ink his fill. The others kept on,
climbed the short, steep bank, and passed from sight over its rim. I
swung down from my horse on the brink of the creek, cinched the saddle
afresh, and rolled a cigarette. If I thought about them getting the
start of me at all, it was to reflect that they couldn't get a lead of
more than two or three hundred yards, at the gait they traveled. Judge
then of my surprise when I rode up out of the water-washed gully and
found them nowhere in sight. I pulled up and glanced about, but the
clumps of scrubby timber were just plentiful enough to cut off a clear
view of the flat. So I fell back on the simple methods of the plainsman
and Indian and jogged along on their trail.

Not for many days did I learn truly how I came to miss them, how and why
they had vanished from the face of the earth so completely in the few
minutes I lingered in the gulch. The print of steel-rimmed hoofs showed
in the soft loam as plainly as a moccasin-track in virgin snow. Around a
grove of quaking-aspens, eternally shivering in the deadest of calms,
their trail led through the long grass that carpeted the bottom, and
suddenly ended in a strip of gravelly land that ran out from the bed of
the creek. I could follow it no farther. If there was other mark of
their passing, it was hidden from me.

Wondering, and a bit exasperated, I spurred straight up the bank, and
when I had reached the high benchland loped to a point that overlooked
the little valley a full mile up and down. Cottonwood and willow,
cut-bank and crooning water, lay green and brown and silver-white
before, but no riders, no thing that moved in the shape of men came
within the scope of my eyes. But I wasn't done yet. I turned away from
the bank and raced up a long slope to a saw-backed ridge that promised
largely of unobstructed view. Dirty gray lather stood out in spumy rolls
around the edge of the saddle-blanket, and the wet flanks of my horse
heaved like the shoulders of a sobbing woman when I checked him on top
of a bald sandstone peak--and though as much of the Northwest as one
man's eye may hope to cover lay bared on every hand, yet the quartet
that rode with me from Fort Walsh occupied no part of the landscape. I
could look away to the horizon in every direction, and, except for one
little herd of buffalo feeding peacefully on the westward slant of the
ridge, I could see nothing but rolling prairie, a vast undulating spread
of grassland threaded here