418 FOX-HOUND, FOREST, AND PRAIRIE. 



than once remained the night at the sawmill camp winter 

 darkness coming rapidly on, the thermometer alreadj r many 

 degrees below zero, and numb Death already gripping him by 

 the waistbelt ! What plight more awful ? What misery more 

 intense ? Whither in his agony thought carried him shall never 

 be known. Conjecture we easily how a life's course would well 

 up, how all that was dear all that was now finished would 

 thrust itself forward appealingly, piteously, despairingly. 

 "My God, my God, is this the end?" would be the poor 

 sufferer's helpless wail. His pockets held a pencil. This was 

 between his teeth the next day. But the pockets, every one of 

 them, were turned inside out in evident quest of paper that a 

 line, a word, a farewell might go home to those dear ones back- 

 East. His whip was in his hand ; and its long lash of raw hide 

 suggested at all events an end to this hopeless torture. A 

 double twist formed his death-cravat. The coil was drawn 

 tight round his windpipe with the nervous fingers of a 

 desperate man : the same sure knots were tied that in years- 

 previous he had taught me would hold a broncho in his wildest 

 struggles and he strangled his life out. Who shall dare to- 

 blame him ? 



But back to the brighter present the line of hogbacked 

 hill, the handy little Winchester, and the thirst and thought 

 begotten of bacon for dinner and bacon for breakfast. The 

 rough red " bad lands " sloped right and left to meet the green 

 valley on either hand. Deep fissures, broken gulches, rocky 

 chasms yawned in wild extravagance of shape and colouring 

 adown the ridge side. "Just the place for blacktail," I 

 muttered and the last syllables were still between my lips- 

 when, popping along the divide ahead, three tufts of cotton 

 went glancing each in rear of a lusty deer. Blacktail they 

 call them, lucus a non, because their tails are white. As a 

 matter of distinction, the white-tailed deer have tails twice as 

 long and twice as white so let that pass. The wind was 

 blowing half a gale along the ridge, from them to me ; there 

 was still a chance of getting up to them and a fat buck might 



