He showed
the strain of sleeplessness and anxiety. Sawdy kept the crowd away by
answering all questions himself--mostly with an air of reserve, backed
by intimations calculated to lead a man to believe he was really
hearing something, and counter-questions skilfully dropped into the
gravity of the occasion. Those who could not be put off by Sawdy were
turned over to Lefever, who could hypnotize a man by asking questions,
and send him away satisfied, but vacantly speculative as to whether he
was crazy or Lefever was.

To Lefever also were referred the men arranging the details of the
funeral. Not till two o'clock was the word given for the procession to
move from the Mountain House, but for two hours before that,
horsemen--peers of any in the world--dashed up and down Main Street
before keen-eyed spectators, on business if possible, but always on
display.

Stage drivers and barnmen from Calabasas and Thief River mingled with
cowboys from the Deep Creek country--for Hawk himself had, years
before, driven on the Spanish Sinks line. From the barn at Sleepy Cat
these men brought out and drafted the old Wells-Fargo stage coach that
Abe had driven on the first trip to the Thief River mines. Six of the
best horses in the barn were to pull it in the procession. These
horses were driven by the oldest man in service on the Calabasas run,
mounted on the near wheel horse with the driver's seat on the box empty
and covered with wreaths of flowers. Old-time Indians from the
Reservation who had known Hawk when he first went into the Falling Wall
country, were down to see him buried; they rode behind the cowboys.

At two o'clock the roundhouse whistle blew a long blast. It was taken
up by the engines in the yard and those of an overland train pulling
out; and the procession, long and picturesque, moved from the hotel.
Laramie, Tenison, Lefever and Sawdy rode abreast, behind the hearse,
and as the procession moved down Main Street, the cowboys chanted the
songs of the bunkhouse and the campfire, the range and the round-up.

"My God!" exclaimed Carpy when it was all over, "if Sleepy Cat could do
that much for a thief, what would it do for an honest man?" With Sawdy
and Lefever, the doctor sat at a table in the billiard room of the
Mountain House. Tenison and Laramie sat near them.

"Not what they did for Abe," averred John Lefever promptly, "and don't
you forget it. But I don't call Abe Hawk a thief--never. Abe was a
fre