re."

"So they have; but oh, the cost av it all! The Government puts the land
at a dollar and a quarter an acre, wid your courage and fightin'
strength and quickest wits, and by and by your heart's blood and a grave
wid no top cover, like a fruit tart, sometimes, let alone a tomb-stone,
as the total cost av the prairie sod. It's a great story now, aven if
nobody should care to read it in a gineration or so."

So O'mie philosophized and I sat listening, whittling the while a piece
of soft pine, the broken end of a cracker box.

"Now, Phil, where did you get that knife?" O'mie asked suddenly.

"That's the knife I found in the Hermit's Cave one May day nearly six
years ago, when I went down there after a lazy red-headed Irishman. I
found it to-day down in my Saratoga trunk. See the name?" I pointed to
the script lettering, spelling out slowly--"Jean Le Claire."

"Well, give it to me. I got it away from the 'good Injun' first." O'mie
deftly wrenched it out of my hand. "Let me kape it, Phil. I've a sort
of fore-warnin' I may nade it soon."

"Keep it if you want to, you grasping son of Erin," I replied
carelessly.

We were talking idly now, to hide the heaviness of our sorrow as we
thought of Bud down under the clods, whose going had left us two so
lonely and homesick.

Two days later when I found time to slip away to our sanctuary and be
alone for a little while, my eye fell upon my feather-decked hat,
crushed and shapeless as if it had been trampled on, lying just at the
corner where I came into the nook. I turned it listlessly in my hands
and stood wrapped in sorrowful thought. A low chuckle broke the spell,
and at the same moment a lariat whizzed through the air and encircled my
body. A jerk and I was thrown to the ground, my arms held to my sides.
Almost before I could begin to struggle the coils of the rope were
deftly bound about me and I was helpless as a mummy. Then Jean Pahusca,
deliberate, cruel, mocking, sat down beside me. The gray afternoon was
growing late, and the sun was showing through the thin clouds in the
west. Down below us was a beautiful little park with its grove of
white-oak trees, and beyond was the river. I could see it all as I lay
on the sloping shelf of stone--the sky, and the grove and the bit of
river with the Arapahoe and Kiowa tepees under the shadow of the fort,
and the flag floating lazily above the garrison's tents. It was a
peaceful scene, but near me was an enemy cutting me off