The pack-ropes had been cut and the pack searched. In the same manner
they had gone through his pockets and scattered a few papers and letters
on the ground. These we gathered carefully together, against the time of
meeting Lyn, and then--for time pressed, and a dead man, though he may
be your friend and his passing a sorrow, is out of the game forever--we
dragged him from beneath the dead horse, wrapped him in the canvas
pack-cover, and buried him in the soft leaf-mold where he lay, as we
had buried his lifetime partner early in the morning. When we had
finished, MacRae ordered his two troopers back to Pend d' Oreille, and we
mounted our horses and turned their heads toward Fort Walsh.

It is seventy miles in an air-line from Stony Crossing to the fort. That
night we laid out, sleeping without hardship in a dry buffalo-wallow,
and noon of the next day brought us to Walsh, a huddle of log buildings
clustering around a tall pole from which fluttered the union jack.

Off to one side of the fort a bunch of work-bulls fed peacefully. Down
in the creek bottom a tent or two flapped in the mid-day breeze, and in
their neighborhood uprose the smoke of half a dozen dinner fires. By the
post storeroom, waiting their turn to unload, was ranged a line of the
tarpaulin-covered wagons, wheeled galleons of the plains, that brought
food and raiment to the Northwest before the coming of steam and steel.

"That looks to me like Baker's outfit, from Benton," I said to MacRae,
as we swung off our horses before the building in which the officer of
the day held forth. "They must have come by way of Assiniboine."

"Probably," Mac answered. "And over yonder's the paymaster's train. At
least, he's due, and I can't account for a bunch of horses in charge of
a buck trooper any other way."