en with tears. One of them said, "Mr. Drannan, do you think
our husbands have been killed by the Indians?"

I answered, "That is a question I can not answer, but I will say that I
hope they have not; they may have lost their course and in that way have
escaped the Indians."

While I was talking with the women, I heard the tramp of horses' feet
coming towards camp on the trail.

I said, "Listen, perhaps they are coming now." and we went to meet
the coming horsemen. There were four of them, and one of them was the
husband of the woman I had been talking to. When they came up to us, he
jumped off his horse and, clasping his wife in his arms he said, "Oh
Mary, I never expected to see you again."

In a few minutes everybody in camp was standing around those four men,
and they surely had a dreadful story to tell. They said, they did not
know how far they had ridden that morning when they sighted a band of
Buffalo in a little valley. They fired at them and killed four; they
dismounted and turned their horses loose and went to skinning their
Buffalo and had the hides nearly off of them when, without a sound to
warn them of danger, the Indians pounced upon them, and of all the
yelling and shouting that ever greeted any one's ears, that was the
worst they had ever heard, and the arrows flew as thick as hail.

"One of them struck me here," and he pulled up his pants and showed us a
ragged wound in the calf of his leg. After we had looked at the wounded
leg, he continued his story. He said, "As soon as I heard the first
yell, I ran for my horse and was fortunate in catching him. I think the
reason of we four being so lucky in getting away was that we were a
little distance from the others. We were off at one side, and we four
were working on one Buffalo, and lucky for us our horses were feeding
close to us. I do not believe that one of the other men caught his horse
as their horses were quite a distance from them, and the Indians were
between the men and their horses. The last I saw of them was their
hopeless struggle against the flying Indians' arrows.

"We had mounted and had run a hundred or two hundred yards when we saw
that four or five Indians were after us. They chased us two or three
miles. It seemed that our horses could outrun theirs, and they gave up
the chase, but in the confusion we had lost our course, and we did not
know which direction to take, and we have been all the rest of the day
trying to find the train,