In Cowboy Land. 441 



tribe, the warriors took their bodies and bore them away 

 for burial honors, the soldiers looking on in silence. 

 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 super- 

 stitious. 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 medi- 

 cine 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 



