My foreman continued:  “By George, there was something that professor said afterwards that made me feel hot.  I sent word up to him by Foley’s boy that seein’ as how it had come out we wouldn’t charge him nothin’ for the rig; and that professor he answered that he was glad we were showing him some sign of consideration, for he’d begun to believe he’d fallen into a den of sharks, and that we gave him a runaway team a purpose.  That made me hot, calling that a runaway team.  Why, there was one of them horses never could have run away before; it hadn’t never been druv but twice!  And the other horse maybe had run away a few times, but there was lots of times he hadn’t run away.  I esteemed that team full as liable not to run away as it was to run away,” concluded my foreman, evidently deeming this as good a warranty of gentleness as the most exacting could require.

The definition of good behavior on the frontier is even more elastic for a saddle-horse than for a team.  Last spring one of the Three-Seven riders, a magnificent horseman was killed on the round-up near Belfield, his horse bucking and falling on him.  “It was accounted a plumb gentle horse too,” said my informant, “only it sometimes sulked and acted a little mean when it was cinched up behind.”  The unfortunate rider did not know of this failing of the “plumb gentle horse,” and as soon as he was in the saddle it threw itself over sideways with a great bound, and he fell on his head, and never spoke again.

Such accidents are too common in the wild country to attract very much attention; the men accept them with grim quiet, as inevitable in such lives as theirs—­lives that are harsh and narrow in their toil and their pleasure alike, and that are ever-bounded by an iron horizon of hazard and hardship.  During the last year and a half three other men from the ranches in my immediate neighborhood have met their deaths in the course of their work.  One, a trail boss of the O X, was drowned while swimming his herd across a swollen river.  Another, one of the fancy ropers of the W Bar, was killed while roping cattle in a corral; his saddle turned, the rope twisted round him, he was pulled off, and trampled to death by his own horse.

The fourth man, a cowpuncher named Hamilton, lost his life during the last week of October, 1891, in the first heavy snowstorm of the season.  Yet he was a skilled plainsman, on ground he knew well, and just before straying himself, he successfully instructed two men who did not know the country how to get to camp.  They were all three with the round-up, and were making a circle through the Bad Lands; the wagons had camped on the eastern edge of these Bad Lands, where they merged into the prairie, at the head of an old disused road, which led about due east from the Little Missouri.  It was a gray, lowering day, and as darkness came on Hamilton’s horse played out, and he told his two companions not to wait, as it had begun to snow, but to keep on towards the