A woman tenderfoot

LIBRARY

OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.

Class

WOMAN TENDEHFOOT

h GRACE GALL ATIN THOMPSON SETON

Doubled ay, Page and Co., New York. A.D. 1905

7

Copyright, 1900, by

Grace Gallatin Scton-Cbompson

REAOIR3 ROOM

213660

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.

THIS BOOK IS A TRIBUTE TO
THE WEST.

I have used many Western phrases as
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, September ist, 1900.

CONTENTS

PAGE

i The Why of It . . 13

ii Outfit and Advice for the

Woman- who-goes-hunting-

with-her-husband . . 17
in 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 . . . 113
vii Among the Clouds . .129
vin At Yeddars . . . 143
ix My Antelope . . .161

CONTENTS

PAGE

175

A Mountain Drama

What I Know about Wahb

of the Bighorn Basin
xii The Dead Hunt
xin Just Rattlesnakes
xiv As Cowgirl
xv The Sweet Pea Lady .

Some one Else's Mountain
Sheep ....
xvi In which the Tenderfoot

Learns a New Trick . 313

xvn 0?/r Mine . . . 335

The Last Word . . . 355

183
215

245
265

291

A LIST OF
FULL-PAGE DRAWINGS.

PAGE §

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

A LIST OF
FULL-PAGE DRAWINGS.

PAGE

Down the path came two of the
prettiest Blackballs . . . 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

I.

THE WHY OF IT.

OF THE

UNIVEHSITY

OF

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-

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
6 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.

II.

OUTFIT AND ADVICE

FOR THE WOMAN-WHO-

GOES-HUNTING-WITH-

HER-HUSBAND.

II.

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,
physically at least, to your pinafore days
when you played with your brother
Willie. Red blood means a rose-colored
world. Did you feel like that last sum-
mer at Newport or Narragansett *?

So enough ; come with me and learn
how to be healthy and 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 CROSS SADDLE RIDING.
Designed by the Author.

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

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
mjoy 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

illustrate : Two New York women,
mother and daughter, took a trip or
some three hundred miles over the
pathless Wind River Mountains. The
mother rode astride, but the daughter
preferred to exhibit her Durland Acad-
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 confounded
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

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 01
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.

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

horse wrangler knows how to cook,
and expects to do it. He is used to
it, and, anyway, is paid for it. He is
earning his living, you are taking a
vacation.

Now for the second advice, which is
a codicil to the above : In return for
not having to potter with the food and
tinware, never complain about it. Eat
everything that is set before you, shut
your eyes to possible dirt, or, if you
cannot, leave the particular horror in
question untouched, but without com-
ment. Perhaps in desperation you may
assume the role of cook yourself. Oh,
foolish woman, if you do, you only ex-
change your woes for worse ones.

If you provide yourself with the fol-
lowing articles and insist upon having
them reserved for you, and then let the
cook furnish everything else, you will
be all right : —

TEARS STARTING FROM YOUR SMOKE-INFLAMED EYES.

An aluminum plate made double for hot
water. This is a very little trouble to fill,
and insures a comfortable meal ; other-
wise your meat and vegetables will be
cold before you can eat them, and the
gravy will have a thin coating of ice on
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 napkins , enough to provide
two a day for the party.

^wo 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. (Should this seem a scanty
supply, a full aluminum cooking outfit
can be bought so that one pot or pan
nests in the other, the whole very com-
plete, 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, 7 by
10 feet, bound with tape and supplied

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

you will have made an eider-down bag
to fit inside all of these for very cold
weather. The eider bag costs about
$16.00 or $18.00, but is worth it if you
are going to camp out in the 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-

rated and dried either by sun or fire
every other day.

Always keep all your sleeping things
together in your bed roll, and your hus-
band's things together in his bed bun-
dle. It will save you many a sigh
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 of 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

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 yourseli
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,

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 ot
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.

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, 01
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 : —

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
miles apart, there were many times
when the little blind god of chance
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

informed us that in two hours we should
be eating dinner at the ranch house
in Jackson's Hole, where we expected
to stop for a while to recuperate from
the past year's hard grind and the past
two weeks of travel. This was good
news, as it was then five o'clock and
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,

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 half
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, be 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

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-

ed exercise at that altitude ; but oh, the
glorious air, the joy of life and motion
that was quite unknown to my recep-
tion-young and frivolous 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.

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 what hit him4?"

" 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
\ery 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

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 N
ditch. ri

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 dreadful words 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

*_j

?

habit, and, rejecting Nimrod's 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."

44 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:

44 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

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

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 life 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.

V.

LOST IN THE MOUNTAINS.

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 ' j[
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 a New 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

£<^)

A^f£|

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.

_ IB

THE TRAIL WAS LOST IN A GULLY.

But Nimrod was blithe and uncon-
cerned, so I made no sign of the craven
soul within me. For an hour or two we
followed the trail, urging our horses as
much as possible, but the ascent was
difficult, and we could not gain on the
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

threw Nimrod head first from the saddle
into the mud, where he lay quite still.

I faced the horror of death at that mo-
ment. Of course, this was what I had
been expecting, but had not been able
to put into words. Nimrod killed ! My
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.

Forcing our tired horses onward, we
again found a trail, supposedly the right
one, but there was that haunting fear
that it was not. For the only signs were J
the bending of the grass and the occa-
sional rubbing of the trees where the ?
animals had passed. And these might §
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 V9 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
p across the stream must be the ones.5*
§ 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.3 How could they
know that a woman and her fears had

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.

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.

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 case ' 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 fom 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

man track had been for years, if ever.
Around us sighed the mighty pines of
the limitless forest. Hundreds of miles
away, beyond the barrier of nature, were
human hives weary of the noise and strife
of their own making. Here, alone in the
solitudes, were two human atoms wander-
ing on the trail of the hunted, and — the
cook and I.

I sat on my rubber bed in the tent and
thought — there was nothing else to do
— and was cold, cold from the outside
in, and from the inside out. There wasn*
a thing alive, not even myself — no one
but the cook.

Outside, I could hear him washing
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?"

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 fed 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,

WHETTED ONE TO A RAZOR EDGE AND THREW IT INTO A TREE
WHERE IT STUCK QUIVERING.

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 •*&.

ii" • • IT Jit v vN

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

case I had returned to camp, and the
bear should come.

I thanked the cook for his solicitude.

To while away the time, I put up a
target and commenced practising with
a 30-30 rifle at fifty yards range.

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

c.

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

says, 4 Hello, where did you come from *?
Come and have a drink ! ' Pard says,
' No, I don't want nothing ! ' ' Oh,

JS^ come along and have a drink ! ' Dick
says, ' No, thanks, pard, I'm not drink-
ing to-night.' 'Well, I guess you'll

o 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."

VII.
AMONG THE CLOUDS.

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 fourteen
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,

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 01
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

i \

fo

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
vapour that cut me off from every object.
Even Blondey's nose and the ground at
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
instant. We brought up against a
boulder, fortunately, with no special
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-

fore I froze to the saddle ; but I grimly
kept Blondey's nose overlapping his
mate's back and said nothing — not even
when I discovered that my cherished rid-
ing whip had left me! It probably was not
fifty feet away, on that toboggan slide,
but it seemed quite hopeless to find any-
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

L

NOT THREE HUNDRED YARDS AWAY . . . WERE TWO BULL ELK
IN DEADLY COMBAT.

that, as they wrestled for the supremacy
of the herd of does, which doubtless
was not far away. We could not see
clearly : all was as in a dream. There
was not a sound, only the blurred
outlines through the blank mist of two
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.

VIII.
AT YEDDAR'S.

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 ^

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 c;ire beyond the getting <3f
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 k a piece.' One by one, the
whole number of freighters, moun-

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.

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. .

Have you ever been on a skunk
hunt? But perhaps you have no preju-
dices. I had. My code of action for a
skunk was, 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

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.

IX.
MY ANTELOPE.

IX.

IT 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
OVEU THE CLIFF.

below, in the steep rocky bluffs that
formed the face of the cliff. Every step
N 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- § A
tioned me to go ahead. I crawled
nearer, inch by inch, my gaze riveted
on that object. It did not move. I
grew more elated the nearer it allowed
me to approach. It was not so very
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

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 reai
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-

ately and went after those antelope — by
pretending to go away from them. For
three hours, we drew nearer to the quietly
browsing animals. We hid behind low
hills, and crawled down a water-course,
and finally dismounted behind the very
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.

kt 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,

so strangely still on the ground. Why
did he not come? 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.

X.

A MOUNTAIN DRAMA.

X.

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 us. 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
air, as if to thank us for the protection
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-

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.

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 big enough
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 -
Inheres Who — Inheres 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

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

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
we could linger for a week or two we
would be sure to catch some one of the
trackers on the return trip.

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 ? "

44 Yes."

" Wai, that there's a bear bath."

44 A bear's bath ! " I exclaimed, sus-
pecting a hoax.

44 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 44 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-

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 or
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
could cross it the next day. It began
to grow dark about three o'clock ; the
storm increased. I kept saying over
and over to myself what I was deter-
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 OP 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 J 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 N
me off, I was too stiff and numb to get 'I

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
soonerX 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.

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.

" 1 will soon cure you," said the Host,
looking most anxiously at me, as the
Cook reheated some soup and chocolate. N
The hot drinks soon succeeded in thaw- ' T
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
was in danger of going over a precipice
or into a rock crevice at any time.
After him came the pack animals, so
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
sides, 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

three sides by a wilderness of moun-
tains. And when after travelling over
these for three weeks with compass as
Jn 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 dinner of the rarest of viands, 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-

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
that would be charming anywhere, but
in that region a veritable fairy's cham- o
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
spied a huge bear track.

" Hah ! " I thought, " Wahb at last,"
and my heart went pit-a-pat as I pointed
it out to Nimrod. He recognised it
but remained far too calm for my fancy.
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-
;ng 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.

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

vvhisper and discovered Nimrod not far
away in a nest he had made for himself
in a pile of rubbish. I edged nearer.

" See, over there in the woods are
two black bears. You scared them
away. Isn't he a monster *? " indicating
Wahb.

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 t.

us, and I was able to get Nimrod away. *

XII.
THE DEAD HUNT.

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
United States in your mind's eye — be-
cause Burfield was there painting Many

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 KAILROAD TRACK IN FRONT OF
THE DAY EXPRESS.

I yanked and tugged at the bit. It
was as a wisp of hay in his mouth. I
might as well have been a monkey or a
straw woman bobbing up and down on
his back. Pound, pound, thump, thump,
gaily sped on the Great Goer. There
were dim shouts far behind me for a
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 ! And I 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—

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
own pasture lot.

Seeking to console my dishevelled
self as I got off, I murmured, " Well,
it was a sensation any way — an abso-
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,

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
true, heavy, small seated, stubborn self.
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 — of
to the Raven Agency, if you will, and
attempt to ride a wheel up the only hill

in all that arid stretch of semi desert, a
rise of perhaps three hundred feet.

It is enough. You will find that your
head is a sea of dizziness, that your
lungs have refused to work, that your
heart is pounding aloud in agony, and
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

\

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

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.

I looked into the shrivelled, but
otherwise normal, face of the Indian
woman. What had been her life, 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

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
Indians catch us, there'll be trouble,
I'm afraid."

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 9 " 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 8
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

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
pulled in their horses to a dead stop —
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 FRONT OF US, THEY PULLED THEIR HORSES
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 5em; savey?" 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 leafs thickness. Then the
second Indian, grim and ugly as the
first, spoke sullenly :

"No touch 'em; savey?" He laid
his hand suggestively on something in
his belt.

Again we shook our heads in a way
that deprecated the very idea of such a
thing. They gave another dissatisfied
look around, and slowly turned their
horses.

We waited breathless to see which
way they would go. If they went on
the other side of 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
away, 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 wife's
bicycle, and we hurried home like
spanked children. That night, after I
had delivered unto the doctor's wife
her own, and disinfected the gewgaws
in carbolic, I added two more subjects
to my Never-again list — bicycling in
Montana and ' dead hunts.'

XIII.

JUST RATTLESNAKES.

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 N
nice things about fear - - " Of all the ' q
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-

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

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
wow-wou\ yac-yac^ and then a long

drawn out ooo-oo • 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 116^ m the
shade, and I believed it. The heat
and glare simmered around us like fire.
The dogs7 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

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

away from me, and seemed in doubt.
Then he began to take on a few quirks.
"He is going to coil and then to
strike," said I, recalling a paragraph '5
from my school reader. It was an un-
happy moment !

I knew that tradition had fixed the §
proper weapons to be used against rat-
tlesnakes : a stone (more if necessary),
a stick (forked one preferred), and in
rare cases a revolver (when it is that
kind of a story). I had no revolver.
There was not a stick in sight, and not
a stone bigger than a hazelnut; but
there was the rattler. I cast another
despairing glance around and saw, al-
most at my feet and half hidden by
sage brush, several inches of rusty iron
— blessed be the passing teamster who
had thrown it there. I darted towards
it and, despite tradition, turned on the

Jgf

w

THE HORRID THING WAS READY FOR ME.

rattler armed with the goodly remains
of — a frying pan.

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
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
4 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

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.

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 01
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

E3

VB

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 alf 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 ' WB '
boss.

" Well, I could have a team hitched
up, and Bob could drive you to the
131ack 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 N
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 2

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
accompany the cowboys to their work,
with the understanding that I was to
keep at a safe distance from the herd.
Van Anden, a famous 'cutter out/
whatever that meant, was deputed
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

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

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 9 I could see nothing but backs
and heads and horns. I allowed mysell
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

J

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-
ward another mass of cattle, a half mile
further on, which could be distinguished §
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,

keeping those crazy creatures together,
and ever pushing them forward. The
dust and heat and noise and smell and
continual action made my head ache.
So this was cowboy life, Van's choice !
I thought of a certain far away, well
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-
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

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 fresh 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 of 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 heifer, 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.

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

g knew how it was done) and was half
way back to the herd when Van took

o 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

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.

XV.

THE SWEET PEA LADY.

SOME ONE ELSE'S
MOUNTAIN SHEEP.

XV.

JT 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

91.' fi

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
our basket, upon the contents of which
our labours had apparently made no im-
pression, and, hastily pushing a plate
over the rich red stain it had left on
the table cloth, departed with our fruit
and a grieved feeling in the region of
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
carry 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.

^fbree minutes later. Have been driv-
en indoors by the sweet pea woman,

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.

Suffer 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.

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.

tfwo 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.

'three days later: Vancouver. Ran
; cross the S. P. Lady in hotel corridor.

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
o 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

I p

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. AVe 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-

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.

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,

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

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
o 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

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 ' J
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
Dead wood 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-

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

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 ! Get up, Milo ! Frank,
get out of that! Now sharp to the
right. Whoa ! Steady ! Left — left; I
say ! Milo, whoa ! Now to the right,
quick ! Let Jem 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 fell, 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

to drive up a flight of brownstone steps
on Fifth 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 before 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 M
curve on a steep down grade ? If you N
have, then you know the nature of my j[
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.

XVII.
OUR MINE.

XVIL

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 Sbarf, 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.

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
way into the stubborn wall grew louder

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,

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
p novel. Three lone women who, for
o 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 safe 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-glycerine in the smithy). Not
much earth had fallen, and in less than
an hour we heard the shouts of 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 ot
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 4 unusable,' stowed
them away, and returned with tranquil
minds, if lighter purse, to milder and
slower ways of getting rich.

XVIII.
THE LAST WORD.

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

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.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE
STAMPED BELOW

11 tttt

HE, 1 "

16 »2>

MAR 27 1324

MAY

APR 15 i

DEC 27

30Nw'51J?

IV

30m-l,'15

1C 28 1 84

GENERAL LIBRARY - U.C. BERKELEY

BDQDS3SbMS