the creek. I could follow it no farther. If there was other mark of
their passing, it was hidden from me.

Wondering, and a bit exasperated, I spurred straight up the bank, and
when I had reached the high benchland loped to a point that overlooked
the little valley a full mile up and down. Cottonwood and willow,
cut-bank and crooning water, lay green and brown and silver-white
before, but no riders, no thing that moved in the shape of men came
within the scope of my eyes. But I wasn't done yet. I turned away from
the bank and raced up a long slope to a saw-backed ridge that promised
largely of unobstructed view. Dirty gray lather stood out in spumy rolls
around the edge of the saddle-blanket, and the wet flanks of my horse
heaved like the shoulders of a sobbing woman when I checked him on top
of a bald sandstone peak--and though as much of the Northwest as one
man's eye may hope to cover lay bared on every hand, yet the quartet
that rode with me from Fort Walsh occupied no part of the landscape. I
could look away to the horizon in every direction, and, except for one
little herd of buffalo feeding peacefully on the westward slant of the
ridge, I could see nothing but rolling prairie, a vast undulating spread
of grassland threaded here and there with darker lines that stood for
creeks and coulées, and off to the north the blue bulk of the Cypress
Hills.

I got off and sat me down upon a rock, rolled another cigarette, and
waited. The way to Pend d' Oreille led over the ridge, a half mile on
either side of me, as the spirit moved a traveler who followed an
approximately straight line. Whatever road they had taken, they could
not be more than three or four miles from that sentinel peak--for there
is a well-defined limit to the distance a mounted man may cover in a
given length of time. And from my roost I could note the passing of