se maybe had run away a few times,
but there was lots of times he _hadn't_ run away. I esteemed that team
full as liable not to run away as it was to run away," concluded my
foreman, evidently deeming this as good a warranty of gentleness as the
most exacting could require.

The definition of good behavior on the frontier is even more elastic
for a saddle-horse than for a team. Last spring one of the Three-Seven
riders, a magnificent horseman was killed on the round-up near Belfield,
his horse bucking and falling on him. "It was accounted a plumb gentle
horse too," said my informant, "only it sometimes sulked and acted a
little mean when it was cinched up behind." The unfortunate rider did
not know of this failing of the "plumb gentle horse," and as soon as he
was in the saddle it threw itself over sideways with a great bound, and
he fell on his head, and never spoke again.

Such accidents are too common in the wild country to attract very much
attention; the men accept them with grim quiet, as inevitable in such
lives as theirs--lives that are harsh and narrow in their toil and their
pleasure alike, and that are ever-bounded by an iron horizon of hazard
and hardship. During the last year and a half three other men from the
ranches in my immediate neighborhood have met their deaths in the course
of their work. One, a trail boss of the O X, was drowned while swimming
his herd across a swollen river. Another, one of the fancy ropers of the
W Bar, was killed while roping cattle in a corral; his saddle turned,
the rope twisted round him, he was pulled off, and trampled to death by
his own horse.

The fourth man, a cowpuncher named Hamilton, lost his life during the
last week of October, 1891, in the first heavy snowstorm of the season.
Yet he was a skilled plainsman, on ground he knew well, and just before
straying himself, he successfully instructed two men who did not know
the country how to get to camp. They were all three with the round-up,
and were making a circle through the Bad Lands; the wagons had camped on
the eastern edge of these Bad Lands, where they merged into the prairie,
at the head of an old disused road, which led about due east from the
Little Missouri. It was a gray, lowering day, and as darkness came on
Hamilton's horse played out, and he told his two companions not to wait,
as it had begun to snow, but to keep on towards the north, skirting some
particularly rough buttes, and as soon as they struck