he went up the outside stairs to his rooms in the second story of his bank building. I put the horses in their stalls, and fed and watered them, and started up the ladder to the loft. What Mr. Clerkinwell had said was still running in my 20 mind. I stopped and thought a moment, and concluded that I was not sleepy, and decided to take a turn about town.

I left my lantern and went out to the one street. There was not a sound to be heard except the rush of the wind around the houses. The moon was almost down, and the buildings of the town and Frenchman’s Butte made long shadows on the prairie. There was a dull spot of light on the sky to the southeast which I knew was the reflection of a prairie fire a long ways off; but there was a good, wide fire-brake a quarter of a mile out around the town, so there was no danger from that, even if it should come up.

I went along down toward the railroad, walking in the middle of the street so as not to make any noise. The big windmill on the water-tank swung a little in the wind and creaked; and the last light from the moon gleamed on its tail and then was gone. I turned out across where the graders had had their camp. Here the wind was hissing through the dry grass sharp enough. I stood gaping at the stars with the wind blowing squarely in my face, and wondering how I 21 ever came so far from home, when all at once I saw straight ahead of me a little blaze of fire.

My first thought was that it was the camp-fire of some mover on the fire-brake. It blazed up higher, and lapped to the right and left. It was the grass that was afire. Through the flames I caught a glimpse of a man. A gust of wind beat down the blaze, and I saw the man, bent over and moving along with a great torch of grass in his hand, leaving a trail of fire. Then I saw that he was inside the fire-brake.

In another moment I was running up the middle of the street yelling “Fire!” so that to this day it is a wonder to me that I did not burst both of my lungs.

It was an even two hours’ fight between the town of Track’s End and the fire; and they came out about even–that is, most of the scattering dwelling-houses were burned, but the business part of the town was saved. There was no water to be had, nor time to plow a furrow, so we fought the fire mainly with brooms, shovels, old blankets, and such-like things with which we could pound it out. But it got up to the dwellings in spite of us. As soon as the danger seemed to be past, I said to Allenham, who had had charge of the fire brigade:

“I saw a man set that fire out there. Don’t you suppose we could find him?”

“Pike, I’ll bet a dollar!” exclaimed Allenham. “We’ll try it, anyhow, whoever it is.” 23

He ordered everybody that could to get a horse, and soon we all rode off into the darkness. But though we were divided into small parties and searched all that night and half the next day, nothing came of it. I kept with Allenham, and as we came in he said:

“There’s no use looking for him any longer. If he didn’t have a horse and ride away out of the country ahead of all of us, then he’s down a badger-hole and intends to stay there till we quit looking. I’ll wager he’ll know better’n to show himself around Track’s End again, anyhow.”

Toward night the train came in pushing Pike’s box-car ahead of it. Burrdock, who had now been promoted to conductor, said he had bumped against it about six miles down the track. The little end door had been broken open from the inside with a coupling-pin, which Pike must have found in the car and kept concealed. With the window open it was no trick at all to crawl out, set the brake, and stop the car. Nobody doubted any longer that he was the one who had started the fire.

I may as well pass over the next month without making much fuss about it here. 24 Nothing happened except that folks kept going away. After the fire nearly all of those burned out left, and about the same time all of the settlers who had taken up claims in the neighborhood also went back east for the winter, some of them on the train, but most of them in white-topped covered wagons. There was almost no business in town, and if you wanted to get into a store you would generally first have to hunt up the owner and ask him to open it for you. I saw Mr. Clerkinwell occasionally. He always spoke kindly and wished me success. Then the great October blizzard came.

Folks in that country still talk about the October blizzard, and well they may do so, because the like of it has never been known since. It came on the twenty-sixth day of October, and lasted three days. It was as bad as it ought to have been in January, and the people at Track’s End, being new to the country, judged that the winter had come to stay, and were discouraged; and so most of the rest of them went away.

It began to snow on the morning of the twenty-fifth, with an east and northeast wind. 25 The snow came down all day in big flakes, and by evening it was a foot deep. It turned colder in the night, and the wind shifted to the northwest. In the morning it was blizzarding. The air was full of fine snow blown before the wind, and before noon you could not see across the street. Some of the smaller houses were almost drifted under. This kept up for three days. Of course the train could not get through, and the one telegraph wire went down and left the town like an island alone in the middle of the ocean.

The next day after the blizzard stopped it grew warmer and the snow began to melt a little, but it was another four days before the train came. By the time it did come it seemed as if everybody in town was disgusted or frightened enough to leave. When the second train after the blizzard had gone back, there were but thirty-two persons, all told, at Track’s End. Only one of these was a woman, and she it was that was the cause of making me a hotel-keeper on a small scale.

The woman was Mrs. Sours, wife of my employer. One morning, after every one had 26 left the breakfast-table except her husband and myself, she said to me:

“Jud, couldn’t you run the hotel this winter, now that there are only three or four boarders left, and them not important nor particular, only so they get enough to eat?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” I said. “I can run the barn, but I’m afraid I don’t know much about a hotel.”

“Do you hear the boy say he can do it, Henry?” says she, turning to her husband. “Of course he can do it, and do it well, too. He always said his mother taught him how to cook. That means I’m a-going down on the train to-morrow, and not coming back to this wretched country till spring has melted off the snow and made it fit for a decent body to live in.”

“Well, all right,” said Sours. “You may go; Jud and me are good for it.”

“Mercy sakes!” cried Mrs. Sours, “do you suppose I’m going to leave you here to be frozen to death, and starved to death, and killed by the wolves that we already hear howling every night, and murdered by Indians, and shot by Pike and that wretched 27 band of horse-thieves that the Billings sheriffs who stopped here the other night was looking for? No, Henry; when I go I am going to take you with me.”

Sours tried to argue with