was given to using better language than lots of white men I have known.

At a point where the trail seemed to bear north a few degrees, Goodell
angled away from the beaten track and headed straight across country for
Pend d' Oreille. At noon we camped, and cooked a bite of dinner while
the horses grazed; ate it, and went on again.

About three o'clock, as nearly as I could tell, we dipped into a wooded
creek bottom some two hundred yards in width. The creek itself went
brawling along in a deep-worn channel, and when my horse got knee deep
in the water he promptly stopped and plunged his muzzle into the stream.
I gave him slack rein, and let him drink his fill. The others kept on,
climbed the short, steep bank, and passed from sight over its rim. I
swung down from my horse on the brink of the creek, cinched the saddle
afresh, and rolled a cigarette. If I thought about them getting the
start of me at all, it was to reflect that they couldn't get a lead of
more than two or three hundred yards, at the gait they traveled. Judge
then of my surprise when I rode up out of the water-washed gully and
found them nowhere in sight. I pulled up and glanced about, but the
clumps of scrubby timber were just plentiful enough to cut off a clear
view of the flat. So I fell back on the simple methods of the plainsman
and Indian and jogged along on their trail.

Not for many days did I learn truly how I came to miss them, how and why
they had vanished from the face of the earth so completely in the few
minutes I lingered in the gulch. The print of steel-rimmed hoofs showed
in the soft loam as plainly as a moccasin-track in virgin snow. Around a
grove of quaking-aspens, eternally shivering in the deadest of calms,
their trail led through the long grass that carpeted the bottom, and
suddenly ended in a strip of gravelly land that ran out from the bed of