240 HUNTING THE GRISLY. 



upon the 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 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 feajr 

 some 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 wan- 

 derer 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 



