ence. Where the slain men were buried the whites never knew, but all
that night they listened to the dismal wailing of the dirges with which
the tribesmen celebrated their gloomy funeral rites.

Frontiersmen are not, as a rule, apt to be very superstitious. They lead
lives too hard and practical, and have too little imagination in things
spiritual and supernatural. I have heard but few ghost stories while
living on the frontier, and these few were of a perfectly commonplace
and conventional type.

But I once listened to a goblin story which rather impressed me. It was
told by a grisled, weather-beaten old mountain hunter, named Bauman,
who was born and had passed all his life on the frontier. He must have
believed what he said, for he could hardly repress a shudder at certain
points of the tale; but he was of German ancestry, and in childhood had
doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and goblin lore, so
that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind; besides, he
knew well the stories told by the Indian medicine men in their winter
camps, of the snow-walkers, and the spectres, and the formless evil
beings that haunt the forest depths, and dog and waylay the lonely
wanderer who after nightfall passes through the regions where they lurk;
and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell
his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he
grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird
and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning
wild beast; but whether this was so or not, no man can say.

When the event occurred Bauman was still a young man, and was trapping
with a partner among the mountains dividing the forks of the Salmon from
the head of Wisdom River. Not having had much luck, he and his partner
determined to go up into a particularly wild and lonely pass through
which ran a small stream said to contain many beaver. The pass had
an evil reputation because the year before a solitary hunter who
had wandered into it was there slain, seemingly by a wild beast, the
half-eaten remains being afterwards found by some mining prospectors who
had passed his camp only the night before.

The memory of this event, however, weighed very lightly with the two
trappers, who were as adventurous and hardy as others of their kind.
They took their two lean mountain ponies to the foot of the pass, where
they left them in an open b