yet given up the idea
of driving Theodore Roosevelt and his "outfit" off the claim at
Elkhorn Bottom.

XII

It was underneath the stars, the little peeking stars,
That we lay and dreamed of Eden in the hills:
We were neither sad nor gay, but just wondering, while we lay,
What a mighty lot of space creation fills.

Our fire was just a spark; dot of red against the dark,
And around the fire an awful lot of night.
The purple, changing air was as quiet as a prayer,
And the moon came up and froze the mountains white.

Henry Herbert KNIBBS

[Illustration: Fantastic formation at Medicine Buttes.]

[Illustration: Medicine Buttes.]

The "boss" of Elkhorn Ranch, meanwhile, oblivious of the heat which he
was generating in the Marquis's Prime Minister, was taking his slow
course northeastward across Wyoming to the Bad Lands. It was long and
weary traveling across the desolate reaches of burnt prairie. The
horses began to droop. At last, in some heavy sand-hills east of the
Little Beaver, one of the team pulling the heavily laden wagon played
out completely, and they had to put the toughest of the saddle ponies
in his place. Night was coming on fast as they crossed the final ridge
and came in sight of as singular a bit of country as any of them had
ever seen. Scattered over a space not more than three quarters of a
mile square were countless isolated buttes of sandstone, varying in
height from fifteen to fifty feet. Some of them rose as sharp peaks or
ridges or as connected chains, but the greater number by far were
topped with diminutive table-lands, some thirty feet across, some
seventy, some two hundred. The sides were perpendicular, and were
cut and channeled by the weather into most curious caves and columns
and battlements and spires. Here and there ledges ran along the faces
of the cliffs and eerie protrusions jutted out from the corners. Grave
pine-trees rose loftily among the strange creations of water and wind
set in a desert of snow-white sand. It was a beautiful and fantastic
place and they made their camp there.

The moon was full and the night clear. In an angle of a cliff they
built a roaring pine-log fire whose flames, leaping up the gray wall,
made wild sport of the bold corners and strange-looking escarpments of
the rock. Beyond the circle that the firelight brought luridly to
life, the buttes in the moonlight had their own still ma