y, pass the haunted butte at night, the rocks
are lighted with phosphor flashes and the banshee sweeps upon them. As if
wishing to speak, or as if waiting a question that it has occurred to
none to ask, she stands beside them in an attitude of appeal, but if
asked what she wants she flings her arms aloft and with a shriek that
echoes through the blasted gulches for a mile she disappears and an
instant later is seen wringing her hands on her hill-top. Cattle will not
graze near the haunted butte and the cowboys keep aloof from it, for the
word has never been spoken that will solve the mystery of the region or
quiet the unhappy banshee.

The creature has a companion, sometimes, in an unfleshed skeleton that
trudges about the ash and clay and haunts the camps in a search for
music. If he hears it he will sit outside the door and nod in time to it,
while a violin left within his reach is eagerly seized and will be played
on through half the night. The music is wondrous: now as soft as the stir
of wind in the sage, anon as harsh as the cry of a wolf or startling as
the stir of a rattler. As the east begins to brighten the music grows
fainter, and when it is fairly light it has ceased altogether. But he who
listens to it must on no account follow the player if the skeleton moves
away, for not only will it lead him into rocky pitfalls, whence escape is
hopeless, but when there the music will intoxicate, madden, and will
finally charm his soul from his body.

STANDING ROCK

The stone that juts from one of the high banks of the Missouri, in South
Dakota, gives its name to the Standing Rock Agency, which, by reason of
many councils, treaties, fights, feasts, and dances held there, is the
best known of the frontier posts. It was a favorite gathering place of
the Sioux before the advent of the white man. The rock itself is only
twenty-eight inches high and fifteen inches wide, and could be plucked up
and carried away without difficulty, but no red man is brave enough to do
that, for this is the transformed body of a squaw who was struck into
stone by Manitou for falsely suspecting her husband of unfaithfulness.

After her transformation she not only remained sentient but acquired
supernatural powers that the Sioux propitiated by offerings of beads,
tobacco, and ribbons, paint, fur, and game--a practice that was not
abandoned until the teachings of missionaries began to have effect among
them. Soldiers and trappers think th