rack of peddlers, and that if Moritz
wanted to start on his travels early in the morning, or to return to St.
Louis for goods, it mattered to nobody. On an evening in 1860 when there
was a mist in the gullies and a new moon hung in the west, Rev. Mr.
Cummings, a clergyman of that region, was driving home, and as he came to
a bridge near "old man" Baker's farm he saw a man standing on it, with a
pack on his back and a stick in his hand, who was staring intently at
something beneath the bridge. The clergyman greeted him cheerily and
asked him if he would like to ride, whereat the man looked him in the
face and pointed to the edge of the bridge. Mr. Cummings glanced down,
saw nothing, and when he looked up again the man with the pack had
disappeared. His horse at the same moment gave a snort and plunged
forward at a run, so that the clergyman's attention was fully occupied
until he had brought the animal under control again; when he glanced back
and saw that the man was still standing in the bridge and looking over
the edge of it. The minister told his neighbors of this adventure, and on
returning with two of them to the spot next morning they found the body
of old man Baker swinging by the neck from a beam of the bridge exactly
beneath where the apparition had stood--for it must have been an
apparition, inasmuch as the dust, damped though it had been with dew,
showed no trace of footprint. In taking down the body the men loosened
the earth on a shelving bank, and the gravel rolling away disclosed a
skeleton with some bits of clothing on it that were identified as
belongings of Samuel Moritz. Was it conscience, craziness, or fate that
led old man Baker to hang himself above the grave of his victim?

BANSHEE OF THE BAD LANDS

"Hell, with the fires out," is what the Bad Lands of Dakota have been
called. The fearless Western nomenclature fits the place. It is an
ancient sea-bottom, with its clay strata worn by frost and flood into
forms like pagodas, pyramids, and terraced cities. Labyrinthine canons
wind among these fantastic peaks, which are brilliant in color, but
bleak, savage, and oppressive. Game courses over the castellated hills,
rattlesnakes bask at the edge of the crater above burning coal seams, and
wild men have made despairing stand here against advancing civilization.
It may have been the white victim of a red man's jealousy that haunts the
region of the butte called "Watch Dog," or it may have been an Ind