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 fear- 

 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 



