretches of two hundred 
 feet of granite, smooth and polished 
 as a floor, where the horses repeatedly 
 slipped and tell, and where the wheels 
 brought forth hollow mocking rumbles. 
 
 There were sections where the rocky 
 ledges succeeded one another in steps, 
 and the animals had to pull the heavy 
 wagon up rises from a foot to eighteen 
 inches high by sheer strength — as easy 
 
 
 JiV 
 
to drive up a flight of brownstone steps 
 on Fitth Avenue. There were places 
 between huge boulders where a* swerve 
 of a foot to the right or to the left would 
 have sent us crashing into the unyield- 
 ing granite. 
 
 When we got to the top there was 
 no place to rest — only rock, rock every- 
 where. No water, no food for the ex- 
 hausted horses, nothing to do but to 
 push on to the bottom — and such 
 going! Have you ever felt the shud- 
 dering of a wagon with brake hard on, 
 as it poised in air the instant betore it 
 dropped a foot or two to the next level, 
 from hard rock to hard rock'? Have 
 you ever tried to keep four horses 
 away from under a wagon, and yet suf- 
 ficiently near it not to precipitate the 
 crash'? Have you ever at the same 
 time tried to keep them from falling 
 
on the rocks ahead and from plunging 
 over the bank as you turn a sharp 
 curve on a steep down grade ? It you 
 have, then you know the nature of my 
 first lesson in four-in-hand driving. 
 
 We got to the bottom at dusk. I 
 was too tired to speak. Every muscle 
 set up a separate complaint and I had 
 had nothing to eat since morning, as 
 we had expected to make camp by 
 noon. The world seemed indeed a very 
 drab place. We found the hunters 
 careering around searching for us. They 
 thought they had missed us — as they 
 had done the bear. 
 
 I have driven, and been driven, hun- 
 dreds of miles since, but there never 
 was a ride like those twelve, cruel, 
 mocking, pitiless miles over Granite 
 Mountain, when necessity taught me a 
 very pretty trick, which, however, I 
 
have not yet been tempted to display 
 at the Madison Square Garden in No- 
 vember. 
 
o 
 
 A 
 
 E 
 N 
 D 
 E 
 R 
 
 , S 
 
 o 
 
 T 
 
 XVII. 
 
 OTO MINE. 
 
XVII. 
 
 T now behooves me to 
 state that, between the 
 events of the last chap- 
 ter and this, Nimrod 
 and I heard the hum, 
 the wail, and the 
 shriek that make the song of the 
 Westinghouse brake before we found 
 ourselves deposited at the flourishing 
 mining camp of Red Ridge in the 
 Arizona Rockies, nine thousand feet in 
 the air. 
 
 Did ever a tenderfoot escape from 
 the mountains without at least having 
 a try at making his or her fortune in 
 
a mine — gold one preferred ? We, 
 of course, had the chance of our lives, 
 and who knows what might have hap- 
 pened if only the fat woman and the 
 lean woman had not gotten jealous of 
 each other, and thereby wrecked the 
 company % 
 
 The gold is, or is not, in the fastnesses 
 of the earth as before, but where, oh, 
 where, is the lean woman of lineage 
 and the fat woman of money ? The 
 lean woman had quality. She was the 
 daughter of somebody who had done 
 something, but, unlike Becky Sharp, she 
 had not been successful in living 
 richly in San Francisco on nothing a 
 year. Nobody knows whose daughter 
 the fat woman was, but in her very 
 comfortable home in Kansas that had 
 not mattered, and, besides, she had 
 saved a few hundreds. 
 
 K 
 F 
 
 g 
 
 T 
 
These two women had husbands, 
 who had entered into a mining scheme 
 together. The man from Frisco was a 
 good-looking, well-educated, jovial fel- 
 low, with the purses of several rich 
 friends to back him up, and with a 
 great desire to replenish his purse with 
 the yellow metal direct, rather than to 
 acquire it by the sweat of his brow. 
 He was many other things, but, to be 
 brief, he was a promoter. The man 
 from Kansas had the pride of the un- 
 educated, and a little money, and was 
 also not averse to getting rich fast. 
 
 Nimrod, the third partner, likewise 
 encumbered with a wife on the spot, 
 desired to make his everlasting fortune, 
 retire from the painting of pictures and 
 the making of books, and grub in the 
 field of science and live happily ever 
 after. 
 
For two weeks we were all together 
 at the only hotel at Cartersville, a ham- 
 let of perhaps thirty souls. It took 
 only two weeks to wreck the company. 
 The mine was a mile and a half away, 
 over a very up-and-down mountain 
 road which on the first day the fat 
 woman and I walked with our hus- 
 bands, and which Mrs. Frisco and her 
 husband had travelled in Mrs. Kansas' 
 phaeton — the result of a little way Mrs. 
 Frisco had of getting the best. 
 
 Three days of this calm appropria- 
 tion of her carriage while she walked 
 ruffled Mrs. Kansas' temper. When 
 she heard a rumour that Mrs. Frisco 
 had stated disdainfully to the landlady 
 that there could be no thought of rec- 
 ognising Mrs. Kansas socially, but that 
 she must be tolerated because of her 
 money in the enterprise, her politeness 
 
grew frigid and the trouble began to 
 brew. 
 
 While perfectly willing to watch the 
 logomachy when it should arrive, I had 
 no wish to take part. I was willing to 
 make money, but not to make enemies, 
 so Nimrod and I removed ourselves as 
 much as possible from the Cartersville 
 Hotel, took long walks and rides over 
 the glorious Chihuahua Mountains, 
 poked around the abandoned mines, 
 spied out the deer and mountain lion 
 and the ubiquitous coyote and all the 
 indigenous beasts and birds of the air 
 thereof. We usually managed to ar- 
 rive at the mine when the partners and 
 their wives were elsewhere. 
 
 The mine, our mine, was a long hori- 
 zontal hole in the mountain, with a 
 tiny leaf-choked stream trickling past 
 the entrance, heavy timbers propping 
 
up the inert mass of dirt and stone just 
 above our heads, piles of uninteresting 
 rock dumped to one side, the " pay 
 dirt." I had seen such things before, 
 and they had said nothing to me. But 
 this was our mine, our stream, our dump. 
 
 McCaffrey, the foreman, put rubber 
 boots on me in the little smithy which 
 formed a part of the entrance of the 
 tunnel, and thus equipped I entered 
 the tunnel. The day shift, represented 
 by two dancing lights far off in the 
 blackness, was preparing to blast. 
 
 I advanced uncertainly, my own can- 
 dle blinding me. Water trickled from 
 the roof and walls of this rock-bound 
 passage seven feet high and four feet 
 wide. A stream of it flowed by the 
 tiny tram track. The hollow sound of 
 the mallet on the crowbar forcing its 
 the stubborn wall grew louder 
 
 t 
 
 iy&~ «A» 
 
 ^ 
 
as we approached, until we stood with 
 the miners in a foot or so of water 
 which showed yellow and shining in 
 the flickering light of four candles. 
 Then we went back to the smithy to 
 wait the result of the blast. 
 
 There was a horrid jarring booming 
 sound. The miners listened intently. 
 McCaffrey said, " One." Another ex- 
 plosion in the tunnel followed — 
 " Two." Another — " Three." Then a 
 silence. "That's bad," said McCaff- 
 rey, shaking his head. "An unex- 
 ploded cap." 
 
 " What do you mean ? " I asked. 
 
 " There were four charges and should 
 have been four explosions. It's liable 
 to go off when we go in there." 
 
 " Oh ! " I said. 
 
 The miners waited a while for the 
 fumes of the dynamite to be dissipated 
 
and kept me away from the tunnel 
 mouth, saying: 
 
 " If you ever get a dynamite head- 
 ache you will never want to come near 
 the mine again. And, besides, that un- 
 exploded cap may do damage yet." 
 
 I went back to the smithy to wait, for 
 it was the last of October, and snow in 
 the mountains at ten thousand feet is 
 cold. I attempted to sit down on a keg 
 behind the little sheet-iron stove, which 
 was nearly red hot. 
 
 " You better not sit down on that 
 kaig," said one of the men calmly, 
 without pausing in his work. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "Well, it's dirty, and, besides, it's 
 nitro-glycerine." 
 
 "Nitro-glycerine ! Why is it in here, 
 and so close to the stove *? Won't it 
 explode ? " and I checked a desire to 
 retreat in disorder. 
 
YOU BETTER NOT SIT DOWN ON THAT KAIG 
 IT'S NITROGLYCERINE." 
 
" No, 't'ain't no danger, if it don't get 
 too hot and ain't jarred. You see, it 
 won't go off if it's too cold, so we keep 
 a little in here and kind o' watch it." 
 
 The keg was within two feet of the 
 stove. Suppose that a dog or some- 
 thing were to knock it over ! But 
 miners do not suppose. 
 
 Just then a tremendous explosion in 
 the tunnel seemed to make the whole 
 earth vibrate. It was followed by a 
 rattling and crashing of rocks, which 
 told us that the last cap had gone off 
 and had done good work. 
 
 Half an hour later, when it was 
 safe from dynamite fumes, I went back 
 to our hole in the ground. Nimrod had 
 left me, lured away by some fox tracks 
 trailing up the mountain. The weird 
 scene was too interesting for me to 
 leave until the arrival of the fat and 
 lean women (Mrs. Frisco had persuaded 
 
Mrs. Kansas to drive her over) caused 
 me to remember that the parlour fire at 
 the Cartersville Hotel must be very 
 comfortable, and that it was a mile and 
 a half of tiresome snow away. 
 
 Evidently the wives of my husband's 
 partners had disagreed on the way, 
 for the air was electric as they greeted 
 me, and to avoid another tete-a-tete 
 they at once turned to accompany me 
 out of the tunnel. I was the last. 
 
 The scene was now properly set for 
 a mining accident, so there was nothing 
 for a self respecting tunnel to do but to 
 act accordingly, which it did. Just as 
 the fat woman and the lean woman 
 passed into the open air, and I was 
 nearly at the mouth of the tunnel, it 
 caused its roof to cave in so close 
 behind me that, had I not instinctively 
 rushed out, some of the flying stones, 
 
 tar 
 
 Cj 
 
THE TUNNEL CAUSED ITS ROOF TO CAVE IN CLOSE BEHIND ME. 
 

timbers, and dirt must have knocked 
 me to the ground. 
 
 As it was, I landed sprawling in the 
 snow outside, sweeping the lean woman 
 down with me. It was very like a dime 
 novel. Three lone women who, for 
 purposes of intensification, may be 
 called enemies, staring with white faces 
 at a wall of dirt, and trying to realise 
 that a minute before it had been a black 
 hole. And at the other end of that 
 hole now were two men horribly im- 
 prisoned in a rock-walled tomb with- 
 out air or food, perhaps dead. We 
 could not tell how much of a cave-in 
 it was. 
 
 The lean woman rushed for Mrs. 
 Kansas' horse and wagon and went to 
 alarm the hamlet. I dashed up the hill 
 a quarter of a mile to awaken the night 
 shift, who were in their cabin sleeping. 
 
And the fat woman at a sate distance 
 wrung- her hands and uttered exclama- 
 tions of horror and ill judged advice to 
 our departing forms. 
 
 Between the fright, the altitude, and 
 the hill I had no breath left to speak 
 with as I pounded on the door of the 
 miner's hut. Mountaineers sleep lightly 
 and do not make toilets, so it was 
 barely ten minutes from the time of the 
 cave-in when three men were working 
 at the tunnel's mouth with pickaxes 
 and shovels. 
 
 The tunnel had not meant to be ma- 
 licious, but merely to do the proper 
 thing (it had not even disturbed the 
 nitro-glvcerine in the smithv). Not 
 much earth had fallen, and in less than 
 an hour we heard the shouts ot the 
 imprisoned men; in two hours they 
 crawled into the air unhurt, and soon 
 
\! 
 
 were helping the others to shore up the 
 treacherous entrance, so that such a 
 stirring thing could not happen again. 
 
 There is not much more to tell. I 
 believe that the tunnel is still there, bor- 
 ing its way into the heart of the moun- 
 tain, where, perhaps, the lovely yellow 
 gold is ; but we no longer refer to it 
 as ours, and Nimrod still has to work 
 for our daily jam. For the insolence ol 
 Mrs. Frisco in leaving Mrs. Kansas 
 stranded in the snow and obliging her 
 to walk, home on the cave-in day de- 
 veloped the brewing storm into such 
 proportions that the next day their hus- 
 bands did not speak as we gathered 
 round the morning coffee. And the 
 Kansases moved away into one of the 
 other five houses in Cartersville. Mr. 
 Kansas was not "going to see his wife 
 insulted by an upstart — not he: he'd 
 
soon show them," and he did so effec- 
 tively that the Red Ridge Mining Com- 
 pany was soon no more. We docketed 
 our golden dreams ' unusable,' stowed 
 them away, and returned with tranquil 
 minds, if lighter purse, to milder and 
 slower ways of getting rich. 
 
 -^ 
 
'355, 
 
 *& 
 
 J 
 
 N 
 
 h 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 THE LAST WORD. 
 
 2S 
 
1357 
 
 XVIII. 
 
 OW this is the end. 
 It is three years since 
 I first became a wo- 
 man-who-goes-hunting- 
 with-her-husband. I 
 have lived on jerked 
 deer and alkali water, and bathed in 
 dark-eyed pools, nestling among vast 
 pines where none but the four footed 
 had been before. I have been sung 
 asleep a hundred times by the coyotes' 
 evening lullaby, have felt the spell of 
 their wild nightly cry, long and mourn- 
 ful, coming just as the darkness has 
 fully come, lasting but a few seconds, 
 
and then heard no more till the night 
 gives place to the fresh sheet of dawn. 
 I have pored in the morning over the 
 big round footprints of a mountain lion 
 where he had sneaked in hours of dark- 
 ness, past my saddle pillowed head. I 
 have hunted much, and killed a little, 
 the wary, the beautiful, the fleet-footed 
 big game. I have driven a four-in-hand 
 over corduroy roads and ridden horse- 
 back over the pathless vasty wilds of 
 the continent's backbone. 
 
 I have been nearly frozen eleven 
 thousand feet in air in blinding snow, 
 I have baked on the Dakota plains 
 with the thermometer at 116 degrees, 
 and I have met characters as diverse as 
 the climate. I know what it means to 
 be a miner and a cowboy, and have 
 risked my life when need be, but, best 
 of all, I have felt the charm of the 
 
\ 
 
 
 J7 •; 
 
'09 
 
glorious freedom, the quick rushing 
 blood, the bounding motion, of the 
 wild life, the joy of the living and of 
 the doing, of the mountain and the 
 plain ; I have learned to know and feel 
 some, at least, of the secrets of the Wild 
 Ones. In short, though I am still a 
 woman and may be tender, I am a 
 Woman Tenderfoot no longer. 
 
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