cember will find him, stock and all,
hundreds of miles from here. The proprietor of the drug
store will move early in December, as he cannot make his
board in the place.

A. T. Packard, the editor of the _Bad Lands Cowboy_, which
now has a circulation of 650, is evidently prospering well,
and, with the managers of the Northern Pacific Refrigerator
Company and the railroad agents, seems to be about the only
person who expresses an intention of spending the season
here.

Fortunate were those who spent that season elsewhere. Old-timers,
whose wits had been sharpened by long life in the open, had all the
autumn been making ominous predictions. They talked of a hard winter
ahead, and the canniest of them defied the skeptics by riding into
Medora trailing a pack-horse and purchasing six months' supplies of
provisions at one time.

Nature, they pointed out, was busier than she had ever been, in the
memory of the oldest hunter in that region, in "fixin' up her folks
for hard times." The muskrats along the creeks were building their
houses to twice their customary height; the walls were thicker than
usual, and the muskrats' fur was longer and heavier than any old-timer
had ever known it to be. The beavers were working by day as well as by
night, cutting the willow brush, and observant eyes noted that they
were storing twice their usual winter's supply. The birds were acting
strangely. The ducks and geese, which ordinarily flew south in
October, that autumn had, a month earlier, already departed. The
snowbirds and the cedar birds were bunched in the thickets, fluttering
about by the thousands in the cedar brakes, obviously restless and
uneasy. The Arctic owls, who came only in hard winters, were about.

There was other evidence that the winds were brewing misery. Not only
the deer and the antelope, the wolves and the coyotes, but the older
range cattle and the horses were growing unusually long coats.

Other signs of strange disturbances of Nature were not lacking. During
October the usual Indian-summer haze seemed to have lifted to a higher
altitude, interposing, as it were, a curtain between earth and sun.
The light became subdued and unnatural. Halos appeared about the sun,
with sun-dogs at opposite sides of the circle. The superstitious were
startled, in the time of the full moon, at four shafts of light, which
could be seen emanating from it, giving an eerie effect as of a c