which the men lived; these men were waiting for the train
with the others, and talked so loud and made such a disturbance that
it drowned out all other noises.

The train was left right on the track, and the engine put in the
roundhouse, after which Burrdock took me over town to the hotel. It
was called the Headquarters House, and the proprietor's name was
Sours. After I got a cold supper he showed me to my room. The second
story was divided into about twenty rooms, the partitions being lathed
but not yet plastered. It made walls very easy to talk through, and,
where the cracks happened to match, as they seemed to mostly, they
weren't hard to look through. I thought it was a good deal like
sleeping in a squirrel-cage.

The railroad men that I had seen at the station had been working on an
extension of the grade to the west, on which the rails were to be laid
the next spring. They had pushed on ten miles, but, as the government
had stopped making a fuss, the company had decided to do no more that
season, and the train I came up on brought the paymaster with the
money to pay the graders for their summer's work; so they all got
drunk. There were some men from Billings in town, too. They were on
their way east with a band of four hundred Montana ponies, which they
had rounded up for the night just south of town. Two of them stayed to
hold the drove, and the rest came into town, also to get drunk. They
had good luck in doing this, and fought with the graders. I heard two
or three shots soon after I went to bed, and thought of my mother.

Some time late in the night I was awakened by a great rumpus in the
hotel, and made out from what I heard through the laths that some men
were looking for somebody. They were going from room to room, and soon
came into mine, tearing down the sheet which was hung up for a door.
They crowded in and came straight to the bed, and the leader, a big
man with a crooked nose, seized me by the ear as if he were taking
hold of a bootstrap. I sat up, and another poked a lantern in my
face.

"That's him," said one of them.

"No, he was older," said another.

"He looks like he _would_ steal a dog, anyhow," said the man with the
lantern. "Bring him along, Pike."

"No," said the man who had hold of my ear, "he ain't much more'n a
boy--we're looking for grown men to-night."

Then they went out, and I could feel my ear drawing back into place as
if it were made of rubber. But it never got quite back, and has always
been a game ear to this day, with a kind of a lop to it.

Sours told me in the morning that they were looking for the man that
stole their dog, though he said he didn't think they had ever had a
dog. Pike, he said, had come out as a grader, but it had been a long
time since he had done any work.

I took a look around town after breakfast and found forty or fifty
houses, most of them stores or other places of business, on one street
running north and south. There were a few, but not many, houses
scattered about beyond the street. Some of the buildings had canvas
roofs, and there were a good many tents and covered wagons in which
people lived. The whole town had been built since the railroad came
through two months before. There was a low hill called Frenchman's
Butte a quarter of a mile north of town. I climbed it to get a view of
the country, but could see only about a dozen settlers' houses, also
just built.

The country was a vast level prairie except to the north, where there
were a few small lakes, with a little timber around them, and some
coteaux, or low hills, beyond. The grass was dried up and gray. I
thought I could make out a low range of hills to the west, where I
supposed the Missouri River was. On my way back to town a man told me
that a big colony of settlers were expected to arrive soon, and that
Track's End had been built partly on the strength of the business
these people would bring. I never saw the colony.

When I got back to the hotel Sours said to me:

"Young man, don't you want a job?"

I told him I should be glad of something to do.

"The man that has been taking care of my barn has just gone on the
train," continued Sours. "He got homesick for the States, and lit out
and never said boo till half an hour before train-time. If you want
the job I'll give you twenty-five dollars a month and your board."

"I'll try it a month," I said; "but I'll probably be going back myself
before winter."

"That's it," exclaimed Sours. "Everybody's going back before winter. I
guess there won't be nothing left here next winter but jack-rabbits
and snowbirds."

I had hoped for something better than working in a stable, but my
money was so near gone that I did not think it a good time to stand
around and act particular. Besides, I liked horses so much that the
job rather pleased me, after all.

Toward evening Sours came to me and said he wished I would spend the
night in the barn and keep awake most of the time, as he was afraid it
might be broken into by some of the graders. They were acting worse
than ever. There was no town government, but a man named Allenham had
some time before been elected city marshal at a mass-meeting. During
the day he appointed some deputies to help him maintain order.

At about ten o'clock I shut up the barn, put out my lantern, and sat
down in a little room in one corner which was used for an office. The
town was noisy, but nobody came near the barn, which was back of the
hotel and out of sight from the street. Some time after midnight I
heard low voices outside and crept to a small open window. I could
make out the forms of some men under a shed back of a store across a
narrow alley. Soon I heard two shots in the street, and then a man
came running through the alley with another right after him. As the
first passed, a man stepped out from under the shed. The man in
pursuit stopped and said:

"Now, I want Jim, and there's no use of you fellows trying to protect
him." It was Allenham's voice.

There was a report of a revolver so close that it made me wink. The
man who had come from under the shed had fired pointblank at Allenham.
By the flash I saw that the man was Pike.




CHAPTER II

The rest of my second Night at Track's End, and part of another: with
some Things which happen between.


I was too frightened at first to move, and stood at the window staring
into the darkness like a fool. I heard the men scramble over a fence
and run off. Then I ran out to where Allenham lay. He made no answer
when I spoke to him. I went on and met two of the deputies coming into
the alley. I told them what I had seen.

"Wake up folks in the hotel," said one of the men; then they hurried
along. I soon had everybody in the hotel down-stairs with my shouting.
In a minute or two they brought in Allenham, and the doctor began to
work over him. The whole town was soon on hand, and it was decided to
descend on the graders' camp in force. Twenty or thirty men
volunteered. One of the deputies named Dawson was selected as
leader.

"Are you certain you can pick out the man who fired the shot?" said
Dawson to me.

"Yes," I answered. "It was Pike."

"If you just came, how do you happen to know Pike?" he asked.

"He pulled me up last night by the ear and looked at me with a
lantern," I said.

"Well," replied the man, "we'll take you down and you can look at him
with a lantern."

They formed into a solid body, four abreast, with Dawson ahead holding
me by the arm, as if he were afraid I would get away. To tell the
truth, I should have been glad enough to have got out of the thing,
but there seemed to be no chance of it. I was glad my mother could not
know about me.

We soon came up to the camp, and the men lined out and held their guns
ready for use. Not a sound was to be heard except the loud snoring of
the men in the nearest tent, which seemed to me almost _too_ loud.
There was a dying camp-fire, and the stars were bright and twinkling
in a deep-blue sky; but I didn't look at them much.

"Come, you fellows, get up!" called Dawson. This brought no answer.

"Come!" he called louder, "roust up there, every one of you. There's
fifty of us, and we've got our boots on!"

A man put his head sleepily out of a tent and wanted to know what was
the trouble. Dawson repeated his commands. One of our men tossed some
wood on the fire, and it blazed up and threw the long shadows of the
tents out across the prairie. One by one the men came out, as if they
were just roused from sleep. There was a great amount of loud talk and
profanity, but at last they were all out. Pike was one of the last.
Dawson made them stand up in a row.

"Now, young man," said he to me, "pick out the man you saw fire the
shot that killed Allenham."

At the word killed Pike started and shut his jaws tightly together in
the middle of an oath. I looked along the line, but saw that I could
not be mistaken. Then I took a step forward, pointed to Pike, and
said:

"That's the man."

He shot a look at me of the most deadly hatred; then he laughed; but
it didn't sound to me like a good, cheerful laugh.

"Come on," said Dawson to him. Then he ordered the others back into
their tents, left half the men to guard them, and with the rest of our
party went a little ways down the track to where an empty box-car was
standing on the siding. "Get in there!" he said to Pike, and the man
did it, and the door was locked. Three men were left to guard this
queer jail, and the rest of us went back to the Headquarters House.
Here we found that the doctor's report was that Allenham would
probably pull through.

The next morning a mass-meeting was held in the square beside the
railroad station. After some talk, most of it pretty vigorous, it was
decided to order all of the graders to leave town without delay,
except Pike, who was to be kept in the car until the outcome of
Allenham's wound was known. It wasn't necessary even for me to guess
twice to hit on what would be the fate of Pike if Allenham should
die.

In two hours the graders left. They made a long line of covered wagons
and filed away to the east beside the railroad track. They were pretty
free with their threats, but that was all it amounted to.

For a week Track's End was very quiet. Allenham kept on getting
better, and by that time was out of danger. There was a good deal of
talk about what ought to be done with Pike. A few wanted to hang him,
notwithstanding that Allenham was alive.

"When you get hold of a fellow like him," said one man, "you can't go
far wrong if you hang him up high by the neck and then sort o' go off
and forget him."

Others proposed to let him go and warn him to leave the country. It
happened on the day the question was being argued that the wind was
blowing from the southwest as hard a gale as I ever saw. It swept up
great clouds of dust and blew down all of the tents and endangered
many of the buildings. In the afternoon we heard a shout from the
direction of the railroad. We all ran out and met the guards. They
pointed down the track to the car containing Pike rolling off before
the wind.

"How did it get away?" everybody asked.

"Well," said one of the guards, "we don't just exactly know. We reckon
the brake got off somehow. Mebby a dog run agin the car with his nose
and started it, or something like that," and the man rolled up his
eyes. There was a loud laugh at this, as everybody understood that the
guards had loosened the brake and given the car a start, and they all
saw that it was a good way to get rid of the man inside. Tom Carr, the
station agent, said that, if the wind held, the car would not stop
short of the grade beyond Siding No. 15.

"My experience with the country," said Sours, "is that the wind always
holds and don't do much else. It wouldn't surprise me if it carried
him clean through to Chicago."

I went back to the barn and sat down in the office. To tell the truth,
I felt easier that Pike was gone. I well knew that he had no love for
me. I sat a long time thinking over what had happened since I had come
to