f the grave, for such it certainly was.

At the time of the discovery I was in Larned, and I immediately
consulted my book of notes and memoranda taken hurriedly at intervals on
the plains and in the mountains, during more than half my lifetime, to
see if I could find anything that would solve the mystery attached to
the quiet prairie-grave and its contents, and I then recalled Uncle
John Smith's story of the quail as related to me at my camp. I also
met Colonel A. G. Boone that winter in Washington; he remembered the
circumstances well. Thorp was working for him, as Smith had said, and
was killed by an Apache, who, in scalping him, tore the half of his head
away, and it was thus found mutilated, so many years afterward.

Uncle John was in one of his garrulous moods that night, and as we were
not by any means tired of hearing the veteran trapper talk, without much
urging he told us the following tale:--

"Well, boys, thirty years ago, beaver, mink, and otter was found in
abundacious quantities on all the streams in the Rocky Mountains. The
trade in them furs was a paying business, for the little army of us
fellows called trappers. They ain't any of 'em left now, no mor'n the
animals we used to hunt. We had to move about from place to place, just
as if we was so many Ingins. Sometimes we'd construct little cabins in
the timber, or a dugout where the game was plenty, where we'd stay maybe
for a month or two, and once in a while--though not often--a whole year.

"The Ingins was our mortal enemies; they'd get a scalp from our fellows
occasionally, but for every one they had of ours we had a dozen of
theirs.

"In the summer of 1846, there was a little half dugout, half cabin,
opposite the mouth of Frenchman's Creek, put up by Bill Thorpe, Al Boyd,
and Rube Stevens. Bill and Al was men grown, and know'd more 'bout the
prairies and timber than the Ingins themselves. They'd hired out to the
Northwest Fur Company when they was mere kids, and kept on trapping
ever since. Rube--'Little Rube' as all the old men called him--was
'bout nineteen, and plumb dumb; he could hear well enough though, for
he wasn't born that way. When he was seventeen his father moved from his
farm in Pennsylvany, to take up a claim in Oregon, and the whole family
was compelled to cross the plains to get there; for there wasn't no
other way. While they was camped in the Bitter-Root valley one evening,
just 'bout sundown, a party of Blackfeet surprised th