he ground.
It was him that changed her."

CHAPTER XII

THE BURIAL

The annals of the mountain desert have never been written and can never
be written. They are merely a vast mass of fact and tradition and
imagining which floats from tongue to tongue from the Rockies to the
Sierra Nevadas. A man may be a fact all his life and die only a local
celebrity. Then again, he may strike sparks from that imagination
which runs riot by camp-fires and at the bars of the crossroads saloons.

In that case he becomes immortal. It is not that lies are told about
him or impossible feats ascribed to him, but every detail about him is
seized upon and passed on with a most scrupulous and loving care.

In due time he will become a tradition. That is, he will be known
familiarly at widely separated parts of the range, places which he has
never visited. It has happened to a few of the famous characters of
the mountain desert that they became traditions before their deaths.
It happened to McGurk, of course. It also happened to Red Pierre.

Oddly enough, the tradition of Red Pierre did not begin with his ride
from the school of Father Victor to Morgantown, distant many days of
difficult and dangerous travel. Neither did tradition seize on the gun
fight that crippled Hurley and "put out" wizard Diaz. These things
were unquestionably known to many, but they did not strike the popular
imagination. What set men first on fire was the way Pierre le Rouge
buried his father "at the point of the gun" in Morgantown.

That day Boone's men galloped out of the higher mountains down the
trail toward Morgantown. They stole a wagon out of a ranch stable on
the way and tied two lariats to the tongue. So they towed it, bounding
and rattling, over the rough trail to the house where Martin Ryder lay
dead.

His body was placed in state in the body of the wagon, pillowed with
everything in the line of cloth which the house could furnish. Thus
equipped they went on at a more moderate pace toward Morgantown.

What followed it is useless to repeat here. Tradition rehearsed every
detail of that day's work, and the purpose of this narrative is only to
give the details of some of the events which tradition does not know,
at least in their entirety.

They started at one end of Morgantown's street. Pierre guarded the
wagon in the center of the street and kept the people under cover of
his rifle. The rest of Boone's men cleaned out the house